Honeymoon Killers,The

This tells, bleakly, unsentimentally, in shady b/w tricked out with a scratchy Mahler soundtrack, the true tale of Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez: she a grotesquely overweight nursing sister from Mobile, Alabama; he a Latin gigolo living off aged spinsters and widows, tricking them of their money and, after a torrid team-up with Martha, bumping them off in a manner no way sanitised in Kastle's hands. The couple were electrocuted in 1951, but the film shows them not so much as monsters as a weird, passionate appendage to the love and marriage stakes glibly represented by the collection of down-home mommas, randy would-be wives and patriotic widows on whom the couple prey (with Martha posing as Ray's sister, though so overcome with jealousy that attempted suicide, murder, and eventually betrayal to the police ensue). An eerie, negected classic of its kind. (Martin Scorsese's first feature as director, until he got canned.) SGr.