a review of 瑞灵顿街10号

𝖍𝖔𝖔𝖕𝖙𝖔𝖇𝖊𝖗 𝖝 𝖓𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝖙𝖍𝖗𝖊𝖊: This is the first of three "bonus" selections for this year's Hooptober, and by now I should understand that Cinemonster always has some sort of intention behind his extra-credit picks, whether that's to simply expose participants to some underseen bit of brilliance from decades past, or to make some connection with current events in art/culture/society at large. I found that this one maybe has just a little bit of both going on. It's undeniably a great character performance by Attenborough (whom I only recall raising his voice once or perhaps twice in the whole movie, at crucial points where we see Christie's true self revealed), and Hurt as the wrongly accused Timothy Evans manages to portray a tragically "simple" man with a measure of empathy and intelligence. But there's also a hidden theme lurking amongst the true-crime trappings, concerning the Evans family's plainly presented need for responsible family-planning services prior to the legalization of abortion in the UK. The film may have been made prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling in the US, but watching it now, a full year after Roe was overturned, made this hit home in a way that I don't think it would have before. Regardless of their precise psychological profile, serial killers always exploit holes in the social code, and Christie was no different. If a struggling family like Timothy and Beryl Evans had access to safe, legal abortion procedures, they would never have become desperate enough to trust in a patent fraud like Christie, and their story might have gone very differently indeed. (By coincidence, I watched this one on the Roku Channel, which also showed several ads in support of Ohio's Issue 1 on the ballot this November. If passed, Issue 1 will enshrine reproductive rights, including contraception, fertility treatments, miscarriage care, and the right to terminate one's own pregnancy in the Ohio state constitution, overriding the state's near-total ban. I assume these ads are running on all of Roku's programming in Ohio, but they seemed especially fitting for this film.)