Thirteen women

THE BOSTON STRANGLER

1968

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Written by Edward Anhalt (based on the book by Gerold Frank)

Spoilers: N/A

There are few movies where the mismatch between its reputational legacy and its apparently foundational influence feels more pronounced than with The Boston Strangler, to the extent I'm fairly convinced I must be missing something, though I really don't know what it'd be.  The serial killer film dates back more-or-less to the dawn days of the medium (one sees the self-describing 1909 two-reeler, "The Crimes of Diogo Alves," mentioned as the very first, though Diogo Alves was more of a prolifically-deadly bandit than what the term "serial killer" connotes; skipping ahead, Hitchcock's 1927 film The Lodger is at least "inspired by" Jack the Ripper, but now we've already arrived at "fictional maniac thriller"), and accordingly I don't want to attribute too much importance or novelty to The Boston Strangler.  But Goddamn, is it ever remarkable how much it already embodies The Serial Killer Procedural, as a genre unto itself and distinct from movies that just have serial killers in them, like Psycho and its knock-offs, right here in 1968, when the phenomenon of serial killing had only recently come to be recognized as a horrifying fixture of American society, and even the actual phrase, "serial killer," was still several years away from being coined.  It's shockingly modern, structurally-speaking, loping through procedural elements and then just dropping the killer right in our laps a little over halfway through, as something like a new protagonist, and to be caught only as a result of luck or his own fuck-ups—and with not so much as a hint of triumphalism, and frankly very little that indicates that our killer's pursuers, while certainly diligent, are even baseline-competent—and I think you could easily convince somebody you were describing it to that it actually came out in the 1990s.

It's exhilaratingly futuristic in this respect, and that isn't even the most noteworthy thing about it.  If you actually showed it to somebody, you'd never convince them it was from the 1990s; depending on how familiar they were with the filmmaking of the 1960s, I think there is a positive likelihood that—even not knowing a thing about this particular movie—they'd still correctly identify the exact year of its release, for I don't know if a more "of 1968" movie could even exist.

Some of that is still its content (it comes off like studio filmmaking just starting to get acclimated to the boiling water of a post-Code era—for instance, it effectively goes out of its way to have its third line of dialogue contain the word "semen," but I'm not sure anyone ever says "fuck" the whole time); but much more of it is form.  It's a movie of 1968-on-the-dot as far as form goes, very clearly the result of people who'd just had their minds blown by the sometimes-quite-wild experiments in split-screen film collage released to the public via the 1964 New York World's Fair and Expo 67 in Montreal, and they were chomping at the bit to put the techniques demonstrated in shorts like "Think," "To Be Alive!", "A Place To Stand," and "In the Labyrinth" to work, only now on behalf of a feature-length narrative in a "proper" movie.  The influence there is so direct that some Wikipedia editor just outright asserts that Norman Jewison and the director of today's subject, Richard Fleischer, had gone out to Expo 67 and subsequently declared these exact intentions to the public, despite the cited source being a contemporary compilation review of Expo 67's short films, that doesn't mention Jewison or Fleischer, and obviously wouldn't mention The Thomas Crown Affair or The Boston Strangler.  But while it'd been percolating since the World's Fair (see, e.g., Saul Bass's contributions to John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix as early as 1966), 1968 was the year of split-screen in narrative film, after which the technique never vanished but—I would say "unaccountably," but, clearly, it makes me giddier than it does most people—it did recede, I suppose consigned to the category of "time capsule fad" (if only cinematic fads in the 2020s ended this fucking quickly), the province of, essentially, just Brian De Palma as an actual tool in-and-of-itself (and even with him, not so much in a "multi-dynamic image technique" vein), or else people simply seeking to evoke the late 1960s, like Steven Soderbergh or Greg Berlanti.  But I might venture that The Boston Strangler must be the high-water mark of the high-water mark, boasting some extremely clear aims on how, why, and when it's using split-screen, and how, why, and when it drops it out of its visual vocabulary, replacing it with less au courant but arguably even crazier stuff instead.

We can attend to all that in due course.  For now, there's the narrative itself—though "narrative" suggests "a story," which I'm not sure it quite has, and one of those ways this movie feels so dizzyingly modern is just what an anti-story we get.  It is based, of course, on the true account of the Boston Strangler, identified here as Albert DeSalvo (eventually played by an actor of note, but I'd like to kick that can down the road too).  This is already a bold move: DeSalvo had not been at the time, and indeed never was, convicted of the strangling murders of thirteen women in Boston.  (Hell, this part is confusingly bold, considering that 20th Century Fox—which produced The Boston Strangler—was so afraid of defamation suits that they'd once demanded the names of the very-famously-convicted villains of Fleischer's previous true crime film Compulsion, Leopold and Loeb, be changed; and Loeb did, in fact, still sue them.)  Naturally, The Boston Strangler got knocked around in the year of its release for being irresponsible, and I can grant that the paleo-wokescolds of 1968 were wrong for the right reasons, though five decades and change later, due to advances in technology, we know that DeSalvo was, if not the Boston Strangler, at least a Boston Strangler.  (There is some indication that there may have been more than one.)

