After a weak heart sidelined him from producing, the terrific blacklisted writer Arnold Perl went back to freelancing and came up with this masterpiece, a wild black comedy that’s way ahead of its time, totally unliked the gritty social realist fare Perl was known for (he produced East Side / West Side and co-created NYPD), and nearly indescribable. It’s the story of supermodel Holly (as in Golightly), played by unknown Melodie Johnson, whose compulsion for thrills sends her out to gamble on anything that will take her action, even (in a wonderfully wacky image) a high school ping-pong match. When the need for kicks escalates to murder, Holly offs her bookie Lefty (Mickey Rooney), and because we do such things for the pretty people, her entourage dumps the body and covers for her. Enter two chatty cops (Don Gordon and Jack Weston), a playful inversion of the existential hit-men cliche. One of them lays out a complex theory on how her need for paternal love led Holly to commit the crime, until Holly blithely cuts him off with, “Oh, I did it myself.” This climactic moment is the one time Perl rises to any kind of recognizable temper, and only to mock the cop’s outdated, ham-fisted psychology; otherwise, mimicking his sociopath antiheroine, he adopts a tone that’s completely without affect. “Hey kids, take ten – years, that is,” Holly calls out gaily to her acolytes as she’s carted off to the clink. It’s Dostoyevsky with a dash of Warhol, or vice versa.
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