10 RILLINGTON PLACE: No, Grandpa, No!

10 RILLINGTON PLACE (Blu-ray)

1971 / 108 min

Alliance Entertainment

Review by Mr. Bonnie, the Butcher🙀

I should probably preface this review by admitting I haven’t seen a lot of the films in Richard Attenborough’s lengthy career. I’m mostly familiar with the more iconic ones, including The Great Escape, The Sand Pebbles and The Flight of the Phoenix. But hey, at least I know his legacy extends beyond sharing the screen with dinosaurs. 

Still, Attenborough’s unnerving performance in 10 Rillington Place threw me for a loop. He plays outwardly congenial landlord John Christie, and in the opening scene, offers to cure a neighbor’s bronchitis with a gaseous medicine he’s concocted. Instead, she’s rendered unconscious. Afterwards, Christie rapes and strangles her (and maybe not in that order!), then buries the corpse in the building’s community garden. 

Jesus Christ!

Christie is immediately revealed to be a serial killer and 10 Rillington Place is based on a true story. His next victims are the financially struggling Evans family, who move into one of the flats in his building. Timothy (John Hurt) and Beryl (Judy Geeson) have a baby daughter and are continuously fighting, compounded when she announces she’s pregnant again. That’s when Christie, feigning expertise, offers his surfaces to abort the pregnancy. Instead, he murders her, but tells Timothy that she died during the procedure.

"What happened to the Twinkies I stashed here?"

Timothy wants to go to the police, but Christie argues that both of them are complicit and would go to jail. Not being too bright to begin with (and unable to read or write), Timothy agrees to remain silent and go away for awhile to avoid questions over Beryl’s whereabouts. And while he’s away, Christie kills their baby. Making matters worse, Timothy is suspected of both murders, which Christie exacerbates when testifying as a witness in the subsequent trial.

Though tastefully handled, this is a grim, disturbing film, largely due to Attenborough. Not only are Christie’s methods horrifying, the actor depicts him as perverted, quietly psychotic, remorseless and indifferent to the suffering he inflicts. Like Henry Fonda playing a sadistic hired gun in Once Upon a Time in the West and Denzel Washington’s turn as murderously corrupt cop Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Attenborough’s performance is a revelation. Who knew he had it in him?

It’s amusing to imagine viewers who only know him as kindly grandpa John Hammond in Jurassic Park or Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street getting an eyeful of this one. Narratively and aesthetically, 10 Rillington Place is bleak enough as it is, but Attenborough makes the film a memorably horrifying experience you won’t be able to unsee.