Dance with a Stranger **** (1985, Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett, Ian Holm) – Classic Movie Review 2054

Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett are superb in director Mike Newell’s powerful, moving and subtle 1985 movie account of the tragic story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain hanged for murder back in 1955. The story provided the background to the long-term British debates that eventually led to the effective abolition of capital punishment in 1965.

It is a resonant success in all departments, starting from the beautifully crafted, dynamic and stark, spare screenplay by playwright Shelagh Delaney (the author of A Taste of Honey in her third major screenplay). She ensures that the film does not come across as an anti-capital punishment tract, but the clearly implied message still comes through powerfully. Ellis is shown to be provoked into killing and would probably have been found not guilty of murder and freed these days if she’d filed a plea of temporary insanity. Certainly, she’d have got off with manslaughter.

Richardson gives a superlative performance as Ellis, with her 50s platinum blonde rinse, perm and bottled-up emotions, who lives with her 10-year old son Andy (Matthew Carroll) next to a London night club. There one night she meets upper-class David Blakely, they start a love affair and she becomes obsessed with the man who turns out to be an unfaithful, abusive good-time guy who looks down on her lower class background. Eventually, infamously, in a rage of madness, she shoots him dead outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead, London, because breaks up with her and she simply won’t give him up.

The ideally cast young Everett (aged 26) is excellent as this handsome, dubious, disreputable charmer, a shifty, spiteful and shady upper-class archetype. Ian Holm impresses, too, as the sad, middle-aged businessman Desmond Cussen, who is equally obsessed with Ellis.

Newell accesses the sad 50s era of British austerity and the time’s repressed attitudes with effortless-seeming economy. The people, the clubs, pubs and cars are all from a different planet, and here they are brought to the screen in a way that never comes over as forced.

Also in the cast are Stratford Johns, Tom Chadbon, Joanne Whalley, Jane Bertish, David Troughton, Paul Mooney, Susan Kyd, Lesley Manville, Sallie Anne Field, Nicholas McArdle, Martin Murphy, Colin Rix and Alan Thompson.

It is fascinating to compare it with the Diana Dors version of the story, Yield to the Night. Newell won the Award of the Youth at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. Richardson won Best Actress at the London Evening Standard British Film Awards.

And, after its success in British cinemas, it became a major hit on TV, with more than  six million viewers in March 1988 on Channel 4, who helped pay for it, along with Goldcrest and the National Film Finance Corp. Those were the days! Today, it’s being packaged as ‘avant-garde’ cinema!

Mari Wilson performs the theme song ‘Would You Dance With a Stranger’, which was a hit single in 1985.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2054

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