UK Release Date: 18-07-2007
UK Certificate: 12A
Director: Robert Lynn
Country: UK
Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment

The British have always loved a good murder, and this unass­um­ing little film from 1962 falls happily into a national cinema­tic trad­ition of tab­loid-style murder movies con­centrating on the seedy back­grounds to famous homi­cides. And none was better known than the killing of faded music hall performer ‘Belle Elmore’ by her hen­pecked husband Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen at 38 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway.

The obvious familiar­ity of the mater­ial to contemporary audiences is attested to by the way the film begins in medias res – with Crippen and his black-clad fancy woman in the dock (this is one of the film’s few deviations from known fact; Ethel le Neve was tried separately) and a ‘chorus’ of goggle-eyed working-class girls lapp­ing up the sens­at­ional details – before pro­ceed­ing to reiter­ate the story through a series of flashbacks. And these – in con­trast to the rel­at­ive flat­ness of the court­room scenes – are com­pell­ingly well done, with excell­ent perform­ances from Donald Pleasence and Coral Browne as the Crippens and the young Samantha Eggar (in her first film role) as le Neve.

What’s particularly interesting is that the film shies away from vio­lence (the murder, if such it was, takes place off screen, and the gory details of the dis­mem­ber­ment and dis­posal of the body are rel­eg­ated to the merest hints of court­room evid­ence), but – caught per­haps on a cusp of post-kitchen sink social change – is sur­pris­ingly frank in matt­ers of sex­ual­ity. Belle is, as well as a blowsy, over­bearing bully, a woman of large, unsat­isfied sexual app­etites which disgust her perm­an­ently detum­es­cent hus­band, who pro­jects his own fant­asies onto the ‘pure’ le Neve.

Ultimately, it’s this sexual dys­funct­ion at the heart of the rel­at­ion­ship that leads to every­thing that follows; there’s no moust­ache-twirl­ing vill­ainy here, just the tragic con­seq­uences of a bad marri­age, and Donald Pleas­ence’s per­form­ance (in what, sadly, was a rare lead­ing role) is a model of unders­tate­ment in which the actor’s beady eyes and mousy demean­our are used to brill­iant, creepy, sym­path­etic effect. All in all, this minor off­er­ing in the Brit­ish horror cycle of the late 50s and early 60s is well worth seeking out.