Richard Fleischer's film initially presents itself as a police procedural, with deft use of split screen to give the narrative the feel of an examination. This never gets to the kind of documentary approach that William Friedkin was to use in The French Connection only three years later but is used so solidly and boldly that it has the feel of muscular reportage. When it shows different perspectives (either side of a door, say) that converge it is the pure climax building that Brian de Palma would perfect in his own split screen work.
I begin with something fairly technical as this is a film that makes a lot of how it was made. Fleischer's film takes a stance on the psychological origins of the criminality of Albert DeSalvo. It's one of many that have been proposed but its compulsion towards the film's fictive approach demanded a toughness in the telling and the pioneering split screen technique for time-saving and heightened tension claw back what might have let it down as a fanciful or sensationalist account. By the time we get to the tour de force that is the final confession we are ready for the interrogator to appear in DeSalvo's flashbacks as he poses questions and to return increasingly to the infinite white of the interrogation room in which DeSalvo is increasingly alienated and laid bare until only the truth will feel right. It's not an approach that survives the decades intact. Psychology is more prey to faddism than any other medical-related discipline and what we are witnessing here is a '60s version beefed up for the movies.
There are myriad other points of datedness like the treatment of the gay community and slurs used (by cops, apart from anyone else). For balance, the gay suspect is given depth and takes some of the grittiness of the rest of the character range in service of the dialogue. While he is accompanied by a pair of campy characters they appear in their element rather than smeared with othering sleaze. He himself is not remotely camp. Thinking of it just now, I'd say that the sleaze and the othering is less on show here than it is in William Friedkin's much later Cruising where it is used to build a kind of hell dimension.
This brings us to the character of DeSalvo himself and the casting considered daring at the time. Many rising stars were considered for the role of the infamous figure but the one locked in was the blue-eyed former pretty boy glamour star Tony Curtis. Curtis hadn't just done fluff to that point (Sweet Smell of Success alone will cure that impression) but for him to step into such reviled shoes was a hazard. From his first scene, about halfway through the timeline, he quashes every fear along those lines. He's a good dad, watching the funeral of Bostonian JFK on tv while his wife cooks dinner and is patient with his young daughter's questions. A sudden compulsion gets him to his feet and he mentions a check he needs to do on a furnace he was repairing. From that point, we see the projected other, the calculating, manipulative and stone faced killer whose eyelids close in pleasure as he headlocks one of his victims. Some Like it Hot, this ain't.
From this point the procedural tone changes into a psychological study with the subject moving into further crimes and his nominated nemesis, the head of the task force and the increasing presence of the psychiatrist called in for consultation. When these converge the screen doesn't just split to save time it swings between the comforting reality of the Henry Fonda-controlled world of law and order and DeSalvo's condition. A scene in which DeSalvo sees his wife as a distant blur when she is only about a metre away is still profoundly disturbing. Then we head to the inescapable chaos of the finale which, with just enough control at the helm, would feel like the kind of psychedelic experiences that the culture was rich with if it weren't so deeply based in hard and weird violence.
The Boston Strangler is not the first serial killer movie. It's not even the first one about the Boston Strangler. But it is a fascinating precursor of the theme that turned into its own genre in the 1990s. Serial killer is a '70s term that was formed from a number of investigations by the FBI. It entered popular parlance with infamous figures like Son of Sam or Ted Bundy. Through the '80s the serial killer was presented as a true crime boogeyman who probably lived on your block and you wouldn't know it until his garotte was squeezing at your throat. The sense of the unstoppable, nihilistic threat gained traction until the movies started up, the highest profile of which at the start of the '90s was Silence of the Lambs.
While I personally regard this film as a glossy exploitation flick that doesn't mind othering sexual diversity, I'll have to own its influence. This is where the rule book of the genre was presented in Oscar winning glitz and for the next ten years ruled its corner of crime/horror cinema. You had a bad guy who was a genius but beyond redemption whose crimes or commentary on those of others was expert and unsettling. And you got an arms race of kills of ever more incredibly engineered complexity. And you got othering, lots and lots and lots of othering. As the perps became more repulsively bizarre in order to outdo the last movie an element of sleaze rises whereby audiences are invited to cheer along as privileged young women or other hoity toity victims were tortured and killed as they surely deserved to be before the FBI breaks in and plugs the monster at which they could all switch back and feel the warmth of law and order. With few exceptions serial killer movies were exploitation films. Even Seven, which I admire, is not above the cliches (but if you can locate the great NZ title The Ugly you're in for a fine iconoclastic time as all of those cliches are deconstructed).
If there is sleaze in The Boston Strangler it is mild by comparison with what was to come. Even the depths of the '80s slasher craze (which show spree rather than serial killing) was no match for dreck like Kiss the Girls or The Bone Collector. And by the time of 2000s absurd The Cell (a kind of psychiatric Fantastic Voyage) there was really nothing left to do but striking visuals. The Boston Strangler provided some of those itself but they were, as discussed, as pragmatic as stylish.
It pays its own tribute to exploitation but affords so little viewer pleasure to the crimes. It engendered nothing like the craze that Silence of the Lambs did, most serial murder titles like The Zodiac killings might have been made from similar cloth to Strangler but they were made for the drive-in and the grind house, having none of the industry power of the Fleischer film. Was this just for lack of Oscars? Silence of the Lambs hogged them in its year, after all, and rendered its massive sleaze respectable. It's not as though the general public only got a taste for nasty crime stories.
While I will admit this is not the cause, one thing stopped me while watching last night and it is something I never saw until Simon Reynolds' The Ugly. DeSalvo catches sight of himself in a mirror mid-assault and for a moment he can't look away. It ties in with the film's pop-psychiatry pretensions but it nevertheless holds its own power and it reminded me of something. In the midst of my own fascination with serial killers (yes, in the '90s and I saw as many of the movies as I could) I read an interview with Danny Rolling who said that after the first time, from that point on he only saw a stranger when he looked in the mirror. In the Boston Strangler it's a moment wherein the strength of the execution transcends the intention to reveal a moment of horror that everyone in every seat in every cinema that showed it recognised.
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