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Three years after "the Boston strangler" ,Richard Fleischer brilliantly succeeds in transferring to the screen a horrible true story.The two movies do not look like each other though."Boston strangler" was spectacular,making the best use of the split screen I've ever seen."10 RP" is an austere bleak work ,all the more disturbing than its style is bald.Richard Attenborough(an extraordinary performance,on a par with Peter Lorre's"M") portrays one of those serial killers in the first half of last century.Two good examples :Landru ,whose character Charlie Chaplin used in "Monsieur Verdoux " and Claude Chabrol in his eponymous movie,or "Doctor Petiot" who was doing on a small scale (killing Jews to despoil them) what the Nazis were doing on a large one. Christie ,Landru and Petiot are close relatives.They seem harmless,mediocre little men .Not the serial killer we meet in today's thrillers.And Christie is given the adequate treatment by his director:the poor house,the crummy flats ,the pubs ,the no-future of an uneducated generation (Fleischer lays stress on the fact that Tim cannot read and write ).This illiteracy is partly responsible for Tim's unfair revolting fate.

Fleischer's style is plain;the trial scenes,when any director would have his actors overact is a lesson a lot of the current artists should pay attention to.The hanging could not be spookier.One cannot help but think that the last lines about Tim on the screen are a bit ironical.

Matching Attenborough's awesome portrayal,is John Hurt's remarkable Tim:definitely not Gregory Peck as his wife thinks,macho but pitiful,a not very handsome whining lad who cannot hold a candle to his maleficent owner.

You should see "the Boston strangler" and "10 Rillington place" one after the other

Slow, deliberate, creepy, grimy, grim, repressed.

The recreation of one of Britains most famous serial killers crimes and the impact on one family in particular is nothing if not sober in tone.

Director Richard Fleischer had recent "true crime" form with his version of The Boston Strangler 1968, Fleischer shoots with hand-held cameras under realistically dim lighting, creating an intimate close up portrait of the house and its occupants.

As such the performances have to match, and do. Richard Attenboroughs in particular. His portrayal of Christie will come as a shock to those who only know him from the Jurassic Park series or Miracle on 34th Street. John Hurt and Judy Geeson as the young, ill-educated Evans couple do well though Hurts accent is a little wayward early on.

There's a whole host of films from the great decade that was the seventies that have gone on to not get the praise that they so rightly deserve, and if one were to make a list of those films; 10 Rillington Place would feature in a prominent position. The film follows the true story of serial killer John Christie, who murdered a series of women in the late forties. His modus operandi is to murder his victims with gas, shortly before having sex with the corpse. Despite this shocking premise, the film always sees fit to focus more on the reality of the situation than the actual murders themselves. Despite not being graphic, this actually makes the film more shocking as we are constantly reminded of the things that go on behind what people allow us to know about ourselves. The murderer in this story is just a normal man. A nice man, in fact. People trust him, and even respect him; yet despite all this, the man is a stone cold killer. The realistic way that the story is approached, combined with the fact that these are real events ensures that 10 Rillington Place is a morbidly fascinating watch.

Richard Attenborough takes the lead role and does fantastically well with it. His calm mannerisms and nonthreatening demeanour clash well with the underlying evil of his character and we really can believe that this man is a maniac. The film was made in the United Kingdom, I'm proud to say, and this is obvious throughout. UK films have a certain atmosphere about them, and although I didn't know that this movie was homegrown before watching it; it soon became apparent. This style bodes well with the theme of the film, as it's downtrodden and makes sure that the film is firmly planted in the land in which the story took place. The idea of an innocent man not only going down, but being killed, for a crime he did not commit is shocking and the cold way that it is presented in this film reflects the fact that it actually happened and also gives it more of a degree of shock. On the whole, 10 Rillington Place is a film that shouldn't be missed by anyone. It's not all that well known, but this is unfair considering the quality of it and I wont hesitate to recommend this movie to people in the future.

