The Strangler
Dear Dick Wolf, you have ruined me for low-budget crime thrillers. After decades of the LAW & ORDER franchise, all I can see are the mistakes the police make. In Burt Topper’s THE STRANGLER (1964, TCM, Tubi), two detectives get the landlord to let them into suspected serial killer Victor Buono’s apartment to see if he’s there. When he’s not, they just start searching the place. One of them finds incriminating evidence, and all I could think was “fruit of the poisonous tree.”
In a film made to capitalize on the ongoing Boston Strangler case, Buono is a lab technician with a bad habit of sneaking into women’s apartments late at night and strangling them with their stockings. He then goes home and strips an adult female doll he’d won at the local arcade and hides it in a drawer that contains one for each murder (the film starts with number eight, whose name, Helen Lawson, had me wishing they’d arrest Neely O’Hara). When he’s not killing, he’s visiting his possessive mother (Ellen Corby) in a nearby nursing home. Meanwhile, the police are desperately trying to solve the case. They stumble on his doll fetish when he throws a victim’s baby doll against the wall. So, they start trying to figure out where he bought it because, I guess, it never occurred to them that the victim might have gotten the doll for herself. But then, these cops are not the sharpest knives in the marquee. One is assigned to surveil the arcade to see if any of the suspects turn up and then goes to dinner while Buono is there. Olivia Benson would have him out pounding a beat in no time.
Topper has a minor cult following in France, a fact derided by Andrew Sarris in his THE AMERICAN CINEMA. But it’s easy to see why they might like him. With the wretched dialog dubbed into French or rendered as subtitles, they could concentrate on the visuals. There are flashes of good filmmaking, mainly when Topper deals with Buono’s world. The police scenes are bland, mostly straight-on two-shots with some occasional deep focus in the squad room. But there’s a lot more panache in Buono’s scenes. The film opens with a shot of a woman undressing as reflected in the killer’s eye. The lighting of these scenes is more evocative, with the camera spying on women through half-open windows and a partially opened closet door. And Buono’s closeups make good use of shadow and light. They’re reminiscent of Laird Cregar’s shots in THE LODGER (1944) and HANGOVER SQUARE (1945). This all creates a clash of two worlds, police work pitted against the dreamlike nightmare of the killer’s life.
That’s underlined by the acting. Buono and Corby treat the pedestrian dialog as though it were Shakespeare. They’re almost compulsively watchable. Grandma Walton elevates crabbiness to almost mythic levels. She’s a nightmare in a hospital bed. And Buono can wipe away lesser actors — and there are a lot of them in this film — with one syllable (his lie detector test borders on the comic with the ways he finds to keep saying “Nope”). He and the director fought a lot over the murder scenes. Buono didn’t want them to be too exploitative. Yet his response when he’s killed a woman is boldly sexual. It’s creepily sexual and really quite daring. There’s a good wise-cracking blonde (Diane Sayer) working at the arcade booth, and James Sikking (later of HILL STREET BLUES and DOOGIE HOWSER, M.D.) turns up effectively as a cheery police sketch artist. But it's really all Buono’s show, with an able assist from Corby.
