The Boston Strangler Directed by Richard Fleischer
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Richard Zanuck, the 32-year-old production chief at 20th Century-Fox who greenlighted the film, dismissed Curtis out of hand when Fleischer suggested him for the role. The studio was looking at a wide range of actors—Warren Beatty, Beau Bridges, James Caan, Peter Falk, Peter Fonda, Martin Landau, Ryan O’Neal, Anthony Perkins, Robert Redford, George Segal—but at 42, Curtis was older than any of them and had been doing nothing but comedy for the past six years. Determined to get the part, Curtis permed his hair and used putty to flatten out his beautiful nose, and Fleischer presented photos of him to Zanuck as those of a young unknown he’d just auditioned for the role. “I really fell for it hook, line, and sinker,” Zanuck recalls in a DVD extra, citing “this kind of haunting quality—tough, yet good-looking in a rugged way, but a little off-balance.” Curtis completed the makeup with brown contact lenses to dull his well-known baby blues; he gained 20 pounds and wore fishing weights around his waist. Onscreen he looks like he’s struggling to put one foot in front of the other, unsure where they might take him.
His physicality in the role is particularly evident in the opening credits. The Boston Stranger was part of the late-60s craze for elaborate split-screen cinema that also included Point Blank (1967) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), though Fleischer, inspired by an installation he’d seen at the Expo 67 in Montreal, was pushing the envelope with seven- and eight-panel wide-screen compositions. The first image is a tiny TV screen showing the Project Mercury astronauts as they parade through the streets of Boston; the frame brightens to show a living room as a workman, his face obscured, goes through a woman’s drawers. Fleischer breaks the frame down into smaller fractions, the credits playing over the remaining black screen, as the man sorts through her jewelry, turns over her mattress, rakes through her medicine cabinet shelves, and puzzles over her LPs before tossing them aside. A shot of him fishing through the contents of a garbage can pans to include the body of the victim, an 85-year-old woman. Curtis doesn’t come back onscreen until the midpoint of the movie, but his character is already lodged in the mind.
The very notion of a single perpetrator was mostly a concoction of the Boston newspapers and public paranoia; though the 13 murder victims were all women who’d been strangled, the crimes varied wildly in their circumstances and signatures. DeSalvo was known for his photographic memory, and during his two-month interrogation by Bottomly he repeated numerous crime-scene details that had been in the papers or scuttlebutt on the streets of Boston. But he also got major facts wrong, and no physical evidence or witness testimony could place him near any of the crime scenes. Serving a life sentence at Walpole, a state maximum-security prison, DeSalvo was stabbed to death by another inmate in 1973; his family has since campaigned for his exoneration, and in 2001 a team of forensic experts, comparing DNA from DeSalvo’s exhumed body and from semen found on the strangler’s last victim, announced that he was probably not the culprit.