I saw this in a theatre here in the United States in 1971, when I was eleven years old. I'd seen Richard Attenborough as the circus master in DOCTOR DOLITTLE and I wonder if I'd sold my mother on taking me to this one because I knew the name Richard Attenborough. In any case, this movie burned itself into my brain immediately and, for the next three decades I told many of my fellow American film-buffs that there was this British movie no American had ever heard about that was more blood-curdling than PSYCHO. I suspect the obviously limited release of this movie in the United States had something to do with the fact that one of its chief selling-points was that it was based on a murder not well-known to Americans. The Christie murders were famous in Britain, and, in fact, historic because of their effect on the elimination of the UK's death penalty. But the distributors in America had to market this on its qualities as a thriller. Attenborough had yet to make his name a household word here, GHANDI being about ten years in the future and the probable difficulty with accents couldn't have made people who did see it very eager to recommend it. On top of this, the movie is not a thriller but a truly disturbing exploration of evil. It makes the roughly contemporary FRENZY look like a sitcom. Movies became more realistic in the late sixties and early seventies than they have been before or since. 10 RILLINGTON PLACE may be the most realistic movie about a serial killer ever made. It may not be the scariest, but it's the most memorable. I haven't forgotten it, and I haven't seen it in more than a generation. It is a mournful movie for serious viewing.

10 Rillington Place is more than a classic film. It is frequently referred to whenever the call for the death penalty is made in Britain. The notorious miscarriage of justice i.e the hanging of Timothy Evans, an immature half-wit, for the murder of his wife and child when it is almost universally accepted that they perished at the hands of John "Reg" Christie, is one which will always haunt the British legal system. When Christie was found guilty and hanged as a serial killer of women, the body of Evans was exhumed and reburied in consecrated ground but this did nothing to hide the embarrassment of those who supported the death penalty.

The film itself is a dark and brooding masterpiece which depicts life in post-war London perfectly. The grim, dirty, rain-washed Rillington Place in Notting Hill was a seedy side-street which housed the poor but largely respectable families which had survived the blitz. John Christie had moved down from the North to find work in the capital but ill-health and a penchant for petty crime prevented him from being successful.

Richard Attenborough plays the downtrodden but curiously arrogant Christie to perfection. His voice almost a whisper as he lauds it over London's underclasses. In fact Christie was not a landlord, as many believe, he was merely a tenant who fancied himself to be a landlord and acted accordingly. He also dreamed of being a doctor, with devastating consequences. His treatment of the poor, subnormal Evans (John Hurt) and his beautiful but foolish young wife, Beryl, (Judy Geeson) was centred around their desire for an abortion - illegal in the UK until the late 1960s.

John Hurt is very good as the hapless Evans although his Welsh accent needed refining. His look of wide eyed horror and disbelief is a sight to behold. Geeson pouts and whinges and looks gorgeous: the kind of wife any man would desire and yet the kind destined to irritate intensely.

The key to appreciating 10 Rillington Place is to have some idea of its setting in British history. To wander in clueless will result in disappointment. There is no gore or x-rated content of any kind and its slow pace will infuriate many. Yet, as a snapshot of an England now gone and a reminder of the folly of capital punishment it is a timeless classic worthy of many viewings.

It's almost fifty years since this film was made, and it hasn't lost any of its potency. I saw this as a youngster, and it terrified me, watching today, I had exactly the same feeling, terror.

The film is wonderfully atmospheric, it's bleak, it's chilling, and Richard Attenborough's performance is spine chilling, he makes Reg an absolutely terrifying figure, despite being so softly spoken.

There is a harshness to this film that truly does work in its favour, there is no lighter side, it's just very bleak.

Based on real life events, it's a fascinating, but tragic story, you can only wonder at the lives that Christie ruined.

Several documentaries are available, and The BBC produced a three part series many years later, but this film version is hard to beat.

Chilling, but outstanding, 10/10.

This is the story of serial killer John Christie, who between 1943 and 1953 murdered women and disposed of their bodies on his property at the titular 10 Rillington Place. Christie used his mild mannered demeanor to gain the confidence of women. He often falsely claimed to have medical knowledge and told them that if they came back to his flat he could take care of their migraines, bronchitis, etc. Once there, he killed them. He was never suspected because the women who disappeared had no known connection to him.

What becomes his undoing is when he becomes homicidally attracted to Beryl Evans, wife of one of his boarders, Tim Evans. Christie does a pretty good job of planning the killing, but he is rather reckless, telling his wife things that will be refuted later. Ultimately the victim's husband Tim is convicted of the murder of his wife and is executed. There were holes in the criminal investigation for sure, and Evans was illiterate and mildly intellectually handicapped as well, known for telling tall tales, so he was limited in how he could help his own defense. So when he truthfully does tell the police what happened, they do not believe him.

