[3] Dennis Pitt is a disturbed young man on parole from a mental institution who becomes attracted to teenager Sue Ann Stepenek.

Things, however, turn out disastrously when Dennis takes Sue Ann along to sabotage a factory on imaginary orders from the CIA.

When the couple encounters the factory's night watchman, Sue Ann knocks him unconscious and then drowns him.

While Dennis refuses to tell his skeptical parole officer Azenauer the truth, he asks him to "see what Sue Ann is up to" in hopes she will be exposed for what she really is.

The film ends with Sue Ann meeting a young man and lamenting to him that the people who took her in after her mother's death won't let her stay out late; it is implied that she will use and destroy him just as she did Dennis.

"[8] Turman had just made The Flim Flam Man for 20th Century Fox and obtained finance from the same studio.

"[11] Tuesday Weld signed to play the female lead with Anthony Perkins as costar.

"I was looking for the young Tony of Friendly Persuasion and Fear Strikes Out, not Psycho, although commentators naturally made the comparison between Norman Bates and the character in Pretty Poison.

"[11] The film was shot on location at Great Barrington, Massachusetts,[14] with She Let Him Continue as its working title.

What he brought was a personal sense of humanity and dignity, which gave the character a sympathetic quality.

Studio people kept arriving and saying, 'You're taking too long' and they had him under a lot of pressure ... Noel had some wonderful ideas and some camera stuff that took time.

"[18] Fox had difficulty securing a release for the film in New York so instead opened it in Los Angeles in September 1968.

The Los Angeles Times reviewer called it "a small, stunning, thoughtful exploration of degrees of madness and of sanity.

When Fox did secure a New York release, they claimed they had trouble getting critics to attend a screening, and persuading the two stars to promote the movie.

[20] Black later claimed, "their unwarrantable action was partly explained by it being the year [1968] of the double assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and a corrosive tale of insidious madness in which a teenage girl shoots her own mother, seemed, to timid studio chiefs, excessive.

The New York Times claimed that "everything that was spare in the novel somehow becomes overblown" and that while Perkins "is quite good ... Tuesday Weld is numbingly dull as the girl.

"[21] It received excellent reviews from magazines and Sunday papers – notably Pauline Kael in The New Yorker – but that was not enough to save the film commercially.

[23] "One of the best films of 1968 remains a pleasant memory for the few of us lucky enough to see it", wrote Rex Reed, who thought it was "an offbeat, original, totally irreverent examination of violence in America, refreshing in its subtlety and intelligent in its delivery.

Kael decided to beat the studio over the head with it by saying, "This great classic, this wonderful movie..." She seriously over-praised it.