Boston Strangler Is Black Comedy

Steiger Plays 6 Roles-All Vivid

By EMERSON BATDORFF For people who like to just sit there and glory in the artistry of Rod Steiger there now comes a movie that ought to send chills down their spines: Rod Steiger in six different personalities, all vivid.

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The picture is a "Terrible. Way to Treat a Lady.” As a whole it does not come off nearly as meritoriously as does Steiger in his splendid individual show of artistic strength.

It is a black comedy based roughly on the Boston Strangler's penchant for doing in harmless old ladies. The surprising thing is that there is so much comedy of any sort available in this sort of undertaking.

THE FILM is funny, due largely to Steiger. It is also cruel, due largely to the lack of humanity in the story.

As a Catholic priest, as a homosexual hairdresser, as a policeman—well, why go on?-Steiger is superb. He uses the disguise to get into apartments to do his dirty work, ending with a lipstick painted kiss on the forehead of each dead woman.

George Segal displays a hitherto unrevealed comic

er shows up, maintaining that he strangled all the women. The killer, Michael Dunn, is a dwarf. We laugh here not with the

and stabbings and grandiloquent melodrama, the picture's makers should pause and give thanks, each time they think of it,

talent as a cop, although it seems unlikely that any cop this dumb could find his way to the station regularly. Being as he plays a Jewish cop, and it is necessary dwarf who is trying to gain that they had the foresight

that both the policeman and the killer should have dominant mothers for purposes of the plot, the film figures a Jewish mother is necessary. A comic one.

where, make CAN'T anybody, anymake a Jewish mother funny, if it is deemed necessary to make her funny at all, without falling into the stereotypes? Heaven knows this film avoids all other stereotypes (except for the dumb cop), so why not dodge the routine Jewish mother bit?

Lee Remick is toothsome as the love interest and

killer bait, which is about all that is required of her.

As for the way the vehicle proceeds, heavyhanded might be the way to describe the direction, but you have to hand it to Jack Smight, the director. He knew right where the laughs lay and he dug them out, and he is not above using cruelty to get them.

THE FILM'S writers were no less unfeeling. At one point a self-announced kill-

some sort of status by his nutty confession, but at him.

It is cruelly funny. At the end, in a confusion of snois

to hire Steiger. No one else could have carried it off.