Richard Attenborough is very much the enigma as killer John Christie. You can easily find out why Christie probably did what he did with some quick internet research, but here no explanation is provided, and that helps add to the tension. Highly recommended.

An interesting and upsetting movie about serial killer John Christie and the murders at 10 Rillington Place in the 1940s and early 1950s. Set in London, 1940, in the midst of the Battle of England, at number 10 Rillington Place lives John Reginald Christie (Richard Attemborough), a shy, timid, absolutely insignificant man, who has been mobilized by the world war as an auxiliary policeman. He's a well respected man who has more than just a couple of dark secrets and who, under the pretext of his medical knowledge, takes unsuspecting women into his home. Meanwhile, Timothy Evans (John Hurt) is a hard working Welshman in London seeking work. He and his pregnant wife (Judy Geeson) are offered a place to stay by John Christie. If these walls could talk !. What happened to Ena and Geraldine and Beryl and Muriel and Rita and Ethel at 10 Rillington Place?. What happened to the women at 10 Rillington Place?

One of Richard Fleischer's greatest films dealing with the true story of John Christie - the serial killer; being a model story in the genre of intrigue as well as terror and never sensationalising its subject. It is a cold, almost naturalistic reconstruction of the crimes of one of the most disturbing psychopaths who terrorized the United Kingdom in the 1940s. The film also deals with a terrible judicial error which precipitated the abolition of the death penalty in Great Britain due to an incident that led a man to be wrongly hanged. Richard Fleischer's staging is masterful, as is the extraordinary interpretation of Richard Attemborough in a completely unusual character in his long film career. Along with other excelent interpretations carried out by Judy Geeson, Pat Heywood and one of John Hurt's earlier movies.

Director Richard Fleischer's occassional preoccupation with strange murders, one remembers ¨Compulsion¨ starring Dean Stockwell, Bradford Dillman about the Leopold-Loch murders and ¨The Boston strangler¨ starring Tony Curtis, brought him to England in 1970 to make this grim reconstruction of the case of John Reginald Christie, who murdered seven people in his dingy North London home. The case itself is brought to life with brooding and harrowing authenticity as well as crude realism, sparing little of the terrifying and gruesome detail involved.

Many years later, a three-part drama remake of "10 Rillington Place" (1971) took place: Rillington Place (2016-2016) , starring Tim Roth as Reg Christie, Jodie Comer, Nico Mirallegro, and Samantha Morton.

10 Rillington place is a film that deals with many things; these things range from pushing censorship in content and what it is we're seeing yet it also deals with conventions that make films particularly enjoyable. Given the time that this film was made (1971), and granted I'm not entirely sure of my historical facts; I don't think too many films were made around this era that were based on real life serial killers which automatically makes it rather ahead of its time.

I think 10 Rillington Place is a film that really sets some sort of a new benchmark in both the thriller and horror genre. It creates a definitive 'world' in which the film can take place – a world which seems very real and is put across through thanks to feelings that anything could happen and that anybody could run into anybody; this creates a very unpredictable and uncomfortable atmosphere, especially if you're like me and you didn't know the full story about the real life events of John Christie.

The film is also shot in a way that makes it look very grimy and very bleak – London in the 1940s and 50s is a perfect setting as run down houses and depressing to look at streets litter the exterior shots of the film when murder is in the air. This changes somewhat when Timothy Evans (Hurt) ends up in the country due to certain events as we're then presented with grass, hills and all things nice but the exterior shots of the countryside are limited in their presentation as although he's a million miles from the murders, he can't hide from them.

The film's slow and trudging delivery also works well. The film carries such a degree of realism in the way it's shot and through the way the characters speak to each other through rather 'real' conversations, it's fascinating, in a way, to witness the murder scenes when they do eventually come along as you do get the feeling the film is building to something and they are it. Also, the way in which these are shot is highly effective – Christie talks to the victims in a calm and logistical way; convincing them it'll be alright and for a time, it seems like it will be; it's only when they start struggling after realising something's wrong that the tension really begins and the build up pays off.

When the film finishes its little first chapter which is dominated by realistic dialogue, fabulous cinematography and a blinding performance from Attenborough as Christie; it then goes down another route which brings the character of Evans more into play. The second part of the film utilises methods more akin to a psychological thriller or horror as Christie very cleverly plays Evans off against, well, himself. Not only this but Christie's evilness and seeming invincibility is only emphasised further when he manages to squeeze his way out of most jams.

