No Way to Treat a Lady (1968)
A showpiece for Rod Steiger. He's a great actor, and he takes on the role of an actor taking on a variety of roles, one by one, as a killer with a few issues to work out. The other two people have full fledged roles but they end up secondary: Lee Remick marginally overacting a ditzy but charming young woman and George Segal in what might be the performance of his life as a low key detective.
Called a comic thriller by some, it hovers undecided...it's not a goofy comedy with thriller trappings like the 1960s Pink Panther movies, and it's not a thriller with some humor giving it humanity like much of Alfred Hitchcock's. So we flipflop from some really funny, if somewhat predictable, lines between the detective and his mother (about Jewish clichés) and some really chilling murder scenes, hammy but gruesome, too.
If you can rise to the surface and enjoy all the pieces as they come together, maybe swallowing a little during the overdone last ten minutes, it's a pretty intensely enjoyable farce and psychodrama.
A showpiece for Rod Steiger. He's a great actor, and he takes on the role of an actor taking on a variety of roles, one by one, as a killer with a few issues to work out. The other two people have full fledged roles but they end up secondary: Lee Remick marginally overacting a ditzy but charming young woman and George Segal in what might be the performance of his life as a low key detective.
Called a comic thriller by some, it hovers undecided...it's not a goofy comedy with thriller trappings like the 1960s Pink Panther movies, and it's not a thriller with some humor giving it humanity like much of Alfred Hitchcock's. So we flipflop from some really funny, if somewhat predictable, lines between the detective and his mother (about Jewish clichés) and some really chilling murder scenes, hammy but gruesome, too.
If you can rise to the surface and enjoy all the pieces as they come together, maybe swallowing a little during the overdone last ten minutes, it's a pretty intensely enjoyable farce and psychodrama.