Retrospective Film Review

10 Rillington Place (1971) • 50 Years Later

A dramatised account of the real-life British serial killer John Christie and the man he framed for murder.

If 10 Rillington Place is less brutally shocking today, that’s partly down to the five decades of increasingly baroque movie serial killers we’ve met since its release in 1971. And although the crimes committed by John Christie in the 1940s and 1950s are mundane by comparison with the excesses of Hannibal Lecter — set in a squalid, depressing post-war London world of bomb sites, cups of tea and poverty — Richard Attenborough’s mesmerising Christie has much in common with Lecter, so much so that it’s easy to believe Anthony Hopkins based his Silence of the Lambs (1991) cannibal partly on the soft-spoken villain of 10 Rillington Place.

The film remains chilling largely because of Attenborough, but much of its power also comes from John Hurt in the other key role: Timothy Evans, the young man effectively framed by Christie for two of his murders, and hanged years before Christie’s true guilt was revealed. Indeed, from the filmmakers’…