Lo Bianco and Stoler experience love on the run.

The Honeymoon Killers could have been Martin Scorsese’s first great film. The then-fledgling director was hired to handle material that seems perfect in retrospect for his sensibilities: a grisly black-and-white docudrama about the real-life 1940s crime spree that saw a pair of grifters commit a string of increasingly brutal murders. The producers were unhappy about the pace of Scorsese’s shooting schedule and his association with the pic ended after just a week. What’s shocking is that novice screenwriter Leonard Kastle, who had no directorial experience, stepped into the breach and did a job even Scorsese could envy.

Suave Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco) is a con man who contacts lonely women across America through correspondence clubs and separates them from their savings. He meets his match, however, when he answers a letter from heavyset nurse Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler), who is so desperate for affection that she doesn’t think twice when she figures out the con. Pretty soon the pair are working the swindle together, letting their love fuel a spree that grows more brutal and murderous with every new victim.

Apart from loneliness and greed, there isn’t a great deal of psychological insight into the vicious crimes, but Lo Bianco and Stoler do so much with surface emotion that the movie never stops being disturbing and oddly touching. For the role, Lo Bianco affected a voice that occasionally sounds like a stock Dracula accent. He and his love draw blood from their victims, to the film’s Mahler score, like they’ll never drink their fill. (Available via Netflix and other outlets.)

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