The Boston Strangler

A nasty case of multiple schizophrenia. Not only are the images tiresomely fragmented by the then fashionable split-screen technique, but the character of Albert DeSalvo, self-confessed perpetrator of 11 stranglings, has been tailored into a straightforward case of split personality, so that we may weep sympathetically as we watch a happy family man being gradually forced to face the crimes committed by his other self without his conscious knowledge. Curtis gives a careful performance, but can breathe little life into this expurgated cliché. Boston in panic (split-screen images of old ladies gossiping on one side of the screen while a corpse awaits detection on the other) is not exactly compulsive. And the interrogation scenes are interminable. Nice stuff around the middle, though, when the stones turned over by the police during their investigations reveal a fine collection of pallid, squirming perverts.