In 1949, the Evanses (Judy Geeson, John Hurt) move into a London apartment but have no idea that the landlord (Richard Attenborough) is a serial killer. The case of John Christie, who killed six or eight people during and after WWII, was so bungled by the authorities that it helped abolish the death penalty in Britain. This film borrows writer Ludovic Kennedy’s interpretation of what really happened and is told in a straight-forward fashion. A highly believable psychological portrait of Christie and his victims thanks to Attenborough’s intentionally low-key performance and, eerily enough, the fact that the film was shot at the actual site of the murders.
1971-Britain. 111 min. Color. Produced by Leslie Linder, Martin Ransohoff. Directed by Richard Fleischer. Screenplay: Clive Exton. Book: Ludovic Kennedy. Cast: Richard Attenborough (John Christie), Judy Geeson (Beryl Evans), John Hurt (Timothy Evans), Pat Heywood, Andre Morell, Bernard Lee.
Trivia: The Christie case was also treated in a 2016 miniseries, Rillington Place.
Last word: “So Leslie Linder said to me, ‘Would you like to come to London and make the picture? It’ll be a small picture, very small budget, but I’d love you to do it.’ And I said, well, I’m packing my bags and I’ll be over in a couple of weeks. So I did make that picture, and it was again a very wild gyration in my career, from making ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’, which is the most expensive picture that Hollywood had made, to ’10 Rillington Place’, which was made for well under a million dollars, which is extremely small”. (Fleischer, Henderson’s Film Industries)
