Between Pathos and Horror

Policemen hulk over the mutilated body of an old woman. "There's no semen," reports a doctor, "but she's been mauled and bitten."

The first victim of The Boston Strangler has fallen. Ten equally obscene murders later, the community is hysterical but the cops are still as empty-handed as they are empty-headed. Their few scraps of fact have only served to compound the confusion. What kind of man would violate women with wine bottles and brooms? How could he gain entrance to so many apartments without using burglar tools? How can he murder with such blind, mindless ferocity and still leave no usable clues? Who is he?

This film, based on Gerold Frank's nonfiction bestseller and shot mostly on location in Boston, confidently supplies the answer. He is Albert DeSalvo,* a lumpish schizophrene with a wife and two kids. Most of the time DeSalvo (Tony Curtis) is a brooding but law-abiding mechanic. But there are moments when he turns into another self, a compulsive, soft-spoken psychopath who can kill at the drop of a door latch.

The Boston Strangler should have been as fascinating to view as it was to read, but the film is afflicted with its own kind of split personality. Early on, Director Richard Fleischer opts for the comic touch, in the style of No Way to Treat a Lady. A parade of men's room queens, peepers and certified nuts pass in review, and the film mocks them all. But after it has squeezed its last smirks from a lisping fetishist who makes love to women's handbags, the movie abruptly shifts direction. The downhill half is a quasi-documentary, reminiscent of In Cold Blood, complete with textbook-spouting psychiatrist and brooding intellectual lawyer (Henry Fonda). Fleischer obviously wants it both ways, but he gets neither. The black comedy is only dirty grey, and the psychiatric probing is reduced to a few slick optical allusions when DeSalvo crosses into zones of hallucination during Fonda's grilling.

Whatever the film's shortcomings, Tony Curtis must be adjudged not guilty. In an atypically intelligent and subtle performance, he climbs inside DeSalvo and makes himself astonish ingly at home. Curtis plays the ordinary Albert without his customary flip mannerisms. And as the monster within the skin, he is something else. Under orders from some burning sector of his mind, he hysterically re-enacts one killing by wrapping his hands around an imaginary girl's windpipe. Hovering between pathos and terror, Curtis suddenly makes the viewer's breath stop in his own throat -- and incidentally gives a glimpse of the picture that got lost somewhere between Boston and Hollywood.

*Although Defense Attorney F. Lee Bailey admitted in court that DeSalvo was the strangler, DeSalvo's new attorney has denied it, and recently requested an injunction to block the film's release because his client might suffer irreparable harm. A federal judge denied the request.

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