.

In the 1968 movie The Boston Strangler Tony Curtis plays Albert DeSalvo, a man who has brutally abused and killed thirteen women. The film is a tense police procedural that all comes to a head when Henry Fonda’s heroic investigator John Bottomly dramatically forces a full emotional confession from the previously taciturn and measured psychopath.

This is not a remake of that film. They have dropped the the common determiner from the title (there are interesting reasons why the the does not fit here) but they have also dropped any pretence. The original movie, made just four years after the real life events it depicts occurred, did largely follow the contemporary understanding of the case, albeit with a Hollywood spin, but there are many details that did not feature. Some of this has emerged recently but others elements were apparent at the time and this new film explores the history around why they weren’t part of the narrative. The confession that ended the ‘68 movie does feature again but in a very different way.

It isn’t that Boston Strangler purports to tell the truth; there is still much that remains conjecture with these murders, most of which are still officially classed as unsolved sixty years later, but it does aim to share many previously disregarded facts.

The first of these, as with the whole film, revolves around the woman who worked to unearth these details at the time. There are a few characters that appear in both movies; including DeSalvo and Bottomly, but completely absent from the former is journalist Loretta McLaughlin who was the very first to connect the different attacks as potentially being the work of one man. This key discovery is attributed to the crusading male police officers in the Curtis film. Any women in that version are wives or victims. This inevitably gives the movie a strong feminist theme, not only in celebrating a woman who had otherwise been written out of popular history but also in the struggle she has in a male dominated world. This might even be laid on a little heavy at the beginning but as her skill as an investigative reporter eclipses the novelty of her being pulled off the paper’s lifestyles desk to work the assignment, so her story becomes more than one of a woman triumphing over work place sexism. It is good to see her talent and drive change attitudes and challenge prejudice and there is a nice role reversal in it being the husband left at home keeping the family together but in the end the story is bigger than this. It is worth noting though, that every time we have seen it where the reporter or the cop or the lawyer is a man, the woman he neglects always forgives him in the end because that is her job; to support her husband. That isn’t quite how it pans out here so there is still some double standard.

The other truths this film exposes, and probably the more significant ones are around the validity of the police investigation and that dramatic confession and it is this that makes Boston Strangler a compelling watch. The fact that it is Keira Knightly doggedly trying to solve the crime and find the killer rather than Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman or Mark Ruffalo and Jack Gyllenhaal is ultimately neither here nor there. (Okay, maybe that’s not true but it might have been with Viola Davis, Nicole Kidman, Angela Bassett or Cate Blanchett so it’s not a gender thing. To be fair to Knightly, she is good but I wouldn’t say her performance has power and is probably more authentic for it.)

Having cited those male actors, I am put in mind of people who directed them and it is hard not to think this wouldn’t have been a better film under Fincher, DePalma, Friedkin or Siegel. These are the inevitable comparisons they are inviting here which is tough. Even judged purer on its own merits Boston Strangler does still leave some aspects undeveloped. There seems to be a thread around how McLaughlin’s quest for the truth may have partly been the very thing that helped buried it, and it starts to investigate whether as a journalist she is more interested in unearthing the story or getting the scoop, but none of these are taken to any conclusion.

In the end though, Boston Strangler is an intriguing and well put together film and it works as a fascinating counterpoint to its famous cinematic predecessor. Taken together these movies paint a strong picture of how the press, police work, cinema and gender politics have all moved on between then and now. This might not be The Boston Strangler then but it’s our Boston Strangler.

.

Boston Strangler is on Disney+

.