The crack staff at FTD have been stumbling onto some exceptionally rare and great films of late, and to tie up (pardon the Wakamatsu pun) Somebody Got Murdered! Week, we've saved the best for last. 10 Rillington Place was based on the John Reginald Christie serial murder spree that spanned over ten years in Britain, starting in 1943. Sir Richard Attenborough, an up-and-coming John Hurt, and Judy Geeson give outstanding performances, and Richard Fleischer's direction of this harsh subject matter is delicately perfect. 10 Rillington place is a gem of a film that could easily be overlooked, but don't let that happen. It's another must-see.
Damn, we've been posting some great stuff lately...
From Chris Cabin at AMC Filmcritic:
Sometime in the last decade, the glut of commercially released thrillers and serial killer flicks shifted focus from killer and victims to just victims. The horror genre began seeping into thrillers and the idea of the serial killer became an unknowable, a wicked creature certainly not birthed of a human mother and father. The methodology of the killer had been transposed onto the director. We were no longer watching a cat and a mouse as much as a band of mice inside a steel trap with an omnipresent figure picking them off one-by-one. Instinct and procedure gave way to happenstance, cliché, and plain-old bad luck. Masked sociopaths with mommy issues don't kill people; scenarios do.
Richard Fleischer's 10 Rillington Place should then come as an unsettling reminder that, more often than not, it is not overly clever traps but rather people who kill people. Based on the notorious Christie murders that plagued Notting Hill throughout the 1940s, the film focuses specifically on John Christie's relationship with the Evans family, which rented out the top apartment of the building where he resided with his wife. Christie, played by Richard Attenborough at the top of his form, was at first a good friend and helpful neighbor to Timothy Evans (a young, exceptional John Hurt) and his wife Beryl (Judy Gleeson), shelling out a few extra shillings to make sure the kids made their furniture payments and offering to help Beryl with an unwanted pregnancy. The cries of the Evans' young daughter pours over the minimalist score and sound design like a cascade of turmoil; no wonder Glenn Kenney likened the film to Eraserhead.
Christie's pregnancy termination sham is, in reality, a ramshackle device to gas female victims and then strangle them. Included in his laundry list of psycho-sexual habits is a pension for necrophilia and, though we never witness the act, Attenborough's scrape-bone performance leaves no question that he was capable of it. After murdering Beryl and covering it up as a mistake during the operation, Christie goes on to frame Timothy, murder their baby daughter, and later testify against the young man in trial. The trial makes up a good chunk of the film's procedural second half, where we are allowed a few crumbs of Christie's unfiltered past. Convicted with little doubt, Evans was hanged in 1950, a full three years before they uncovered bodies at Christie's house -- one being his wife -- and put him to the gallows too.
Set in a nightmare London filled with decay of the soul and rotted foundations, 10 Rillington Place is a bellowing black cloud of lugubrious mood and overcoming dread, lit only by the reflection of light off of Attenborough's bald pate. Fleischer, the manic filmmaker behind Mandingo and Soylent Green, strikes a strange but affecting pitch by not empathizing with killer or victim. Evans, played by Hurt as a frustrating dullard, isn't romanticized as the wrong man, nor is bald, pudgy Christie posited as an anti-hero. It's all too harrowing to not be true: Text at the beginning of the film informs that Fleischer and screenwriter Clive Exton used as much fact and transcribed dialogue as possible, and even the terrifying scene of Evans being hung was technically advised by none other than famed hangman Albert Pierrepoint. Written and performed as human, Attenborough's Christie is an entity of his own twisted will; the audience is relegated to stunned, chilled spectator.
Technical Information:
Title: 10 Rillington Place
Year: 1971
Country: UK
Director: Richard Fleischer
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.23 GB
Length: 1:46:22
Programs used: Unknown
Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~7200 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps
Audio 1: English- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: English Commentary- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: cc-English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras:
- Introduction by Sir Richard Attenborough
- Interview with Sir Richard Attenborough
- John Hurt Commentary
- Fact File
- Filmographies
- Vintage Lobby Cards
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