Plot: When her roommate submits her name to a lonely hearts club as a joke, Martha Beck, a two hundred pound nurse from Mobile, Alabama, meets Raymond Fernandez, a Spaniard living in New York, and the two become lovers. There he indoctrinates her into his confidence game - that of meeting lonely widows, fooling them into believing he is going to marry them, and then killing them and taking their money and jewelry.

This film has gained a real cult reputation in recent years despite of and probably due to its relative obscurity and lack of general availability. It is a reputation that has grown from its banning in several countries - in Australia it was not seen for fifteen years. It is based on fact - and follows the details of the real Beck/Fernandez killings quite closely too.

It is a strong and disturbing film. Much of its effect is derived from its deliberate modeling along the lines of a crime melodrama of the 1940s. It is naturally shot in black-and-white and the score (which the film claims is derived from Gustav Mahler) has a wonderfully stentorous, didactic drive to it. Director Leonard Kastle opts for a documentary-like approach and as a result the rawness of some scenes is quite disturbing. In the scene where Tony Lo Bianco kills Mary Jane Higby with a hammer, all to Shirley Stoler’s encouragements of “If you love me, you’ll do it”, and the final image of Lo Bianco stripping naked, dropping his clothes on the dead body and disappearing into the bedroom, telling Stoler he wants to make love, Kastle sits his camera and just blankly, dispassionately observes the scene, with highly disturbing effect. The most disturbing element though is the performance given by Stoler, who moves through the film with coldly narrowed eyes and the carriage and steely indomitably of a Sherman tank. The sheer menace to her cold, eye-narrowed response to the doctor at the hospital who admonishes her after finding her love letters - “I don’t think that Hitler was wrong about the Jews” - quite takes one aback. Her and Kastle’s peeling open and understanding of the character’s vulnerabilities, emotional manipulations and dangerousness is exceptional.

Sadly Leonard Kastle has never made another film. Stoler made occasional minor appearances in other films and episodes of tv series before her death in 1999, but never had another powerhouse role like this. In a piece of trivia the film was originally to have been directed by Martin Scorsese.