The Boston Strangler [1968] Tony Curtis

The Boston Strangler (1968)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062755/

The Boston Strangler is a 1968 film based on the true story of the Boston Strangler. It was directed by Richard Fleischer, and stars Tony Curtis as Albert DeSalvo, the strangler, and Henry Fonda as John S. Bottomly, the chief detective now famed for obtaining DeSalvo's confession.


Tony Curtis ... Albert DeSalvo
Henry Fonda ... John S. Bottomly
George Kennedy ... Det. Phil DiNatale
Mike Kellin ... Julian Soshnick
Hurd Hatfield ... Terence Huntley
Murray Hamilton ... Det. Frank McAfee
Jeff Corey ... John Asgeirsson
Sally Kellerman ... Dianne Cluny
William Marshall ... Atty. Gen. Edward W. Brooke
George Voskovec ... Peter Hurkos
Leora Dana ... Mary Bottomly
Carolyn Conwell ... Irmgard DeSalvo
Jeanne Cooper ... Cloe
Austin Willis ... Dr. Nagy
Lara Lindsay ... Bobbie Eden


The first part of the film shows the police investigation, with some examples of the seedier side of Boston life, including Homosexuality and promiscuity in the adult quarters of the city. The second part shows the apprehension of DeSalvo. The intention of Officer Bottomly and the law is to answer the question presented in the film's famous print ad: 'Why did 13 women open their doors to the Boston Strangler?'

“One by one the victims fell, each death more gruesome than the last….” The “true horror story” of The Boston Strangler kept many women off the streets at night. Today, the faithful horror viewing population can still relive the terror in this epic film. This film is an important film for all horror fans and film students. Whether it’s the film’s landmark shooting style, the controversial subject matter, or Tony Curtis’s finest performance on celluloid, you should be hanging your head in shame if you haven’t seen this film already.

Perhaps the most obvious of all the film’s attributes is the tremendously original shooting style. When The Boston Strangler is on the screen, the screen splits into anywhere from 2-5 screens so the viewer can see the Strangler ringing the doorbell, the stairs he’s going to walk up, the door to the apartment, and the victim in the apartment at the same time. While it seems as though this would be confusing, it is spectacularly done. Perhaps the most haunting scene is when you see a split screen of a roommate dead on the floor in her bedroom (with the door closed) and her roommates having a very casual conversation right outside her door, unaware that their roommate is dead. I would bet that most people would feel a chill up their spine in that scene.

The second attribute that deserves a mention is the controversial issues this film brought up. This film caused quite a stir with the censors as it dealt with the most horrible sexual crimes you could possibly imagine in explicit detail (there is an explicit discussion where it was revealed that one of the victims was raped with a wine bottle). Though I thought the latest sex-crime flick, From Hell, was horrifying, this movie is still miles past it in the “balls” department. Consider that this was a simpler time where murders such as this were never even considered to be exploited by Hollywood, coupled with the fact that this movie was made only a few years after the actual events took place, and it’s a no-brainer to realize that this movie has some serious balls.

Finally, Tony Curtis deserves more than a mention. Known as a “light and fun” actor, Tony Curtis would probably be the furthest from a casting director’s mind when trying to come up with a suitable actor to play The Boston Strangler. However “mis-casted” he might have been, he did an absolutely phenomenal job. Much like Bill Pullman in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, this is the one movie that showed Tony Curtis’s true acting ability. This was truly a marvelous risk taken by the director.

This is a film based on the world-famous Boston Strangler killings, which occurred between 1962 and 1964. During this time thirteen women were raped and strangled, the item of strangulation always being left tied in a bow at their necks. Coming from oft genre-associated hand Richard Fleischer, who had directed the likes of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Doctor Dolittle (1967), the film is an often impressive one.

Rather than concentrate on the killings themselves, Fleischer pushes them to the background and instead focuses on the social reaction to the crimes. In these scenes, Fleischer makes inventive use of split-screen opticals to portray multiple points-of-view and citywide reactions at the same time. Equally distinctive are the flashbacks scenes as Henry Fonda pushes Tony Curtis’s De Salvo to remember, which combine both black-and-white and colour film.

Certainly, the film varies widely from the details of the actual case. In particular, the scene where the police finally pin the crime on De Salvo by seeing his wounded hand in a chance encounter a lift is an entire fiction. In fact, De Salvo had been placed in a psychiatric institution after conducting a rape. A fellow inmate suspected De Salvo might be the Boston Strangler and De Salvo then confessed to the crimes to his lawyer, F. Lee Bailey. Although here, for reasons unclear, the character of F. Lee Bailey has been entirely written out of the film. Furthermore, the climactic interview scenes, giving De Salvo a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder and where the final breakthrough causes him to snap altogether, never happened that way in real life – De Salvo willingly confessed and seemed proud of the crimes. Henry Fonda’s portrayal of Bottomly also makes him seem much more heroic that was actually the case, whereas Bottomly was widely regarded by those in the know as being a near incompetent bumbler. (Among other things, when Bottomly obtained De Salvo’s confession the questions he asked were, under thorough examination of the transcripts, often seen as leading and placing information in De Salvo’s mouth).

It is important to remember that, as the film accurately portrays, De Salvo was never actually criminally convicted for any of the Boston Strangler killings. Rather, F. Lee Bailey negotiated a plea bargain in return for De Salvo’s confession and De Salvo was instead jailed for life on charges of sexual assault and robbery. After serving six years of his jail term, De Salvo was stabbed and killed by a fellow inmate in 1973. Several years after the incident, a number of speculations emerged that De Salvo was not actually the Boston Strangler – many of the details of his confession do not match and he later recanted his confession anyway – and it was believed that he was an egotist who sought the notoriety of the crime. In 2001, De Salvo’s family in conjunction with the family of victim Mary Sullivan petitioned the courts to have De Salvo’s body exhumed so that his DNA could be tested against the Sullivan crime scene. The results showed a negative match, meaning that there was no corroborating evidence, outside of De Salvo’s retracted confession, that he was the Boston Strangler.

What is also interesting, if the investigation shown in the film is an accurate portrayal, is the primitiveness of police detection methods with the success of the operation appearing to owe more to chance than criminology. In one scene, the police are urged to: “Bring in the people you’d usually ignore – the peepers, the men’s room queens, the exhibitionists, the subway jostlers, the dirty word specialists.” At another point, the film refers to ‘faggots’ and shows the police hounding a gay man. Such typing of all deviance from the heterosexual norm alongside a serial rapist/strangler says interesting things about how the times viewed alternative sexual mores.