10 Rillington Place (1971) - film review

In 1948, Tim and Beryl Evans, a young married couple, move into a top floor flat at 10, Rillington Place, Ladbroke Grove, London.  They have a one-year-old daughter and find it difficult to make ends meet, thanks to Tim’s illiteracy and learning difficulties.  When Beryl discovers that she is pregnant with a second child, she decides to have an abortion.  She cannot believe her good fortune when her ground floor neighbour, the amiable Mr Christie, reveals that he was once a trained doctor and has the wherewithal to provide her with an abortion, at no cost.  Tim reluctantly agrees, and whilst he is out at work, Christie gives Beryl the treatment.  Unfortunately, Christie is not a doctor but a psychopath who has already raped and murdered two women.  Beryl will be his third victim...

In stark contrast to the heavy stylisation of his previous psycho-thriller The Boston Strangler (1968), Richard Fleischer’s next foray into the genre is a much more sombre and realistic affair, and more effective for this reason.   10 Rillington Place is a fairly accurate dramatisation of possibly the most notorious cause célèbre to take place in Britain in the Twentieth Century.  It was the wrongful execution of a simple-minded Welshman, Timothy Evans, and the subsequent conviction of John Christie that fuelled the polemic over the safeness of capital punishment which lead to its abolition in the UK in 1965.

Although it received mixed reviews when it was first released, 10 Rillington Place is now regarded as a superlative example of both the drama-documentary and psycho-thriller, and is easily one of Richard Fleischer’s best films.  The dreary confined sets (which include rooms adjacent to those in which the real-life Christie performed his horrific deeds) and restrained cinematography create a loveless claustrophobic environment within which all of the protagonists, including Christie himself, are hopelessly trapped.

In one of the defining performances of his career, Richard Attenborough is both chilling and strangely sympathetic as the psychopath John Christie.  At first sight, it seems incredible that the mild-mannered man that Attenborough portrays so convincingly could hurt anyone.  This is what makes the murder sequences so shocking – not because they are particularly violent, but because they are so unexpected, so at odds with Christie’s seemingly inoffensive persona.  The film effectively makes the point that evil is not always easy to identify from outward signs and that we should never rush to judgement.  It was John Christie’s apparent ordinariness that allowed him to get away with murder, whilst an emotionally unstable young Welshman ended up being caught in the net of justice, and paid the price.

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