10 Rillington Place

Director Richard Fleischer is most often remembered for his expansive and experimental use of the Cinemascope aspect-ratio. Take the 1967 true-crime picture "The Boston Strangler" as a prime example-in it, he employs numerous variations of split-screen techniques, often fitting more than three separate images into an individual frame, all so that the audience can watch cops and suspects and killers at work, all at once. It might come as a surprise, then, that Fleischer's "10 Rillington Place"-another of his true-crime movies, now available on Blu-ray via a limited edition release from Twilight Time-is a claustrophobic experience, played out in constricting frames. If "Strangler" used its aesthetics to suggest omniscience, this film only stares.

The film dramatizes the crimes of John Christie (Richard Attenborough,) who killed and disposed of at least 8 women-in his basement, or behind his walls-in midcentury London. Fleischer's focus is on the documentation of details, no matter how excrutiating. So the opening sequence details his process: the way he lures women into his flat, the way his geekily nonthreatening demeanor keeps them at ease, the way he puts them to sleep with gas, and the way his victims seem to realize what's happening just in the last moments of consciousness-just in time for them to be terrified. Once they expire, he continues to desecrate the bodies. Fleischer renders much of this just outside the bounds of the frame. The film is not gory, nor is it necessarily horrifying, at least not in the sense of the horror genre. And it does not aim to investigate the psyche of the killer, either. It just takes all that for granted-his sociopathic tendencies, his violent method, and his complete inability to end his own murderous compulsion-and lets us draw our horror from his very existence.

From that prologue, the film jumps ahead, to the arrival of its primary victims. They are Timothy and Beryl Evans (John Hurt and Judy Geeson, respectively,) and from the moment of their arrival, they're placed in compromising positions. Timothy can't read, which provides all the expected complications with regard to finances and comprehension. And his wife, recently set with an unwanted pregnancy, is not in the headspace to be sympathetic to his plight. That makes it easy for both to fall under Christie's barely-veiled spell-he plots a more complicated fate for these two, staging their murders in a way that will leave a scapegoat (unlike usually, when Christie doesn't leave behind anything at all.) Fleischer continues to observe the tragedy from a distanced, unfeeling perspective: the whole scheme is treated with a deliberate sense of journalistic insensitivity-the film even claims to take some of its dialogue from original court documents.

Twilight Time's Blu-ray release does extremely well by the film, offering it a presentation that's far superior to any previous home video transfers. But before that, you notice the selection of special features. There's two separate audio commentaries, one carried over from a prior release (featuring Hurt,) and another that's newly-recorded (where Geeson joins Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman.) Another auditory extra comes in the form of an isolated score track (the compositions are by John Dankworth,) while a theatrical trailer rounds out the disc. Also included in the package itself is a booklet featuring an essay by Julie Kirgo, who connects the film's implicit sense of despair to the British national mood in the two decades that followed World War II.

Certainly there's despair in the compositions themselves. Fleischer shoots the film in the boxy 1.66:1 aspect ratio-and this disc is the first time it's been presented that way on home video, for the record-which are most often marked by grimly-lit backgrounds filled with wartorn debris. This sense of pessimism is most clearly apparent in the film's centerpiece; which is not a murder sequence, but rather an elongated conversation between John and Timothy. The former twists the latter around his own needs, manipulating every weakness in the illiterate man's character for the sake of personal gain. Fleischer's camera squeezes the two into a composition that contrasts their profiles, putting them into literal physical conflict. It's a cold, unfeeling, and painfully acute rendering of human psychosis-its means, and its results-at its most unsettlingly banal. And it's as disturbing as anything else in the movie.

"10 Rillington Place"
Blu-ray
$29.95
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