Richard Fleischer (1971)

This was the first X-certificate film I ever saw in the cinema, in the summer of 1971.   Ludovic Kennedy’s book 10 Rillington Place, on which Clive Exton’s screenplay is based (Kennedy appears in the credits as ‘Technical Adviser’), was first published in 1961.  I’d read Kennedy’s book – updated to take account of the 1966 official inquiry into the Christie-Evans murders and the posthumous pardon for Timothy Evans that followed – with great interest, and a new edition was published to coincide with the film’s release.  I didn’t want to see any picture I wasn’t old enough to see:  I wanted to see just this one.  I was impressed, and especially by John Hurt as Evans, but I’m not sure that I’d ever seen 10 Rillington Place in its entirety again until 2013.  Although the story they tell was notorious enough in this country to attract audiences, Clive Exton and the director Richard Fleischer were still faced with a tricky commercial assignment.   Should the piece be a horror film about the serial killer ‘monster’ John Reginald Halliday Christie or a cautionary tale about the perils of capital punishment (which had very recently been abolished in Britain, after an initial five-year suspension beginning in 1965) or a human drama?  10 Rillington Place turns out to be all three and, thanks to the film-makers’ skill in balancing these elements, it’s a good movie.

This is in spite of its getting off on the wrong foot and, in doing so, making what turns out to be a dramatically limiting choice.   The ‘monster’ angle is the easiest way to draw the audience in, and this is what Fleischer and Exton decide to focus on:  the film’s opening describes Christie’s murder of Muriel Eady (the second of his eight known victims) in 1944.  The writing and staging of the killing is realistic and frightening but the immediate exposure of what lies behind Christie’s creepy sociability means there’s nothing much more to reveal about him and, unlike the Kennedy book, the film doesn’t attempt to explain Christie’s psychopathology.   The meticulously drab settings are anything but lurid, there’s no scary music (Fleischer uses John Dankworth’s score only for the opening titles) and Richard Attenborough’s interpretation of Christie is painstaking, but he’s still essentially a bogeyman.  Fortunately, once the Timothy Evans story gets underway, the human drama aspect takes over; because this aspect is so strong 10 Rillington Place never needs to present its anti-hanging message too explicitly.

Attenborough as Christie is often a shade too theatrical – both in relation to how the other parts are played and in the sense that he comes over as a figure of evil drawn from film history rather than real life, which allows a measure of security for the audience.   The piggy look (very different from the real Christie’s gauntness), the sinister spectacles, the carefully produced voice and the strength of Attenborough’s natural presence combine to make his Christie too striking, too difficult to ignore.  Yet the portrait is admirably detailed and thought out – and there’s no histrionic cover to the murder sequences:    Richard Attenborough gives himself fully to these.  John Hurt is wonderful as Timothy Evans.  At first you wonder if he’ll struggle to be believably half-witted but this turns out to be the most brilliant aspect of Hurt’s performance.  He shows you how Evans’ brain works – and what happens when, as frequently happens, he can’t get his thought processes to go any further.  When Tim Evans is baffled he resorts to anger.  What happened to Evans would be a bewildering nightmare for anyone but Hurt makes him profoundly and very individually helpless.   In the witness box at the Old Bailey, Evans hears a question and a vast expanse of silence opens up as he struggles for an answer, and swallows him.  The trial sequences are impressive.   I assume that Exton made use of the actual trial transcript:  this gives the scenes an absorbing reality and Fleischer directs them with remarkable discretion.  Perhaps the staging of the trial is almost too disciplined:  I wondered, for example, if Christmas Humphreys, who prosecuted, wouldn’t have run rings round Evans more quickly and cruelly than he’s shown as doing in the film.  However, the near-underplaying of this part of the trial helps increase the impact of Christie’s outburst of sobbing when the judge dons his black cap.   The rapidity of Evans’ execution and Fleischer’s cut from the hanged man dropping down to Christie stiffly standing up with a wheezing groan of back pain may sound obvious but the sequence has a shocking visceral impact.

10 Rillington Place is carefully cast and the acting is first rate throughout.  As Tim’s wife Beryl, Judy Geeson occasionally loses concentration but she’s very good once she gets into a conversation (and a rhythm) with Attenborough or Hurt.  She has an especially good bit in a pub, where Tim and Beryl go after a visit to the pictures.  They’re really enjoying themselves until he starts blethering about going to night school and getting qualifications which he knows as well as his wife does are beyond him:  the spell of a happy evening is broken and Judy Geeson registers the return to normality affectingly.  As Ethel Christie, Pat Heywood achieves the near miracle of convincing you that this marriage could have survived for decades – she’s timidly passive, almost stupefied.  (The Christies married in 1920, split up four years later but got back together in the mid-1930s.)  As Ethel prepares to leave 10 Rillington Place to return to live with her sister in Sheffield, ‘Reg’ asks how he’ll manage and where he’s supposed to go, and Ethel says, ‘I know where you should be’.  ‘What do you mean?’ he asks.  ‘You know what I mean,’ Ethel replies.   Pat Heywood manages to make these lines sound both exhausted and chilling.  (This is the couple’s last conversation.   Mrs Christie never made it to Sheffield:  she became her husband’s fifth victim, in December 1952.)  The fine cast also includes:  Isobel Black as Beryl’s friend Alice; Gabrielle Day and Jimmy Gardner as Evans’ aunt and uncle in Merthyr Tydfil;  André Morell as Mr Justice Lewis, Geoffrey Chater as Christmas Humphreys and Robert Hardy as Evans’ defence counsel Malcolm Morris; Ray Barron and Douglas Blackwell as workmen who arrive at 10 Rillington Place at just the wrong moment, from Christie’s point of view, to do repairs for the landlord;  Rudolph Walker as the new West Indian tenant of the property, who discovers the corpses there; and Richard Coleman as the policeman who eventually arrests Christie.

Richard Fleischer has the reputation of a journeyman Hollywood director.  The reputation is hardly undeserved but he excelled himself on 10 Rillington Place:  he shows a remarkable feel for the time and place of the story and for the nuances of Clive Exton’s truly excellent dialogue, which is both naturalistic and incisive.  In the first part of the film the emphasis on cups of tea raises fears of a very-English-murder treatment of the story.  In fact the picture is all the more impressive for this initial suggestion because of the distance it travels away from it through the story of Timothy Evans.  By the same token, Christie’s prattling on with details of his bogus medical knowledge has a flavour of Francis Iles’s Malice Aforethought (the little man who becomes a killer); but is replaced by something much more pungent when he actually carries out the murders.   The last days of Christie before his arrest are well summarised.  The silence accompanying the closing credits seems like a recognition of how powerful the film has become.  It was shot in the actual Rillington Place in Ladbroke Grove (the street has long since been demolished), although not at number 10.  According to Wikipedia, ‘the three families living there in 1970 refused to move out’ so Fleischer and his team had to make do with number 7.

26 February 2013