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CRIME OF DISPASSION Mike Newell’s Dance with a Stranger has a fatuous conceit—turning platinum-blond Ruth Ellis, who in 1955 was the last woman to be hanged in Britain, into a nastier impersonation of Marilyn Monroe out of Henry Hathaway’s 1953 Niagara. In the former, Ellis (Miranda Richardson) can’t resolve her love-hate thing with her racing driver lover David Blakely (Rupert Everett), so she pumps six rounds from a Smith and Wesson 38 into him on Easter Sunday; in the latter, Monroe plots to murder her hubby Joseph Cotton while on her honeymoon. (You don’t blame the girls—their defense would be justifiable homicide.) It’s impossible for a moviegoer who sees Dance not to remark how Richardson has been made up to pass as Monroe; the result is we can’t get involved with Ellis’s plight because we’re spending so much reserve on the drag. (In real life, Ellis looked a bit like Sybil Burton, Richard’s ex.) I guess we’re thankful this Ellis is a step up from an earlier version of the story—Yield to the Night with Diana Dors. Still, Dance is ice-cool; though reasonably well made, with a British Gato Barbieri score by Richard Hartley, Shelagh Delaney’s script is insistently heartless, so we can’t really figure out why frosty Ellis is this poisonously obsessed with her lover. Since she’s a disguised whore to begin with, she’d seem to have the experience to see him for what he was. A son of a doctor, a charmer when sober and snotty, offensive and truculent when drunk. If passion, jealousy and rage were the reasons behind his murder, which Ellis said was performed “somehow outside myself, in a sort of daze,” we can envision a movie acquittal for it: Everett reminds us of repulsive snit William Atherton. While suffering misery over Blakely, Ellis is being taken care of by the good-hearted, protective Desmond, played by the reliably pathetic Ian Holm. After she consents to sex with him she starts to look more like Monroe—mirroring those Bert Stern photos taken just before her death. This is the one time during the movie I didn’t object too much to the resemblance, because who wouldn’t look the worst for wear after being done by Holm? You’ll likely find the whole thing a tragedy wanting to be comedy, which it eventually becomes anyway: when Richardson kills Rupert, the audience I saw the movie with laughed—the clumsiness triggering a comic release. Before going to her death with dignity and no tears, Ellis, a mother of two children, wrote Blakely’s mother to express regret about the “unpleasantness” she caused and added, “I shall die loving your son, and you should feel content that his death will be repaid.” The trouble is, you don’t care; this crime of passion is too dispassionate.
Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
