10 Rillington Place Reviews

Richard Attenborough portrays murderer John Reginald Christie, whose actions led to the hanging of an innocent man and the eventual abolition of capital punishment in Britain. The film picks up in 1944 as Christie coaxes a young lady into his flat, then rapes and strangles her, burying the body in his back yard. Several years later, Timothy John Evans (Hurt) and wife Beryl (Geeson), along with their baby daughter, move into the building and are charmed by Christie, who claims all sorts of medical and legal knowledge. When Beryl learns she is pregnant, the young couple allows Christie to perform an abortion. Instead of performing an abortion Christie rapes and murders Beryl, then tells Timothy his wife died during the operation and suggests he go away and leave their daughter in his care. The none-too-bright Timothy does as he is told, and that same night Christie kills his daughter. Eventually Timothy goes to the police and confesses to murdering Beryl. At his trial he relates the facts but is condemned by perjured testimony from Christie and hanged. Christie goes on to take the lives of several other victims, including his own wife, before justice is served. Based on the historical Christie-Evans case, this painstakingly accurate film was shot in the building next door to the one where the actual killings took place. After filming was completed, the entire block, now renamed Ruston Close, was razed and council houses were built on the location. Attenborough is excellent as the banal, middle-class killer, and John Hurt is effective as usual as the man too dim to keep himself from being executed for a crime he didn't commit. 10 RILLINGTON PLACE is somber and frightening and omits the stylistic flourishes that marred director Richard Fleischer's previous excursion into the world of true crime, THE BOSTON STRANGLER. Fleischer directed two other suspense-filled films that same year, THE LAST RUN and SEE NO EVIL.