The Honeymoon Killers
Leonard Kastle · 1970
Leonard Kastle’s 1970 debut is a stark, black-and-white docudrama about Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, two real-life killers whose relationship curdles into murder. Made on a $200,000 budget with non-star actors, rough cinematography and Mahler on the soundtrack, it rejects glamour, psychology and historical fidelity in favour of sustained moral unease. Shirley Stoler’s performance as Martha remains one of cinema’s most unsettling studies in embodied desperation.