Dance with a Stranger | | Cast : | Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett | | Director : | Mike Newell | | Studio : | Mgm/Ua Studios | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | August 09, 1985 | | DVD Released Date : | September 07, 2004 | | Language : | French (Subtitled), English (Dubbed), Spanish (Subtitled), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 06, 2005 | | Summary | A Disturbing Movie With Extraordinary Acting | Content
 | Ruth Ellis (Miranda Richardson) was a night club hostess in one of London's private clubs. It was a Spring evening in 1954 when David Blakely (Rupert Everett) walked in with some friends. Little more than a year later, Ruth Ellis was hanged for the murder of Blakely. The movie tells the compelling, tawdry, almost inevitable story of what happened.
Ellis was divorced and living with her young son above the club she helped manage. She bleached her hair, knew how to keep men laughing and buying, and was definitely not part of the upper class system. Blakely was a race car driver, wealthy, young, selfish, had the right friends, and had never had to face any real responsibility in his life. With some mixture of lust and need, the two of them instantly became entangled in each others' lives. "Where do you live?" he asks her. "Over the shop," she says. "Can I take you home tonight?" "Yes." Their affair follows a pattern. First lust, then tears, abuse, his forgetting her for a while, her desperation, and lust again. She has one friend, Desmond Cussen (Ian Holm). Cussen loves her but is the type of man who can't quite get up the nerve to kiss her, much less invite her to bed. He trails after her and tries to pick up the pieces. Cussen knows the kind of man Blakely is. "Why can't you leave him alone," he once shouts at Ellis. "He's so involved with himself he can't think of anything else." The results are predictable. Ellis slides further into misery and fixation the more Blakely takes her for granted and forgets about her at times. One night she takes a pistol, follows him to a pub, and when he leaves she carefully puts two bullets in his chest.
The trial was a great event in Britain. It had everything: sex, the class system, a tawdry affair. The legal system couldn't deal with her fast enough. The trial started June 20, 1955. She was hanged July 13. Ruth Ellis was the last woman hanged by the British.
The movie is excellent and the performances are extraordinary. Rupert Everett was 26 when he made the film. He's perfect as the product of a privileged system, so selfish as to be cowardly, so self involved that he misses entirely what he is doing to Ellis, or even care if he did realize. Miranda Richardson at 27 carries the movie. Her performance made her a star. I can't describe what she does except that every word she says and every step she takes just rings true. She is utterly mesmerizing.
This is, in my view, one of the movies that can probably be called great. You'll be thinking about it for some time. The DVD picture looks fine. The only extra is an alternate ending, which is disposable. |
| Rating | | | Date | March 23, 2005 | | Summary | A sensitive treatment of a sad sad story. | Content
| This film was Richardson's first outing as a movie actress and she is outstanding, Everett is also good as the callous playboy, though he has never quite managed to build on his first performance in the way Richardson did. Holme is aslo excellent as the doting "Father" figure.
This is the sad telling of the true story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England, in the mid 1950's.
Ellis was essentially a loving and caring woman with a chequered past and little options for making a living, a woman who would have been highly frowned upon in such conservative times. She met and fell in love with, a rich boy rogue, David Blakely and the film chronicles their destructive and doomed relationship. Not an easy story, Richardson is amazing as the increasingly unhinged Ruth and Everett is the perfect "Bastard".
A worthy watch and an excellent introduction to the talents of Richardson (in my opinoin, she is one of the finest contemparary actresses and could only be rivalled by the likes of Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon).
This film is a very sad tale and to this day the British Judicial system debates whether or not Ellis should have been executed, the majority thinking amongst the British public both then and now is that it was a gross miscarraige of justice.
I have to also say that I cannot understand negative reviews of this film, I can only conclude that such people find the content hard to tolerate which is vaguely understandable, or they just don't have the intellilect to work through the story. |
| Rating | | | Date | February 08, 2005 | | Summary | A Suspicious Woman Pulls The Trigger | Content
| Ruth Ellis was put to death because she was a resentful woman with a gun. She was a girl that had a baby by an American soldier who she claimed was killed the same year her son was born in 1944. In 1950, she married a dentist and had a girl, but that marriage was dissolved in 1953. During that time, she meets gorgeous David Blakey, a racing motorist, and a son of a doctor aged 29.
