27 July 2013 - Dance With A Stranger

The touchstone film quoted by both Amanda Whittington and Carol Ann Lee as inspiration for their respective works on Ruth Ellis. I remember watching Mike Newell's film around the late 80s, most likely because it had Rupert Everett in it, who I fancied like mad after seeing him in Another Country. I can't exactly recall how I felt about the film at the time, but I do remember being impressed by Miranda Richardson as Ruth.

Watching it again now in preparation for The Thrill, I could appreciate the film a lot more, from the sharp script by A Taste of Honey writer Shelagh Delaney to the stripped down cinematography from Peter Hannan to the splashes of sax-led incidental music by Richard Hartley. And then of course, there is the performance from Richardson - maybe, as Lee puts it, 'a screaming mass of neuroses', but also tempered with moments of vulnerability and tenderness. And she really does look stunning, peroxide blonde, perfectly shaped eyebrows, slashes of vivid red on lips and nails, all in check. 

Complementing Richardson is the support from Ian Holm as Desmond Cussen and Everett's performance as Blakely, a pouty, spoiled brat of a character who flails with his fists when he doesn't get his way. (Incidentally, I thought young Everett looks a bit like Matthew Goode does now. Or is that just me?). On the downside, I thought Stratford Johns was just too nice to portray the outright sleaze bucket that was Morrie Conley, a truly gross character in all respects.

It was a nostalgic experience watching Dance With A Stranger again - it reminded me of the other low budget British films that were being produced at the time, such as My Beautiful Laundrette and Letter To Brezhnev, which I would go and see at the temples of cinematic goodness in Oxford at the time; the Penultimate Picture Palace and Not The Moulin Rouge. Only one of which exists now, sadly.

It also gave me a better appreciation of Whittington's play in comparison too; The Thrill delves deeper into the Ruth Ellis story by focussing on the key female characters in Ellis's world (and includes one fictional male character who acts as narrator). Dance With A Stranger is a strongly dramatic film, but The Thrill of Love, I believe, is a powerful play which highlights a chain of tragic events that ultimately affected a change in the UK law regarding capital punishment. All too late for Ruth Ellis though.