Trailer
Plot summary
Beryl and Tim Evans take the top flat at 10 Rillington Place in London in 1949 with their baby daughter Geraldine, and Beryl finds she is pregnant again. Beryl attempts to end the pregnancy herself, and when she tells Tim the two have a violent argument that Christie breaks up. John Christie and his wife Ethel live on the ground floor; Christie has killed in the house before and passes himself off as a man with medical training. Money is tight for the Evanses. Christie offers to end the pregnancy for nothing, and pretends to study a medical textbook so that Tim will trust his skill. The Evanses agree to let him carry out the procedure.
Cast
- Miss Rileyas Baby Geraldine
- Gabrielle Dayeas Mrs. Lynch
- Edward Evansas Det. Inspector
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about 10 Rillington Place (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Hangman Albert Pierrepoint, who had executed both Timothy Evans and John Christie, advised uncredited on the film to make the hanging scene authentic. It showed, for the first time, a hanging carried out in silence in a matter of seconds rather than as a drawn-out procedure.
- The British Board of Film Classification had blocked the making of any film about the murders committed by John Christie for over ten years.
- Richard Attenborough accepted the role of John Christie immediately, without seeing the script, when producer Leslie Linder offered it to him while he was preparing his own film Young Winston.
- The family then living at 10 Rillington Place were too afraid to move out even temporarily, fearing they would not be allowed back, so exterior and window shots were filmed at the neighboring number 7. Richard Attenborough was the only actor filmed inside number 10.
- The film follows Ludovic Kennedy's argument that Timothy Evans was innocent and framed by John Christie, an argument the Crown accepted when Home Secretary Roy Jenkins pardoned Evans in 1966.
- Screenwriter Sean Graham dropped out of the project after he felt director Richard Fleischer was flouting his sensitive approach to the material. Fleischer wanted a hard-edged "horror film to end all horror films" and said there was no censorship any more in America.
- Number 10 Rillington Place and its street were demolished shortly after filming, and flats built in the late 1970s cover the exact spot where its kitchen, wash house and back garden once stood.
