DVD of the Week: Pretty Poison

Having gone to summer camp in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, I was pretty excited, as a college freshman, to hear from one of the upperclass movie buffs that the Film Society would be showing a movie that had been shot there, “Pretty Poison” (which I discuss in this clip). After seeing it, I wasn’t disappointed, and yet I was: I didn’t recognize many locations but I did recognize the atmosphere, but, most of all, the characters seemed to talk and to act in clichés. Little did I know: Hollywood classics remained virtually unknown to me, the term “film noir” hadn’t yet entered my vocabulary, and it was only later, under the implicit tutelage of the criticism of the French New Wave filmmakers, through whose advocacy I came to see some mainstream American movies of previous generations and to see them and love them as works of art, that I recognized the clichés of “Pretty Poison” to be winks and nods, homages and references, and, especially, grafts: the director, Noel Black, planted Hollywood in New England, and, like a biologist, showed how well the species thrived there. The procedure was New Wave-ish; the motive and the result were political; without a word about Vietnam, civil rights, or any of the variety of heated conflicts that were roiling America and, for that matter, the world, the movie, made in 1968, feels hectic with the political and social passions of the moment, even as it draws on the styles of the past. Another title could be, simply, “The Last War”—the one that, inevitably, Strangelovian generals and ideologues were fighting—and also “The War at Home,” the one that was taking place in the streets.