No Way to Treat a Lady

A scathingly funny black comedy satirising movie psychopathology. Steiger is brilliant as a sort of Boston strangler, son of a great actress who has left her boy with a mother fixation, a taste for impersonation, and a thirst for applause. Genuinely funny as he sets out to satisfy all three urges through murder, meanwhile making a special telephone confidant out of a reluctant cop (Segal, also brilliant) with Jewish momma problems of his own. Smight directs uncertainly, especially in some statutory love scenes, but the script (based on William Goldman's novel) is unstoppably witty. Difficult to resist a film in which a dwarf hopefully confesses to the killings, only to be told that eye-witness accounts point to a taller killer. 'See what I mean?' he cries, 'I'm a master of disguises!'