Sloper wrote:I haven't quite listened to all of Hurt's commentary, but I did find Attenborough's intro on the DVD quite moving. He obviously felt this was a very important project, and was very committed to the idea of treating the subject in an honest, objective manner. This really comes through in his performance - he seems scarily at home in Christie's skin - and in the whole film, which, as closeleyobserved says, is anything but salacious and exploitative, as it could so easily have been in someone else's hands.
I haven't seen that intro (I don't have the DVD), but I do remember an interview with Attenborough in which he said that he was worried about taking on the role because it could so easily have been salacious and exploitative - but he trusted Richard Fleischer and the source material (Ludovic Kennedy's book, based on his investigative journalism). Rightly, as it turned out.
It's well worth remembering that there's less of a gap between the film going into production and the actual Christie murders than there is between now and the discovery of Fred West's murders in 1992, which I remember as though it was last week - and I remember John Trevelyan at the British Board of Film Censors was a little concerned about the project, though he admitted later (in his memoir
What the Censor Saw) that the finished film gave him nothing to worry about. It obviously got an X certificate (which then banned under-16s), but that was expected.
Incidentally, I'm introducing
Psycho in a cinema in Gloucestershire later this week, and while I normally try to incorporate local-interest stories if only to prove that I'm not just recycling old material, I've decided against any Fred West references: it's too recent, and they'd be too gratuitous.
