10 RILLINGTON PLACE. Columbia Pictures, UK/US, 1971. Richard Attenborough, Judy Geeson, John Hurt, Pat Heywood, Isobel Black. Director: Richard Fleischer.

   For a serial killer movie, Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place is rather subdued. There’s comparatively little screen-time violence and there is almost no blood or gore. What there is, however, is psychological violence of the worst kind.

   Richard Attenborough gives a chilling performance as psycho-sexual deviant John Christie, a real-life criminal responsible for the strangulation murders of numerous women in late 1940s and early 1950s. He’s an everyman, struggling to survive in post-war London, and operates under the radar. Nobody, except perhaps his long-suffering wife, seems to suspect that there might be anything amiss in the building that Christie lets out for renters.

   Enter a working-class married couple with a young infant daughter. Timothy Evans (John Hurt) and his wife, Beryl (Judy Geeson) are just trying to make ends meet. He drinks. She stays home. They fight. But overall, it’s a decent marriage. Until Christie decides that he is going to make Beryl his next victim. In a dastardly act of manipulation, Christie finds a most shocking way to get Beryl alone and vulnerable, before proceeding to strangle her to death.

   What comes next is even more unnerving. Realizing that Evans is a simple illiterate with few friends, Christie manipulates him into leaving town, telling him that Beryl died accidentally. Evans, doe-eyed and unaware of the evil enveloping him, complies and seals his fate. Eventually, he is arrested for the murder of his wife and is hanged by the authorities for it.

   Attenborough disappears entirely into the role. His Christie is less salacious than Anthony Hopkins’ scenery-chewing (pun intended) Hannibal Lecter, but perhaps even more vicious. Apparently, Attenborough took the role of Christie in significant part because of the film’s implicit anti-death penalty stance. Evans, after all, was truly an innocent man, a victim of both Christie and a judicial system unable to look past his social origins and lack of intelligence.

   As you might have suspected, 10 Rillington Place is an undoubtedly bleak film, largely bereft of daylight, either in the literal or metaphorical sense. Everyone lives in a fog of despair and depression. This was, after all, the age of austerity. Britain was trying to get back on its feet after the Second World War and the subsequent loss of empire.

   There was massive social dislocation in postwar London, with many persons left without families, spouses, or social support systems. Christie, the film implies, seems to have taken advantage of the weak, the lonely, and the trusting in the worst possible way. Fortunately, he eventually did get caught and face justice. But not before shocking many middle-class Britons with his horrendous crimes.

   Fleischer is a talented director who worked in many genres over a long career in Hollywood. Some may consider him an auteur. Others, most certainly would not and feel that he was skilled journeymen, who adapted with the times and reinvented himself as his career required. Whatever the case, his direction here is steady and immersive. He certainly gets the most out of his actors. This is particularly true for Attenborough and Hurt, whose professionalism lends the film its necessary gravitas. Indeed, there’s nothing particularly exploitative here.

   On the contrary, it’s perhaps too antiseptic, distant even, at times. A movie happy to show you what happened, without trying to overly capitalize on your emotional response. In fact, there’s not much – if any – music or overly intrusive ambient noise in the film. What we have instead is a quiet, claustrophobic world manipulated by a sociopath who learned how to lie and to manipulate his way into far too many lives.

   The film is able to make you feel this intellectually, even more than emotionally. It’s a different kind of serial killer film. One that persons who usually don’t like that particular subgenre of crime film might find worth a look.