Critiques Around a Common News Item: The Boston Strangler

I criticized on the occasion of the release of a film on the strangler of Boston, a film which was also dedicated to him.

The Boston Strangler, 1968 – “They said on TV we were going to clear Africa. They better clean up Boston”

Several elderly women were found strangled. The investigation skids between irreproachable suspects and false leads. Richard Fleischer masters his camera like no other: it zooms in, it moves away, it twirls and it even splits. The film is divided into two parts: one which shows the extreme couch grass in which the police got entangled; the other, a stunning behind closed doors once the killer is arrested in which it is a question of mental illness which contains a hair-raising face-to-face between Tony Curtis et Henry Fonda sublimating their text through the power of interpretation. The story gives pride of place to the work of the police and is intended as a criticism of the press, which is ostrich because the murders were apparently not noisy enough.

The Boston Strangler, 2023 – “Nobody knows what a lonely woman feels”

Three women are murdered by strangulation. In the era of feminism at all costs, it is obvious that the investigator turns into a female journalist who demonstrates all the concupiscence of men by extracting information from the police in a bar. Compared to the old treatment of this news item, they included the theory of multiple killers more likely despite the DNA analysis carried out for the thirteenth and last murder which accredits the predator usually designated but why would he have modified the typical profile of his victims passing from old women to young people? The 1968 film also neglected the work of these two female reporters and instead emphasized that of the forces of order, which is in contradiction with this footage. Nevertheless, the immersion in the survey is less strong than in that of 68.