So the other night, I got the 1968 movie The Boston Strangler in the mail from Netflix. I don’t remember putting the movie in my queue, but I know it must’ve been forever ago. I think I may have read a magazine sidebar about good serial killer movies, way back when Zodiac came out. Strangler is not a perfect movie—it’s got that weird, let-it-all-hang-out 60s-70s pacing, for one thing—but it’s a sad reminder of how unimaginative most studio movies are today.
There’s all kinds of camera play here; multiple angles are shown on the screen at once, a couple of freaky scene changes happen where a person’s body becomes a portal into the next scene, and there’s some downright expressionistic tricks with light and color and editing. And I don’t know if I’ve seen Tony Curtis in anything but embarrassingly earnest talk show appearances in a very long time, but he’s super creepy-great as Albert DeSalvo, the serial killer who had all of Boston on edge in the early 60s. It’s enough to make one wish that someone could convince Tom Cruise to play a mass murderer. Like Curtis’s DeSalvo, I bet it’d turn out to be the role of a lifetime.
The movie doesn’t really seem to have a perspective; it switches back and forth from the cops to the killer, like it’s not exactly sure who it wants to follow, but everything comes together in a big way for the finish, which is a great ending for a true crime movie. I prefer Zodiac, but Strangler is a great, creepy story that clearly informed some of what Fincher was doing with Zodiac. This YouTube clip doesn’t demonstrate fully how crazy the visuals can get, but if you like the clip, you’ll probably love the movie:
Maybe it would be better to convince someone to cast him as one. Cruise seems more than willing to do more serious work like Magnolia and Collateral.
Curtis was very disappointed that he wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for his work in The Boston Stangler especially after the whole town (Hollywood) assured him that he would be and after he’d been nominated for a Golden Globe.
Who was nominated for an Oscar that year? Alan Arkin (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter), Alan Bates (The Fixer), Ron Moody (Oliver!), Peter O’Toole (The Lion in Winter), and the Oscar went to Cliff Robertson (Charly).
#2 It was a good year for movies.
When I first started reading this post I thought it was going to be about the portrayal of homosexuals in the film being over the top. After seeing Milk I think the portrayals in 60s films of gay people are somewhat O.K. and it demonstrates how “straights” looked down on them then (as many still do today).
If I were him I would have strangled that douche who took my parking space.