Despite rave reviews from the trade press (“a superb reenactment of the Lonely Hearts murder case of the late 1940s. Well-scripted, harrowing, brilliantly acted....” -Variety) and from important critics, The Honeymoon Killers was poorly handled in distribution (beginning with the title change from Dear Martha to The Honeymoon Killers), and was condemned to a short-lived existence on the grind house circuit. After its distributor - Cinerama Releasing - went bankrupt, this independently produced feature simply disappeared. We are fortunate to be able to show a 35mm print obtained directly from the producer, Warren Steibel. Here are some excerpts from Roger Greenspun's New York Times review:
“The Honeymoon Killers ... recounts the criminal partnership of Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, who were executed for murder at Sing Sing Prison in March, 1951.
“Fernandez and the 29-year-old, 200 pound Mrs. Beck, known as the ‘Lonely Hearts Killers' at the time of their trial, made a career of stealing from lonely women whom Fernandez met through correspondence clubs, with Mrs. Beck, a trained nurse, posing as his sister. Two of their more recalcitrant victims were murdered, and a third died as a result of an overdose of sleeping pills administered by Mrs. Beck.
“The movie follows the killers from just before their meeting (through a lonely hearts club correspondence) until just before their trial. Although it takes only the slightest (and most essential) liberties with the facts of the Beck-Fernandez case, The Honeymoon Killers is basically a fiction film - of a type virtually unknown in recent years, except as transmuted in the myth-making romanticism of, say, a Bonnie and Clyde. Within the limits of its type it is one of the best and, curiously, most beautiful American movies in recent years.
“Photographed in black and white, with fairly rudimentary sound recording and with lighting that seems always to come from natural sources or from whatever electric light bulbs might be at hand, The Honeymoon Killers virtually epitomizes the low-budget murder melodrama of everyone's fondest imaginations.
“In fact, it is concerned with murder less as crime than as unambiguous event....
“But The Honeymoon Killers has something else - a more concentrated, less cluttered, clearer vision than you are likely to have found in even the best conventional crime movies. Unusually seedy in all its particulars, utterly unflattering to all its characters, sufficiently horrible (but never gratuitously shocking) in the details of its murders, Kastle's film succeeds as a kind of chamber drama of desperate attraction and violent death.”