So we begin... in fact we begin with the Fox logo, uncharacteristically lacking its fanfare, because this is serious business, as the following "based on fact" title card underlines.  But we begin on June 14th, 1962, in a dark void where the only thing visible, for a moment, is a black-and-white television broadcasting a tickertape parade through Boston for the Mercury astronauts; the room the TV is in resolves itself (it's actually a composite shot) and the credits go, and the split-screen collage of what looks like a burglary could still be a normal "opening credits" gesture, but at the end we get the body of his elderly victim*, Anna Elza Slesers, jammed into the right side of the screen, and with the next shot, an exterior, the new image on the left expands to fill the Panavision frame.  It's a pretty canny way to begin—it's just weird, for starters, but weird in a very cold, observational, buttoned-down sort of way, uncomfortable might be the word—but it's already started nodding, formally, to what the movie will be about, which, besides murder, is media circuses, the difficulty of discerning objective truth, and the slow throttling of American optimism that had already started in the early 60s and had pretty much been completed by 1968 (eventually, there's the very faintest suggestion—well-calibrated enough to be productive—that it was the psychic dislocation of JFK's assassination that caused DeSalvo to get sloppy with his serial homicide).  And then Det. Phil DiNatale (George Kennedy) shows up and inquires about semen, and our sex murderer movie has pretty much already arrived, going full-speed.

Or at least as "full-speed" as The Boston Strangler gets in its first phase, which is largely cops and bureaucrats banging their heads on walls in pursuit of random eruptions of chaos, and even cutting them some slack for the challenge that presents, often doing so rather stupidly.  The jurisdictional problem between Boston and its suburbs is ameliorated, sort of, by the establishment of a "Strangler Bureau," overseen by John S. Bottomly (Henry Fonda), who openly tells the press this sucks and he doesn't want to do it, and is such a free-floating manifestation of mid-century lawyer liberalism slowly dissolving in a sea of urban decay—Fonda presumably being cast for this exact reason—that the movie, albeit possibly not intentionally on this point, throws you for a loop when it reveals, 100 minutes down the line, that he even has a home life (represented by Leora Dana; the real-life Bottomly, who of course had a home life, served as a consultant on the movie, and whatever else we may say about him, I think he comes off a good sport).

By this point, the movie's structure seems to have asserted itself: there are the murders, the principal recipient of split-screen (though the media attention and public paranoia surrounding them gets it too), then DiNatale and Bottomly sort of sullenly investigate, barely capable of figuring out where to start, with Edward Anhalt's screenplay getting entirely shaggy, and by no later than the third reel, it's pretty clearly making fun of its heroes.  For instance, the movie seems very aware that the general crackdown on "deviants" is sort of asinine: for one, it prompts feelings of annoyance that the police apparently can run down all the quality-of-life-degrading, nickel-and-dime sex criminals in Boston (the gropers, the telephonic perverts) who get swept up alongside more-or-less-innocent sex work aficionados and at-least-non-criminal philanderers, but until somebody starts killing people, they just don't bother; and for two, more troublingly, the film really rubs your face in the outright baffling decisions the cops keep making to hassle gay men while looking for a sex-driven murderer of women.  They're obviously grasping at straws, and it even starts to dawn on them that this is so—that, to say the absolute least, they're barking up the wrong tree—and so obviously this is the point that they bring in a fucking psychic (George Voskovec).  To my understanding there are vast swathes of this screenplay that amount to compressions, composites, or straight-up fictionalization, but this shit is at least true enough that you can go look and see yourself: psychic Peter Hurkos did work on the Strangler case.  I don't know if I'd call the movie conventionally thrilling in respect to its detective work, but it's endlessly interesting as an almost-primary document of 1962-1963 from the perspective of only 1968, scowling at what outright savages it perceives Americans to have been, just five years earlier, and there's the most persistent sense that when it's not scowling, the movie is dryly scoffing, merely being careful to not let its heroes hear it.  It is, anyway, obviously not "a comedy" but it is often funny in how subtly it's judging its story's participants.  (A thread of satire that the movie allows to remain almost invisibly subtle is the perplexing question of how the Strangler keeps getting invited into women's apartments, despite Strangler Panic; and the answer seems to be because the Strangler is a repairman, and every apartment in Boston is in such a profound state of collapse that the outright miracle of the owners actually sending over someone to fix them simply cannot be refused, even if you have what looks like a 50/50 chance of having the life choked out of you with pieces of your own shredded clothing.)

