The Boston Strangler (1968) Queer Film C-

Director: Richard Fleischer

Although The Boston Strangler belongs to that liminal grey area of queer cinema, it is, nevertheless, unmistakably saturated with the gay slurs, stereotypes, and panic that Hollywood deployed whenever police procedurals dipped into the “demimonde.” As the Boston PD scours the city for the serial killer in the years 1962-64 (Tony Curtis, whose brave, career‑pivoting performance remains the film’s one true asset), the script treats queer people as a kind of human debris—objects to be interrogated, mocked, or dismissed.

Hurd Hatfield, a long way from his Dorian Gray days, has a striking scene in a gay bar where Henry Fonda’s detective questions him. Hatfield plays it with weary dignity, but the film gives him no refuge: he’s been fingered by two viciously drawn lesbian characters, played by Eve Collyer and Gwyda Donhowe, in a gay‑turning‑on‑gay moment so bizarre it borders on the surreal. One hopes both actresses lived long enough to regret ever stepping in front of the camera for this.

Edward Anhalt’s screenplay—astonishingly, from the Oscar‑winning writer of Becket—is so casually homophobic it becomes a kind of time capsule of contempt. The language is ugly, the attitudes uglier, and the film’s sense of moral superiority makes it all the more grating. Richard Fleischer directs with an overreliance on split screens, a stylistic tic that quickly becomes a distraction rather than an innovation. The result is a nasty piece of filmmaking: voyeuristic not in the cinematic sense, but in the prurient, peeping‑through‑the‑keyhole sense. You leave the film feeling complicit, and not in a productive way.

To make matters worse, very little of what the film presents as fact actually happened. Its claim to docudrama authenticity is as flimsy as its ethics.

Adapted from Gerold Frank’s book, The Boston Strangler remains a grim artifact of its era—ugly, sensationalistic, and revealing in all the wrong ways.

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https://thebrownees.net/85-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1968/

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