If the film has a flaw it's because as it wears on; tension is relaxed and atmosphere is consequently deflated. The film remains dark, brooding and there is definitely an uneasy feeling as you watch some later scenes which I'm sure you know of yet I shall not spoil but the predictability that it was at the time regarding 'bad guys' and 'justice' is followed through in a rather easy and unsatisfying manner although the film DID stick true to what happened in real life.

I think 10 Rillington Place is one of those films that will remain etched into British film and into film in general as if there was ever a template to somehow work around when making a thriller/horror like this one, 10 Rillington Place is perhaps the first place you'd look.

This film portrays the 'evidence' of what happened inside 10 Rillington Place, however, as it is a polemic against capital punishment it must be viewed as heavily distorted towards that aim. Large parts of the film are excellent, Attenborough's portrayal is brilliant, ditto Hurt and Geeson. That's where my praise for the film ends. The rest is based on leaving out crucial evidence against Evans, crucial evidence concerning the murder of Beryl and claims Evans was illiterate and a fantasist. He was neither of those things. Read 'The Two Killers of Rillington Place'by John Eddowes and make your own mind up. Great actors in this film, great performances, let down by factually inaccurate script.

This British thriller is one of the best films I have ever seen. It tells the story of John Christie, the serial killer whose "career" lasted from the middle 1940's until the early 1950's. The name is taken from the scene of the murders; 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London.

Chillingly portrayed by the great actor Richard Attenborough , Christie was a little mouse of a man who first lured his victims home on some pretext or other, usually by saying that he could perform some desired medical procedure on them, for example, an abortion, which was illegal at the time. Once there, he put them at ease by offering them a cup of tea, deceived them into breathing gas from the pipe, rendering them unconscious, then strangled them. He disposed of the bodies, at first by burying them in the garden, then putting them under the sink in the water closet, and finally by tearing up and replacing floorboards and papering over cupboards.

The primary reasons that Christie was able to do what he did for so long were first of all the war. London was undergoing the blitz, and people had a tendency to disappear during the bombing. Another reason was that he was able to turn the suspicions of the police from him to a not very bright truck driver named Timothy Evans, (played by John Hurt) who was convicted of the death of his baby daughter, and was also suspected in the murder of his wife, but due to English law could only be tried for one or the other of them. He was hanged in 1950. The scene in the film where Evans is hanged is chilling, and quite accurate.

Slow at first and shot on location at the actual scene of the murders, the film shows a dangerous manipulative killer hiding behind a bland, mild exterior. Because he appeared so mild, Christie was all the more terrifying. Attenborough brings this out expertly and the overall effect is very creepy.

This superbly-acted film is British cinema at its' very best.

Cup of tea, anyone?

Christie barely even registers as a physical presence. He's small, bespectacled, almost completely bald. He speaks barely above a whisper. But behind those spectacles, there's a penetrating look you might not even notice at first - hell, you probably didn't even look at him when he spoke his mild pleasantries and shook his hand. Nobody, not even his wife, had any idea of his history of criminality, nor his lies, which he spins without a moment's hesitation, no sign whatsoever that he even understands the difference between fact and falsity.

Tim Evans was a foolish young man, either loaded with money from an inheritance from his father, or not - he doesn't seem to care. He's got a young wife and a baby, and hits the roof when she tells him she's expecting another. Running off to drown his sorrows at the pub, Christie, in his self-effacing, matter-of-fact way, lets in on the fact that he has training as a doctor, and may be able to help. There is, however, a one in ten chance she may not survive - but, he explains, fathers always make it.

This is Christie's modus operandi. Posing as a doctor, who can help with abortions, migraines, and anything else, he sets up his rudimentary equipment - rubber hoses running gas through a jar of bubbling white liquid - and suffocates his victims. These scenes, while not that violent, are extremely confronting and horrible.

There is little attempt at first to make Timothy Evans a likeable character, but it doesn't take long for us to realise that he is just another of Christie's victims. And a victim of his own careless nature, and selfishness. But he is at an utter loss to explain why Christie would have murdered anyone. And so are we.

He is, as it happens, a necrophile, kissing and fondling the bodies of his victims. But can that even come close to explaining his crimes? The truth is, that we may never understand why people like Christie do what they do. "10 Rillington Place"'s refusal to provide a phony justification is just another reason to recommend it, along with the typically flawless performances from Attenborough and John Hurt. But be warned - emotionally, this is strong stuff. Not one for the gorehounds, but bleak, and unflinching.