Ruth being from rocky background begins an ardent love affair with the David who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Love and hate became the core of their relationship, and their affair gave birth to nothing but jealousy. She began dating him while she was still married to the dentist, and David was engaged to another girl. Ruth at first refused to take the affair seriously since he had another woman.
When David suspects or finds out that she sleeps with other men, he becomes outraged and begs her to marry him. She becomes more affectionate, but does not trust him and accuses him of cheating. They have dramatic scenarios such as her throwing him out of her flat in anger and him coming back begging on his knees to marry her. She spies on him while he is with other women, and he brings her flowers at the hospital after he beats her. Eventually the relationship worsens and escalates, and Ruth ends-up supporting much of her rich boyfriend's habits.
Well this goes on with the dark and lustful tension that keeps building up throughout the whole film. Miranda Richardson's performance is just excellent, and it is based on the true story of the last woman to be put to death in England 1954.
It is a very interesting British film noir, so I will not give the whole story away.
|
| Rating | | | Date | October 20, 2004 | | Summary | Beware the passion of a lonely human being ! | Content
| Ruth Ellis is a gentle waiter . She has a son and lives for him and his welfare . But soon she will meet David; a man who will become her only subject of desire and illusion .
And David is just a gigolo without any future . He lives as many people does ; just waiting for the fridayness and have a great fun .
But this encounter with Ruth will arise a opposite passion totally unknown . He will be to her the object of desire but besides of pain and sorrow ; he punishes her and this behavior gradually will carry to the expected ending : this murder became the last execution in the England fifties.
Miranda Richardson has been a very beautiful woman and also a very gifted actress , she has expressive force and presence on the screen. Ruppert Everett plays David in a very credible role .
This film may be well be considered the best british film noir of the eighties .
Extraordinary! |
| Rating | | | Date | September 25, 2004 | | Summary | My son tells me birds eat twice their own weight every day. | Content
| I have seen some bad films in my lifetime, but this film literally takes the cake. Right after watching this film I went over to my wife and asked her if she knew what the film I just watched was all about. She told me that she didn't see it, and I proceeded with a "Well, you probably know more than I." What a horrible film!!
I had no idea what was happening for any of this film. What was the relationship between Holm and Richardson all about? I thought that he was the father of her child, but then he isn't, but then maybe he is ... WE NEED SOME SORT OF CONSISTENCY HERE PEOPLE!!! I understand that this film has some respect to it because it was directed by Mike Newell (of Four Weddings and a Funeral fame), but this film really didn't make any sense to me. Now I watch movies very closely because I don't want to miss anything elaborate, but even if I watched this film for a second time I still think that I wouldn't catch half of it.
This was Richardson's worst role ever. She screamed most of her lines urging me to almost want to use the subtitles. Everett tries too hard to be the clichéd "uncatchable" male figure in this film, but I just didn't see him as the part. Holm, well, if I knew what Holm's role in this film was I would be a better person. It was almost as if he stumbled onto the set by accident and just started acting in some scenes with Richardson and Newell didn't want to take it out.
Nothing was coherent in this film. The acting was horrible, the story was boring, and there was no string tying this film together. Instead what you got was a 1000 piece puzzle where the pieces were all from other puzzles. Nothing seemed to match up. I understand that sometimes it is good to put into film some major events in our world's history, but I am not sure that the last few months of Ruth Ellis (the last woman hung in England) life was exactly what I needed to get through my life. This film was so bad that whenever my cat walked by the television his eyes would water and he would have to claw at his ears to make the vision and sound try to disappear.
I have never ... I mean never experienced a film like this. I am going to end this review now because it is giving me a headache just thinking about it. This film should definitely have a Mr. Yuck sticker on it prior to renting. Also, if you get a petition in the mail shortly, it is going to be from me asking to eliminate weapons of mass destruction and replace them with Dance with a Stranger. It would cause the same amount of damage ... PEEE-EW!! In the words of Jay Sherman ... the God, the man, the myth ... "IT STINKS".
Grade: * out of ***** |
|
