JamesHitchcock

On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955, outside the Magdala public house in Hampstead, London, David Blakely, a young racing driver, was shot dead by his lover Ruth Ellis. Ellis was tried and executed for this crime, making her the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

"Dance with a Stranger"- the title is taken from a popular song of the period- tells the story of the doomed relationship of Ruth and David, a story that can be summed up by the cliche that they could neither live with one another nor without one another. David was handsome and superficially charming, but there was also a dark side to his personality. He was feckless, irresponsible, immature and a heavy drinker. He also had a vicious temper, and would abuse Ruth physically in the course of their frequent quarrels. Neither Ruth nor David remained faithful to one another. He had other girlfriends, and even became engaged to one, Mary Dawson, at a time when he was still seeing Ruth. She had another wealthy lover named Desmond Cussen.

Their relationship was further complicated by questions of social class. David was from a well-to-do bourgeois background, and knew that his family would never accept the working-class Ruth as his wife. Moreover, their objections to her went well beyond her social class. She was a divorcee, at a time when this status still carried some social stigma, and the mother of two children, only one of whom had been fathered by her husband. She worked as a nightclub hostess, a profession which put her on the edge of respectability, and there were rumours that she had previously been a prostitute and nude model, professions which would have placed her well beyond that edge.

The film is not always historically accurate. Most of the changes concern the character of Cussen, who here becomes much older than he was in real life. Ian Holm was, at 54, twice Miranda Richardson's age, whereas the real Cussen was only three years older than Ruth Ellis. I suspect that Holm also played Cussen as being much nicer than he was in real life, Ruth's platonic admirer and a benevolent father-figure to her and her young son Andy. No mention is made of the allegations that Cussen supplied Ruth with the pistol she used to kill Blakely, showed her how to use it and then drove her to the fatal rendezvous. Cussen would still have been alive in 1985, and his character was presumably whitewashed for legal reasons.

We tend to look back on the late fifties as a period of optimism, the New Elizabethan Age when Britain, with a beautiful young Queen at the helm, was emerging from a decade and a half of war and post-war austerity into a new age of prosperity. Yet there was also a darker, seedier side to the decade, and that is reflected in this film. We see little of the glamorous world of David and Blakely his family, and a good deal of the downbeat world of Ruth Ellis, perhaps unsurprisingly given that the screenplay was by Shelagh Delaney, best-known as the author of that seminal kitchen sink text, "A Taste of Honey". Mike Newell's direction emphasises the drabness of Ruth's world; many scenes are set in dark, dingy interiors. When the camera does move outside it is normally night-time or a dank, misty daylight. The visual look of the film could be described as Neo-noir, although that term is normally used for fictitious stories, not ones base don real-life events.

The film gave a big boost to its two young stars, Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett. Richardson, in particular, is excellent, portraying Ruth as a woman who could seem hard and brassy to the outside world, yet who underneath that veneer was really vulnerable, someone who had been hurt by life and who could see no way of avoiding being hurt again.

This is important, because Ruth's story has become a well-known one in Britain. Her case played a part in the campaign to abolish capital punishment. This was not just because of her sex; hardly anyone remembers the penultimate woman to be hanged in Britain. (She was Styllou Christofi, a Greek-Cypriot immigrant who had murdered her daughter-in-law). It was certainly not because anyone believed her to be innocent; there was no doubt that it was she who killed David. There was, however, a widespread belief that she was as much sinned against as sinning, a victim of abuse who, only a few years later, would probably have been acquitted of murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility (a defence, alas, not available in 1955). The death penalty had already been abolished by 1985, but the film's central message, that justice needs too be tempered with mercy, was still relevant then, and remains relevant today. 7/10.