“AN EXCEPTIONAL FILM! Long before Silence of the Lambs... a disturbingly detached, naturalistic examination.
Deftly turns the tables, in a manner that directly anticipates Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Short Film About Killing.”
– Dave Kehr, The New York Times
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[5 out of 5 stars]
“AN UNDERSEEN GEM! A SERIAL KILLER CLASSIC!
Unlike many a film serial killer... Christie’s cartoonishness is appropriate considering that the director is the son of animated-film pioneer Max Fleischer.
Yet the character never seems a gag come to life. Both the director’s sober approach to the very lurid subject matter and Attenborough’s
appropriately one-note performance help to illuminate this ostensible villain’s psychopathic philosophies... [ends on] a perfect, downbeat grace note.”
– Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York
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“Set in a nightmare London filled with decay of the soul and rotted foundations, Rillington is a bellowing black cloud of lugubrious mood and overcoming dread,
lit only by the reflection of light off of Attenborough's bald pate. Fleischer strikes a strange but affecting pitch by not empathizing with killer or victim...
the audience is relegated to stunned, chilled spectator. ”
– Chris Cabin, AMC
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“In the giant squid from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fleischer created the scariest ever Disney monster. Attenborough is comparable,
playing the prim, repressed killer with a single, quizzically pursed expression and an insinuating sibilant voice that drips like poison into your ear.”
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice
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“If 10 Rillington Place weren't based on real events, it would take the warped mind of Jim Thompson to imagine such paranoid, psychosis-driven characters...
Fleischer brought with him the expert, B-noir stylizations that characterized the best of his Hollywood pictures. With its lifeless, ashen walls shot
just two doors down from where the real murders occurred, Rlilington evokes an uncommonly dismal atmosphere perfectly suited to its uncompromisingly bleak story ”
– Cullen Gallagher, L Magazine
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“EDITOR'S PICK!” – New York magazine

“What makes Fleischer's film so disturbing is not the gore, but the tension built around Christie's crime spree... all the more creepy in a restored 35mm print!”
– Flavorpill

(1971) An ultra low-key — but all the more menacing — account of the notorious Christie serial murder case; in 1948, Welsh blue collar worker Timothy Evans (John Hurt) and wife Judy Geeson, lodgers upstairs from mousily mild-mannered John Reginald Christie (Attenborough) and wife, already have trouble making ends meet when Geeson discovers she’s in the family way — but ever helpful Attenborough offers a homemade do-it-yourself abortion. The chilling results not only confirmed Christie’s morbid reputation, but ultimately altered the U.K.’s stance on the death penalty.

Filmed in the actual Rillington Place (but at #6, at that time renamed Ruston Close because of the notoriety, and since demolished), Fleischer worked with legendary executioner Albert Pierrepoint as technical adviser. (Because of the Official Secrets Act, no details of the execution were formally known; this would be the first time U.K. audiences would ever have seen a British execution on screen.) 10 Rillington Place also features two tour de force performances; Attenborough, in bald pate make-up, affecting a supremely quiet, unobtrusive manner that renders the brewing of a pot of tea subtly chilling, while Hurt achieves a unique acting coup, making believable a man so gullible and stupid (the real Evans’ IQ was estimated to be 70) as to falsely confess to murdering his own family — without making him a figure of farce. Approx. 111 minutes.

“WILL WORK ITS WAY INTO YOUR NIGHTMARES, GUARANTEED.”
– Glenn Kenny

“Unlike the current strain of serial killer films, Fleischer’s don’t invite the spectator to identify surreptitiously with the power and impunity of the murderer, but neither are they simple expressions of moral outrage. They focus, with sober detachment, on the details of crime and the working of the criminal mind, expressing no more shock than would a documentary on the functioning of the Ford assembly line. Fleischer’s killers are ordinary, physically undistinguished and almost faceless… They blend easily into Fleischer’s carefully observed backgrounds, none more smoothly and deceptively than John Reginald Christie of 10 Rillington Place.”
– Dave Kehr, The New York Times

“Attenborough, abetted by a prosthetic bald plate that's almost as effectively expressive as the performer himself, gives an astonishing, perfectly modulated performance as the monstrous, unknowable psychopath, a mild-mannered wheedler of the first stripe. (His Christie is his second indelible portrayal of a criminal, the first being his white-hot work as Pinkie in the 1947 film of Greene's Brighton Rock.) It's hardly a stretch to say that the film's depiction of miserable urban domesticity would not be matched until David Lynch's Eraserhead six years later.”
– Glenn Kenny

“Unique even within Fleischer's varied career. Though he had effectively explored similar true-crime subjects in wide-screen via Compulsion and the intricately composed split-screen procedural The Boston Strangler, for 10 Rillington Place, which recounts the appalling true story of British mass-murderer John Christie, the director chose the comparatively claustrophobic standard frame. The true spectacle of 10 Rillington Place is the completely naturalistic treatment that Christie's depravity receives.”
– Bruce Bennett, The New York Sun

“Is closer in spirit to Fleischer’s sharp, documentary-influenced B-grade noirs (1952's The Narrow Margin, 1949's Trapped) with which he started out his career… he made several true crime films over the years, but arguably none truer than this chillingly poker-faced tale. Trading in British working-class miserabilism as if born to it (even Ken Loach would be impressed), the distressing yet nonhyperbolic Rillington delivers one credible version of the much-disputed case. Everything about it is astutely controlled, but two performances — Attenborough's and Hurt's — push that description into the realm of brilliance, indelibly etching the respective banalities of evil and of innocence.”
– Dennis Havrvey, San Francisco Bay Guardian

"I found it extraordinary, for the tension of it and how beautifully it's shot. Hurt’s portrayal of a small, ignorant, easily duped man was nonpareil.”
– Alexander Payne

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