This is a convincing account of the infamous serial killings of Christie, and the dreadful miscarriage of justice which led to the hanging of Timothy Evans, who would now be described as having a learning disability, for the murder of his wife. Richard Attenborough portrays the apparently respectable, colourless killer with insidious menace, through to his eventual disintegration and discovery. The house of horrors has now been demolished- who would want to live there? At this time serial killers were unusual in the UK, and there was little expectation of finding multiple corpses in a dreary lower middle class dwelling - Jack the Ripper had been regarded as the epitome of the worst humanity could be. The execution of Evans was and is an overwhelming condemnation of the existence of the death penalty in any society or state which has moral values or any claim to respect for justice or civilised mores.

This British 1970's drama tells the life of the real London strangler John Reginald Christie, a doctor and landlord who killed several of his female patients in the 1940's and 1950's. Richard Attenborough plays Christie in a rather silent, but very menacing and psychological way. Director Richard Fleischer is not portraying a serial killer monster like Hannibal Lector, but rather a boring and nice guy who turning to a mentally disturbed and brutal serial killer.

The atmosphere in the dirty London suburbs is photographed in a very dark and intense way, as most of the scenes take place in Christie's old back street house. The calm music adds much atmosphere to the movie, and young John Hurt plays the husband of one of the victims. A forgotten genre jewel that is worth being discovered again, as it cannot be compared to many of those stylish current serial killer TV and movie productions.

There's been a lot of revisionist theories put forth by professional and amateur criminologists concerning the murders at 10 Rillington Place. People who lived at that address tended to check in, but not check out. It was more fatal to live there than at the Bates Motel.

Midway between the killings attributed to John Chrystie one Timothy Evans was tried and hanged for killing his wife and infant daughter. The luckless Evans played here by John Hurt and the portion of Chrystie's killing spree portrayed here in 10 Rillington Place is when Chrystie kills Mrs. Evans played here by Judy Geeson.

Watching Richard Attenborough as Chrystie he reminds me a bit of one of the heavily made up characters Kirk Douglas did in The List Of Adrian Messenger. You might remember Mr.Pithian who Dana Wynter comes across in Adrian Messenger's flat who says he's there to take care of Adrian's cat. Attenborough affects that same inoffensive mild look and voice as he lures victims to a position where he uses gas on them to paralyze them so they don't struggle while being strangled. It's chillingly effective.

In his long career as an actor Richard Attenborough played a variety of parts, both good guys and bad guys. In 10 Rillington Place he stretches the limits of his considerable talents.

This one will scare the pants off you.

I know this is a highly regarded film for it's dark but serious portrayal of a real life serial killer but it's difficult to watch. In the working class concrete jungle (literally there appears to be a single tiny tree in a sea of gray stone) a mild-mannered, middle aged man starts murdering women during WW2.

A few years later, a young couple with a baby move in. The upstairs apartment they inhabit is dirty and dank, something that hasn't been renovated since the Victorian era 50 years earlier, and their baby cries constantly. The husband is a complete loser, he can't read and write, and he's abusive towards the wife. Apparently, the soft-spoken serial killer frames him to protect himself and is unfairly hanged.

This is an important chapter in UK legal history, and I don't doubt the excellence of the acting portrayals ...but the film is just ugly and miserable to watch, and it's exceedingly difficult to feel a whole lot of sympathy for the illiterate, abusive husband framed for murder.

Based on the true story of serial killer John Christie (Richard Attenborough) in 1944 London. It recounts his final killings involving couple Beryl Evans (Judy Geeson) and Timothy John Evans (John Hurt).

I never even heard of this movie until TCM played it early in the morning a while ago. After watching it I realize why it's unknown--it's very very VERY slow, quiet and tame. The murders are never shown, there's no nudity, sex or violence (it's very PG rated) and everything moves at a snails pace. At first it was interesting but it went through a step by step examination of Christie's last killings and execution and got dull. To some this may be fascinating but I was bored silly. The only thing that kept me watching was the acting. Geeson and an incredibly young Hurt are good but Attenborough is excellent as Christie. He's soft-spoken and seems so gentle throughout the movie but you can see the evil in his eyes. I can't really recommend this movie but the acting is superb--that's why it gets a 5.