Publicized as the “Lonely Hearts Killers” and pilloried as the Oddest Couple during their 1949 trial, Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck were destined for a B-movie placard. Initially acquainted through a Lonely Hearts club correspondence, Ray was a trim and inveterate swindler of old maids, widows and divorcées while Martha was an overweight nurse living with her unbearable mother. While it wasn’t love at first letter, the two improbably partnered and, under a brother-and-sister guise, went on to gull and murder 17 women through the personal pages. Once detained, the media vultures picked apart the sordid details of their tabloid-tabbed case—Martha even wondered if she was “being tried for murder, or because [she was] fat?”—and the lovebirds were eventually sentenced to Sing Sing’s infamous chair. But, as Shakespeare intoned, the evil that men (and women) do lives after them, particularly in cinema.
With Jared Leto and Salma Hayek’s offering forgettable takes in
Lonely Hearts (2006), Ray and Martha’s continued notoriety owes largely to Leonard Kastle’s
The Honeymoon Killers (1970). A remarkable example of the
art brut that the late Manny Farber was referential for in his criticism (it also anchored his famed MoMA lecture in 1979), Kastle’s cult one-off is, at turns, horrifying and darkly humorous. The portrait of its mismatched connivers is unglamorous, eccentric and represents Kastle’s stab at an anti-
Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which, ironically, provided the anti-establishment primer for New Hollywood films like
The Honeymoon Killers.
Cobbled together from $150,000, the occasional off-key sound and other asperities turn the B-movie into a See-movie of expressive close-ups, breakneck zooms, and black-and-white shadow play—often, the shorthand for intercourse. A composer by trade, Kastle employs a classical score, a la Kubrick, to underscore or undermine what’s onscreen: Ray and Martha’s exaggerated letters elide to Mahler’s dulcet theme for his wife while his sixth symphony imbues the dupe-and-dispatch maneuvering with a galvanic and ultimately ironic grandeur.
Originally titled
Dear Martha, the psychotic
pas de deux begins and ends with the complex and fatal femme. Remarkably embodied by Shirley Stoler and her vaulted eyebrows, Martha’s persona bounds between the petulant, infatuated damsel (Ray assures her, like a broken Beatles’ record, that they were “meant to be for each other silly girl”) and the manipulative, no-nonsense mother (the prey allude to her, more often than not, as Ray’s mother instead of sister). Moreover, the guileless victims materialize as funhouse-mirror versions of Martha—they’re reflections that are only a step away; whether an over-the-top patriot or a penny-pinching flibbertigibbet, the other women’s oddities appear to Martha as the apparent fates without her Ray. Thus, she relishes the fact that the lonely fools rush headlong into the couple’s playacted lies.
Set chiefly in claustrophobic interiors, the narrative’s tension comes from the fierce, intermittent tête-à-têtes between Ray (a pitch-perfect Tony Lo Bianco), with his broken promises and his search for the grail-like last scam, and Martha, with her parochial, all-for-one plan for their future. This treacherous divide widens with each successful swindle: Ray remains a devout Don Juan while Martha, though allowing him to host ideas, adamantly refuses to share his blessed body with their love-starved victims. Martha’s anomalous last act, then, isn’t committed in the name of theodicy, but with the same, elemental belief that inspires every tree-bark etching: Ray + Martha forever.
