The Boston Strangler

FILMING PARTS of The Boston Strangler in Cambridge last spring created a minor diversion to spark up the otherwise dull life of many a resident of the City. Middle-aged men and women gathered around a small drugstore near the eastern end of Cambridge St. to vie for walk-on parts in the film, strolled past Simeone's for a glimpse of Tony Curtis slurping a plate of spaghetti, and gossiped endlessly about the trial of a self-confessed strangler--Albert DeSalvo--in an East Cambridge courtroom. But now that the completed film blares out on the screen, it's hard to feel other than slightly nauseated--or even ribaldly amused--by its pastiche of lurid suggestions and high school locker jokes, topped with a machete-wielding probe of the psyche of the strangler.

Some call the film "tasteful." Granted, it refrains from showing the strangler's work in all the gory details, but an honest camera shot of one of the corpses would be preferable to the straightfaced but inwardly leering remarks of the police officers who discover the bodies. After an hour, one is thoroughly tired of the discovery scenes, the interviews with terrified old ladies, and the slapstick arrests of suspects seemingly chosen at random from the sexual underground by Boston police.

Joking, frequently punning, becomes an obsession in the dialogue, not to relieve tension or to underline the callousness present in those following the strangler, but simply, it seems, to flesh out a weak plot with vaudeville routines that would have left the Old Howard crowd stone cold. One suspect, a wholesale grocer who is termed a "pickle salesman" by the police, sheepishly confesses that he has slept with about 300 different women in the last six months. "My, you've been a busy little beaver," a detective quips. Not to be outdone, his sidekick adds, "Find out what diet he's on and have it mimeographed." DeSalvo himself becomes a deadpan comic--as deadpan as only Curtis can be. Posing as a plumber, he tells a victim that "you're on my list," to gain entrance into her apartment. And then, after his first on-screen assault begins, one can almost hear the cameraman calculating, "and ... now, di ... solve." Which he does, to the deafening beat of drums.

Once the comic opera and the skin scenes are out of the way, it's time to have the confrontation between DeSalvo and John Bottomley, the dogged law-professor-cum--special investigator, (Henry Fonda plus moustache) who has been commissioned to track the killer down. Aside from a brief interlude in which Bottomley confesses his secret worry--"I'm beginning to like this"--to his wife, the interrogation and, predictably and inevitably, the breakdown of DeSalvo takes place against a searingly white background. Once you've mulled for six or seven seconds over the symbolic significance of the white, the remainder of the scene provides only a pain in the eyeballs.

Throughout the interrogation, Fonda portrays Bottomley as a subtle mixture of priest and detective, probing DeSalvo to extract the confession that he wants. Unfortunately, the finesse in the interrogation ends there. The camera cuts in for overly searching closeups of Curtis, whose baggy faces droops a millimeter or two as he finally coughs up the secrets of his "other self." To let even the dullest know what's happening, a hand-held camera stumbles behind the strangler re-enacting--in the psychic presence of Bottomley--one of his slayings. A few multiple image projections here, as throughout the film, serve mainly to drain whatever fear, fascination, or other emotion the strangler might evoke, reducing him to the level of a puppet dangling around on screen.

It's to be hoped that the crowds which gathered to watch the filming of The Boston Strangler don't bother to go down and see the finished product. They could get just about the same thing--leering headlines and all--by buying a copy of the National Enquirer at their neighborhood newstand.