Director: Richard Fleischer
BOTTOM LINE: Released the same year as “The Detective,” “The Boston Strangler” is another serial killer movie that, although not part of Queer Cinema per se, is filled with “queers” and “faggots” as the police comb the gay demimonde in search of the strangler (Tony Curtis, whose brave performance is film’s only redeeming feature). Hurd Hatfield, a long way from his Dorian Gray days, has a good scene in a gay bar where Henry Fonda is questioning him. He has been fingered by two nasty dykes played by Eve Collyer and Gwyda Donhowe, in a gay-turning-on-gay scene that has to be seen to be believed – let’s hope both actresses lived to regret ever making this movie. The screenplay by Oscar-winner Edward Anhalt (“Becket”) is so nonchalantly homophobic it makes you glad you live in a more enlightened era. Richard Fleischer directs with so many split screens it’s distracting. It’s a nasty piece of filmmaking, voyeuristic, but not in the cinematic sense. It makes you feel like a peeping tom! It makes you feel dirty.
STREAMING: AMAZON PRIME AND APPLE TV+
https://thebrownees.net/sixty-five-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1967
https://thebrownees.net/sixty-five-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1967-table-summary
https://thebrownees.net/fifty-two-post-hays-code-queer-films-released-in-the-decade-1967-1976
