'NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY'..........A THEATRICAL HAM LEAVES 'EM ALL CHOKED UP....

No Way To Treat A Lady (1968)  Long before we cringed at Anthony Hopkins sucking in his teeth at the thought of human liver with fava beans and a nice chianti,  that raging hambone Rod Steiger gave us a belly laugh serial killer.......

              Afforded a viruoso opportunity usually only given to Peter Sellers, Steiger, an actor whose over-the-top dial always went up to 11, chewed the scenery and everything else as Christopher Gill, a Broadway theater impresario obsessed with his deceased, beloved actress mother.

               What the script, taken from a William Goldman novel, never explains is why the 40ish Gill, after a presumed sane lifetime,  suddenly decides to raid his own theater's prop closet, take on multiple disguises and identities and strangle lonely little old ladies, smearing their dead foreheads with a caricature of his dead mom's lips.

               Well.....who cares?  What this film's all about is the dark fun of watching Steiger worm his way into his victims' apartments by playing a jolly Irish priest, a homesick German janitor, a weepy middle aged woman and his Standing O showstopper, a a swishing, mincing wig fitter. Before he drops the mask and gets down to the business of choking these women to death, we get treated to a few funny minutes with each of Steiger's unique creations........(out of all of them,we're partial to the sweet Stuttgart handyman....... practically having an orgasm as he chomps down on the homemade crumbcake offered to him by the soon-to-be-throttled German widow....)

              Remember, however, that this is 1968......so Steiger's impressive cartoon cast of characters aren't the only stereotypes on view here. Hot on his trail comes sad sack Jewish detective Morris Brummel (George Segal, at the peak of his young film career), nagged and babied to the point of madness by his monstrously caricatured mother (Eileen Heckart, a worthy rival to Steiger when it came to gobbling up a scene like it was her last meal). Their scenes together play like the anything-for-a-joke stuff you'd see in the early Woody Allen films.......

              In the course of his hapless investigation, Segal falls into an impossibly sweet romance with a manic-Pixie-Holly-Golightly dreamgirl played with witty spunk by Lee Remick. There isn't one minute of this unlikely coupling that doesn't smack of a screenwriter's romantic fantasy, but Segal and Remick turn on enough charm and chemistry to make it work.

              As it swings back and forth between the sick laughs and the genuine menace of Steiger's psychosis, you shouldn't wait for any sub-text.......the movie has nothing much on its mind beyond the surface pleasures of viewing Steiger's hydra-headed collection of grotesques.....and scoring easy, cheap giggles from his preening gay wig guy and dwarf actor Michael Dunn's bit as furious midget who demands his own arrest for the murders.

                Artistically, none of it should hang together, this bumpy mixture of skit-spoof type comedy and dead bodies, but in the cinema of the 60's, a 'we'll-try-anything-once'  kind of vibe prevailed......which resulted in a steady stream of quirky little movies like this one.

               And the BQ does miss them. So we'll get a stranglehold grip on 3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2) for odd Rod and his entertaining circus of multiple mania......maybe one of the last tongue-in-cheek takes on serial killers......