That's the "normal" part; but then we have those cinematic experiments that keep slicing through it.  It goes to my thesis that The Boston Strangler is accorded no particular greatness, because at least by 1993, Fleischer himself apparently thought of it as such a minor work in his filmography that he consigns it to the next-to-last chapter of his autobiography, a collation of errata called "Short Ends" (it's a celluloid filmmaking reference), where he devotes a few paragraphs to nothing the movie actually turned out to be, rather than just some anecdotes about its first screenwriter, Terence Rattigan, who delivered work so completely unusable that Fleischer expresses disgust that he still got paid.  (For example, Rattigan's draft included a Bat-computer that accused Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck of being the Strangler; to Fleischer's dismay, the movie Rattigan wrote, about thirteen women getting murdered five years ago, was a comedy.)  Thus I have no idea what was going through Fleischer's head, or editor Marion Rothman's head, or uncredited advisor Christopher Chapman's** head, as regards a film that sure looks a bit avant-garde, as twenty-five years later it was evidently beneath its director's own interest.  Obviously, it's aggravating, given my position as a huge Fleischer apologist.

But whatever the holes in Fleischer's memory, The Boston Strangler's split-screen is something worth being an apologist for.  Quantity is a quality all its own here, so describing every single split-screen sequence (I expect it has over a dozen) is right out, and I hope that describing them generally with some highlights does them justice, without accidentally flattening their variety (which is considerable).  The murders depicted thereby, at least, have a tendency towards being, actually, scenes of corpse discovery, where one frame might be sitting in the dark with the very barest edge-lighting of an object we don't recognize (but we can probably reliably determine by murder no. 3 or whatever), until others, going about their day, enter the room, or turn on the lights, and stumble upon the gruesome sight.  (The film peaks as horror, or at least its first phase does, with a woman screaming with no sound issuing from her mouth upon one of these discoveries.)

This is often very great, and the rest of it is even more ambitious, as Fleischer and company deliver mosaics detailing the fallout, which get creative, sometimes with more frames than you'll be able to count in the split-seconds they're still visible, sometimes just one frame, sitting abandoned inside the giant black rectangle; they peak (I think, but far less definitively) with a series of vertical frames arrayed within bars across the screen, insisting on the city-sized prison the Strangler has made.  The main thing I want to get at is that these split-screens do a lot of work, fulfilling several different functions: they bolster the suspense-thriller, by giving you the information that characters don't have, demanding that you wait with a cold, sick feeling in your stomach wondering when they're going to finally find out; they multiply perspective, sometimes alongside the media frenzy, but perhaps more often merely attempting to capture the social catastrophe the Strangler has inflicted upon a sprawling community; and they just plain and simply overwhelm you with visual data, pummeling you with random images while revealing nothing actionable, putting you, however tentatively, in the headspace of cops who, in the absence of any better ideas, go out and hit the gay bar.  (Fleischer and his cinematographer, Richard H. Kline, are doing some of the same stuff with the full frame, not exactly frames-within-frames but a lot of planes-within-planes in gratifyingly deep focus, and it's nicely filmed stuff throughout, allowing Fleischer his customary vertical impositions—a notable vertical imposition includes a corpse's feet—and with lighting choices, revolving around color, that sometimes veer away from the abiding mode of naturalism in understated but subliminally-woozy ways.)  Altogether, it's just really smart, in that the movie's goals with the split-screen are almost always identifiable ones beyond "it looks cool and modern," and they're carefully-fitted to their particular deployments (in fact, given that the last type in my taxonomy of the split-screen here is "intended to overwhelm," that's pretty smart in itself, since if it does not have an identifiable goal, you can just assume the goal is discombobulation in and of itself).

Honestly, I don't know if the movie's (very Fleischeresque) ambling gait had, in fact, "exhausted itself"; but either way, a little more than halfway through, DeSalvo shows up—disorientingly, we sort of just find ourselves teleported to his house, where this random dude is sitting around with his family—and, adding to that disorientation, DeSalvo is big-ass movie star, Tony Curtis, pressed into makeup that for some reason seems to be intended to make him look like Victor Mature (he does not, anyway, look any more like DeSalvo in it).  And The Boston Strangler gets much weirder now, as it shades into a psychological study upon the subject of the fictional DeSalvo, diagnosing him with a multiple personality disorder (at this point the movie becomes a primary document of how dumb 1968 was) and, when happenstance and mistakes get him caught for one crime, Bottomly engages in full-tilt psychic struggle with the amnesiac killer, something Fleischer dramatizes by way of a more-or-less complete stylistic break.  Out are the split-screens; in are jagged editing, genuinely freakish color/black-and-white composites, endless white voids, and the quasi-telepathic leaps Bottomly makes into DeSalvo's mind.  It's wild stuff, grounded enough to maintain itself as a legitimate psychothriller, and it's all the more destabilizing because this has not been a movie about performances, even Fonda's, but now it's very much about Curtis's, not so much as "a character" than as a series of increasingly-addled emotional states and the actor appearing to basically melt on camera.  DeSalvo gets caught early enough that I got worried that the movie was going to grind into courtroom tedium; I don't know if its second phase is "better," but the way it plays out instead is so unexpected that it's like a bolt of lightning hit the movie, and the thing had been crackling with jolts of "the unexpected" since its very first images.

Score: 9/10

*Besides "being women," the Boston Strangler's victims were rather demographically diverse.

**A great film editor, Rothman was at least one of the principals involved, because she'd kind of have to be—even though this was her "editing by" debut!—while Chapman was the director of "A Place To Stand."