The Boston Strangler

This is a gritty, criminally underrated, true-crime drama, with innovations in editing and structure that would do well to be included in today's thrillers. Read full review

The Boston Strangler, based on Gerold Frank's book, emerges as a triumph of taste and restraint with a telling, low-key semi-documentary style. Adaptation is topnotch not only in structure but also in the incisive, spare dialog which defines neatly over 100 speaking parts. Read full review

Fleischer mastery of tension and attention to detail make this riveting story a great piece of cinema. Read full review

The Boston Strangler requires a judgment not only on the quality of the film (very good), but also on its moral and ethical implications. Read full review

Tony Curtis does a remarkable portrayal of De Salvo, while Henry Fonda is outstanding as the principal criminal investigator, John S. Bottomley, who must work with few clues. [17 Feb 2002, p.9]

An unnerving film that chips away at the sensibilities, effectively shot in a semidocumentary style, but a movie that refuses to pander to the perverse. Read full review

A taut and incisive thriller, stylishly incorporating a multi-image technique and a stream-of-conscious narrative. [12 Aug 1999, p.F15]

Richard Fleischer’s professional efficiency tarts up a bit with dated 60s flashiness (multiple images, etc) and semidocumentary pretense in this 1968 feature about Boston sex murderer Albert De Salvo (Tony Curtis), brought to justice at last by police inspector Henry Fonda. Read full review

Harrowing, low-key dramatisation of the serial killer's reign of terror in Boston in the early 1960s. [07 Aug 2004, p.53]

A film of two halves - and not only because of its use of voguish split screen. The first, filmed faux-documentary style, is a grim police procedural featuring Henry Fonda's grizzled detective. In the second, Tony Curtis puts in a nuanced performance, playing against type as the real-life serial killer Albert DeSalvo, who killed 13 or more women in their homes. [16 Oct 2010, p.26]

This semi-documentary account of the terror in the Boston of the early Sixties sparked off by the serial killer Albert de Salvo has a creditable central per-formance from Tony Curtis and an admirable suppor-ting one by Henry Fonda as the chief investigator for the state attorney general. [12 Aug 2007, p.14]

Curtis gives a careful performance, but can breathe little life into this expurgated cliché. Read full review

THE BOSTON STRANGLER represents an incredible collapse of taste, judgment, decency, prose, insight, journalism and movie technique, and yet—through certain prurient options that it does not take—it is not quite the popular exploitation film that one might think. It is as though someone had gone out to do a serious piece of reporting and come up with 4,000 clippings from a sensationalist tabloid. Read full review