Watched this on Saturday night, BBC 2.
The tag line is: Why did 13 women willingly open their doors to the Boston Strangler? And the pitifully mundane answer is: because they were driven to desperation by the sorry state of their plumbing. And that isn’t a euphemism.
That’s as close to telling a true story as the movie gets. In real life, Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo didn’t have Multiple Personality Disorder; he was just a git who liked murdering women. If it was actually him. Or even one person. This makes the movie ripe for a fantastic remake, although it’ll probably end up staring Jim Carey and being rubbish.
This is a good film though. It uses split screen well throughout, and Tony Curtis is great in this as disassociated nutter Albert DeSalvo. I’m not a huge fan of his, outside of his Cary Grant impersonation in Some Like it Hot, and Antoninus avoiding giving it up to Laurence Olivier in Spartacus.
The first half of the film focuses on the police department’s useless search for the Strangler. The police act on behalf of the slowest member of the audience in this film, asking all the obvious questions. Their stupidity is reiterated in the way they go all out to find any ‘deviant’ they can pin the murders on, so if you were gay or like shoes, unlucky.
There’s a fantastic gay disco scene though – there must be more footage of this somewhere. This is the kind of perfect extra that never gets included on the DVD.
William Marshall plays Attorney General Edward W. Brooke, & it’s pretty amazing for the time that the fact that it’s a Black guy kicking everyone’s asses goes without comment, although this may be because he actually was the first Black Attorney General - & he sure doesn’t get a huge role.
The hunt for the killer is pretty much depicted as a golden age for women in Boston, except for the ones that got murdered of course. It must have been about the only time in history that you could call the police when some guy was harassing you and they’d actually come and do something about it.
George Kennedy who plays Det. Phil DiNatale was miscast his whole life – always a police officer or army guy, George would have been perfect as a paedophile priest, with his particular blend intense dumbness always slapped over with a thick coating of affable blandness. He’s still alive but the bulk of him (although still startlingly pink) seems a little deflated. Some casting director should have snapped him up in the early 1990s when the glut of religious child molester movies was at it's height.
The second half of the movie focuses on DeSalvo reassuring insanity and definite culpability. Which is great because there was never a trial for any of the murders.
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