No Way to Treat a Lady (1968)

Director: Jack Smight Writers: John Gay, based on the novel by William Goldman
Stars: Rod Steiger, Lee Remick and George Segal

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I love plucking films I’ve never heard of out of filmographies entirely due to research. Rod Steiger was a giant of American cinema, which means that there’s no shortage of films I could have chosen to celebrate his centennial.

This is one I’d never even heard of before, but he’s both the lead and the villain, he was at the height of his powers a year after In the Heat of the Night and he plays a character who plays other characters to strangle women and taunt the police. The fact that it’s based on a William Goldman novel was just a bonus.

As the film starts, he’s Fr. Kevin McDowell, an Irish priest with red hair whistling his way down the road to visit Mrs. Molloy, widow and lapsed Catholic, so that he can drink her port, tickle her mercilessly and then strangle her to death. It’s clearly all to do with his mother.

Of course, he’s not really Fr. McDowell. He’s a German plumber called Hans Schultz for his next act, then Dorian Smith, flamboyantly gay wig fitter, and so on. Eventually we realise he’s really Christopher Gill, some sort of theatrical producer who lives in a mansion with servants and clearly knows people. He’s someone, even before the strangler makes the front pages.

His nemesis here is Morris Brummel, who’s not remotely someone, at least if you listen to his mother. He’s played by George Segal with a impressive sense of patience. She’s played by Eileen Heckart as such a Jewish nightmare she could teach classes on it. Apparently, her own mother was a nightmare and her grandma was worse, so I wonder how much she channelled of them into this part.

She’s certainly memorable, enough that she dominates the early scenes, putting down her son relentlessly while beatifying his brother, who’s a heart surgeon and not even forty yet. Morris is just a cop. Whoever heard of a Jewish cop? You get the picture. I presume this is all a clever setup to show that whatever Gill’s mum did to him, it couldn’t have been this bad and yet Morris hasn’t become a serial killer.

Morris has certainly figured out how to take disappointment, but Gill hasn’t. He’s offended enough by his murder warranting just a single paragraph on page seven that he even calls up the newspaper to complain. Soon enough, he takes to calling Morris directly, even at home.

His modus operandi is pretty consistent. He does his homework and tailors his persona of choice to his victims. He chats with them, then strangles them and leaves them with a pair of lips drawn on their foreheads in lipstick. Then he calls the cops to boast.

Typically in serial killer thrillers, the major character is the cop, so George Segal, and he’s perfectly fine here but Morris, as good as he is, isn’t at all dominant. He’s not in charge when he’s at home, because that’s his mum. He’s not in charge when he’s at work, because that’s his boss. He’s not even in charge in a relationship that builds with the witness to the first killing, Kate Palmer, because that’s all her.

She’s flirtatious and sarcastic and, while she eventually displays an insecurity deep inside, she’s so dominant in their relationship that it could be argued that she plays with Morris as much as Gill does, just in a very different way. It could even be argued that the order of stars on the poster is highly appropriate, even with Segal getting more screen time than Remick.

Michael Dunn, Miguelito Loveless himself, is only in one scene and I’ll remember both him and Heckart longer than Segal. However, it’s always going to be Steiger’s show, because this script is an absolute gift to him. He owns this movie, pure and simple, and he enjoys it.

In fact, he isn’t content with merely playing a character putting on other characters like a set of shirts; he adds more on the phone to the cops. At one point, he starts as Dorian Smith, then switches to W. C. Fields just because. Gill flaunts his acting as much as his murders.

However, like most murderers, he’s flawed, which eventually leads to his downfall. We see the cracks early in his need to be recognised in the paper, but they grow. He’s outraged when it calls him a pervert. He shouts at Morris on the phone, then seeks his forgiveness, not for multiple murders but for daring to be rude.

It’s inherently hammy and it’s meant to be, as we discover, albeit not as much as Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood. The catch is that it takes over from everything else, so there’s not much psychology and I’d have liked that. This may have done all it could with the running time but I’d love to see it extended to a mini series or a full season. With Steiger.

I wonder how Steiger was to work with here because he was a pivotal method actor and so deliberately became his characters so as to get into their minds more effectively. I wonder if that, at least in part, was escape, because, like Heckart, he had an awful childhood.

His father left soon after he was born, likely because his mother was an alcoholic, and his stepfather left too. At five, he found the house empty on Christmas Day because his mother had vanished for a three day binge. Maybe this is why, also at five, he was lured into the home of a local paedophile and sexually abused.

After running away from home at sixteen to join the U.S. Navy, he discovered a talent for acting obvious enough that he was invited to join the Actors Studio without auditioning. He studied method with Lee Strasberg, along with Karl Malden, Eli Wallach and Marlon Brando.

His first big break could have been Marty, as he played the role on television and was going to reprise it on film but rejected a seven year studio contract so Ernest Borgnine took over and won the Oscar. It didn’t matter, because he got On the Waterfront instead, as Brando’s elder brother, and that led to The Big Knife and Oklahoma! and The Harder They Fall and on.

He claimed that he did his best work in The Pawnbroker in 1964 as an embittered Holocaust survivor, but that was followed by The Loved One, Doctor Zhivago and an Oscar for In the Heat of the Night, so there are plenty of candidates.

He already preferred acting in Europe but it became a necessity later in his career, when he suffered from depression. By 1979, he was taking any role that was offered, ending with Poolhall Junkies in 2002, but many of these were strong nonetheless, from Shiloh to The Neighbor to Mars Attacks! My backup choice after this was a second outing as Mussolini in the three hour Lion of the Desert, funded by the Libyan government in 1981. I may tackle it anyway.

He died in 2002, after five marriages and an almost unmatched filmography.