1971@50: 10 RILLINGTON PLACE

A middleaged man with a soft voice is making a woman feel comfortable with a cup of tea in advance of a procedure of some kind. A home made kit of rubber hoses, jars and such are on the table and he is explaining how he will use them, taking care to reassure her that the process is safe. Soon she puts down the tea and tells him she's ready. He moves in, covers her face with a homemade mask attached to a hose which will be feeding her gas from the mains. She struggles but he forces her and soon she is unconscious.  He had promised her an abortion but is about to sexually assault and strangle her. Next scene she's buried in the back garden. It's post war London, a grimy part of it, he's John Reginald Christie and he's part of history.

When a young couple with a newborn take his sublet upstairs rooms, Christie can't stop thinking about them and, small incident by small incident, they are embroiled in his next scheme which he plays by opportunity and involves more detail of his M.O. It's rough and it only gets rougher. By that I do mean towards some grisly images but more to grisly gaslighting and manipulation as Christie steers everyone around him into compliance.

Richard Attenborough in the title role stood back from the authority figures and farcical conspirators to adopt a role from living memory and present one of the scariest serial killers ever to own a screen. Yes, that includes the '90s rash of them which I'll get to. Why? Because, apart from a scant few moments when his menacing expression is overplayed, he looks at everything and everyone as either a target for the rages inside him or an accessory to escape its actions. When he brings a shouting match between his tenants to a halt it is with the quietest of whispers. If he smiles here or jokes there it's as though he is lifting them from a stockpot. While his accounts of himself are concealing fabrications he himself is not prey to his own fantasies. He is deliberation and control, id and ice. And he reaches out over the decades to deliver his horror just as he once did.

Judy Geeson stepped down from her young woman in progress in To Sir With Love and landed as a much more worldly thing, born and raised in the sooty terraces of the London blitz. She doesn't like what her life has dealt her but her street smarts guide her through. Her husband, John Hurt's Tim Evans, is crushingly self-deluding. Illiterate and clueless and possessed of far less native wisdom than his wife, he is a fallguy waiting to be approached with a quiet solution. The brittle tension between the two, their bickering and outright fighting have a anxiety-producing bluntness which makes their scenes in the cramped sub-let feel imprisoned and hopeless.

Richard Fleischer and his screenplay writer used the Ludovic Kennedy book of the same title as their source and a title card clearly claims that the dialogue is derived from official sources where possible. This is always a ploy when anything is presented as fiction but there are ploys and ploys. If you see any film that uses phrases like "real events" or "true story" you might well be getting a feast of researched substance or just Conjuring 3. In this case, however, you get a sober replay of the timeline tightened and finished with muscular skill. Fleischer was an allrounder in cinema but he had been here before when he delivered the impressive Boston Strangler. That had mixed procedural with an attempt at a psychological p.o.v. of  the killer and, while it plays more as a thriller, did its job with deadly focus. Rillington Place gives you the day to day of domestic atrocity and enough mounting atmospheric suffocation to lodge it permanently in your mind. It's not just the violent scenes; the courtroom cross examinations are serious and exacting, the scenes of officialdom are worrying and intimidating.

The 1990s saw a flood of serial killer films that flowed from the Oscar winning Silence of the Lambs and kept the pressure up for a whole decade. Each year there was a new one and an arms race ensued which saw the killers go from methodical criminals to humanoid aliens made of CGI and the filthiest ideas from the writers' rooms. Despite exceptions (Seven, The Ugly) these movies traded in the kind of sleaze that both encouraged and dissed their welcoming audiences. The monster is evil but you do like seeing his victims get it all the same but when the FBI bash through the door it's all, "finally!"Between the few peaks there are probably none that deserve your revisit (including Lambs - sorry, I just think it's over-manipulative garbage). And none of them have a gram of the power of this disturbing and exhausting film. If you want to see it (I hired it from Google Movies) either add an intermission at half time or have an oxygen tank handy. But you'll ultimately be glad you saw it.