The Boston Strangler (1968)
2.35:1 (16x9 Enhanced)
Dolby Digital Mono and 2.0
Fox Home Entertainment, $14.98

One of the great benefits of the DVD era has been its ability to shine a fresh light on films deserving of rediscovery. The brilliant but curiously obscure The Boston Strangler is just such a picture. Made just before an infusion of raw filmmaking talent overtook the staid studio system in the 1970s, the film is just as daring and uncompromising as the best of the following decade, and possibly even more influential.

Given a free hand by forward-thinking 20th Century Fox production chief Richard Zanuck, director Richard Fleischer took a novel stylistic approach to the true story (based on journalist Gerold Frank’s book) of a serial killer who terrorized Boston in the early 1960s by committing 13 seemingly random murders. Fleischer and cinematographer Richard Kline, ASC used the screen like Cubist painters, splitting it into two, three and sometimes as many as seven frames within the frame, a device greeted with much greater fanfare when it appeared in the Academy Award-winning Woodstock a year later. In addition to the split screens, tactile sound effects, shock edits, snap zooms and long takes add to the film’s powerfully unsettling atmosphere.

The stylized approach is paired with a deadly serious storytelling tone — the film is almost completely devoid of both music and humor — creating a tense intersection of documentary and police narrative. As lead investigator John Bottomly (Henry Fonda) finally delves into the mind of suspect Albert DeSalvo (Tony Curtis, in a career-best performance), the film begins to blur the line between reality and subjectivity; Fonda is seen talking to DeSalvo inside his memories, an innovative idea that inspired director Spike Lee in his own 1995 thriller Clockers.

Fox Home Entertainment has delivered an immaculate transfer of The Boston Strangler, presenting Kline’s adventurous visuals with excellent sharpness, accurate colors and nary a noticeable blemish. Working mostly on location in Boston, Kline had the best of both worlds, shooting a film that bounced back and forth between gritty, documentary-flavored realism and DeSalvo’s cloudy, delusional mindscape. The final half hour of the film merges the two psychologies presented in the film — Bottomly’s rationality and DeSalvo’s confused pathology — inside a barren interrogation room. Working on a perfectly shadowless set (built from white muslin) that could be lit from the outside, the filmmakers cannily exploit reflections in the room’s two-way mirror to suggest DeSalvo’s split personality.

Among the supplements on this bargain-priced DVD are a teaser, a trailer and a brief Fox Movietone period newsreel from the time of the Boston Strangler killings. (The latter is in such bad shape that parts of it are presented without sound.) The main supplement is the 20-minute American Movie Classics featurette Backstory: The Boston Strangler. The film probably deserves a documentary with a little more depth, but the AMC special offers some good observations from the principals, including Kline, Fleischer, Curtis and Zanuck. Fleischer reveals that the idea for the film’s split-screen strategy came from the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair: “I saw these wonderful new big-screen pictures that were using multi-image work on the screen. It struck me immediately as a way to handle The Boston Strangler, to show on the screen a city in panic.” The device also works effectively as a metaphor for DeSalvo’s fractured mind — and as a way to keep the viewer on edge. Kline notes, “Generally in photography, you make the eye go to something, and with this technique, the eye almost always [goes] to the new panel that [comes] on the screen. But at the same time, the retina or your brain [retains] what the other panels had established, so you [see] the whole puzzle being put together in one frame.” The cinematographer also comments on the technique’s logistical complications: “We would make a matte that fit into the camera so that we could photograph just that portion. If there were five panels in a given frame, we would have to do five different shoots and five different scenes; at times we’d use two or three different cameras to synchronize [them].”

On a ghoulish note, the documentary reveals that DeSalvo was flattered enough by the film to send handmade leather wallets to Fleischer and Zanuck — but not Curtis. “Maybe he didn’t like the way I played the part,” shrugs the actor.

— Chris Pizzello