I watched this yesterday, knowing nothing about the actual crime, other than that there have been numerous filmings of similar incidents including one episode of PBS's Mystery back in 1979.

This film follows the true story of Dr. Crippen, a US born homeopath as opposed to MD, who emigrated to England along with his second wife, Cora, a music hall performer. He was able to find employment as a distributor of patent medicines. The marriage was an unhappy one with Crippen being a milquetoast passive fellow and his wife being very outgoing but frustrated because her music hall career never took off in England. She began a series of affairs with people in what we now call vaudeville, and Dr. Crippen began an affair with a young typist in his office, Ethel Le Neve. Both Crippen and his wife knew about the other's affairs, neither had much interest in the other at this point, yet both apparently resented the other's unfaithfulness. Then one day Cora disappears without a word to her friends in England, and the friends are suspicious, especially when Crippen moves Ethel into his house and she's out and about wearing Cora's jewelry. The police investigate and complications ensue in this story of true crime or at least true jurisprudence.

The film is black and white, which was still done in 1963, and that adds to its period feel. Its style is semi-documentary, much in the same manner that "A Night To Remember" was done about the sinking of the Titanic. The facts are adhered to where known, but there are fictitious characters and conversations to pad the proceedings.

The end has a completely fictitious conversation that occurs between Crippen and an official of the prison on the day of the latter's hanging. In it he confesses to accidentally killing Cora when he gave her a normal dose of sedative. He does confess to disposing of the body, but said he never explained himself because he wanted Ethel to continue to love him and not be disappointed in him. He said seeing a look of disappointment in her face would have been worse than the gallows.

What makes this film fascinating actually has nothing to do with the production. In 2007 DNA tests were made on the "mass of flesh" found buried in the basement of the Crippen home that was the only non-circumstantial evidence that linked Crippen to any crime. The flesh was found to be from someone male who was not a genetic match to Cora Crippen's family tree. Furthermore in 1920 a singer was registered as living with Cora's sister in New York of the name Belle Rose. Records show that the same woman entered the US through Ellis Island from Bermuda in 1910 shortly after Mrs. Crippen disappeared. Cora Crippen's stage name in the United States had been Belle Elmore.

Hawley Harvey Crippen has gone down in history as one of the most notorious murderers in British history, although he was neither a serial killer like Jack the Ripper or the Moors Murderers nor a powerful crime lord like the Kray brothers. He was hanged for the murder of his wife whom he poisoned so that he could be with his attractive, much younger, mistress Ethel Le Neve. There were probably many similar domestic murders in Victorian and Edwardian Britain; what made Crippen so famous was probably his dramatic attempt to escape to his native America with Ethel and the part modern technology (or what was then modern technology) played in their arrest aboard a ship in Canadian waters. (Crippen had been recognised from newspaper photographs by the ship's captain, who telegraphed his suspicions by wireless to Scotland Yard).

Mrs Crippen's real name was Kunigunde Mackamotski, but she later changed this to Corrine or Cora Henrietta Turner and also used the stage name Belle Elmore. (She was a music hall artiste). In the film she is always referred to as "Belle", although in private life she seems to have preferred "Cora". Her husband has gone down in history as "Dr Crippen", although this is not strictly correct, as his qualifications from the Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College did not allow him to practise medicine in Britain, where he worked, among other things, as a distributor of patent medicines. In the film, however, it is implied that he is a GP.

The film follows the facts of the case fairly closely, although there are occasional divergences; Crippen and Ethel are shown as being tried together but in reality they were tried separately, Ethel's trial taking place after Crippen's had been concluded. (She was charged with being an "accessory after the facts" to murder, so it made sense to hold two separate trials. Had Crippen been acquitted, there would have been no charge for Ethel to answer). Crippen and his wife were both American by birth, but they are played here with British accents; unlike many British film-makers from this period the producers were clearly not interested in bringing in Hollywood stars to increase the film's appeal at the American box-office. Or perhaps they could not find Hollywood stars who were interested in playing a notorious murderer and his shrewish wife.

There are two excellent performances from Donald Pleasence as Crippen and Coral Browne as Belle, who combine to provide a striking portrait of a disastrously unsuccessful marriage. Browne plays Belle as a crude, vulgar and sexually promiscuous middle-aged woman, no longer attractive although she may have been so in the past. We get some idea of her character when she sings one of her music hall songs in which she declares that, although she is not a "one-man woman", anyone who loves her must be a "one-woman man", and it is quite obvious that this applies as much to the real Belle as it does to her stage persona. She delights in insulting and humiliating her husband, often in front of friends and acquaintances, and cuckolds him with their lodgers and with her music-hall colleagues. Despite her own infidelities she is offended by her husband's affair with Ethel and by the fact that he no longer wishes to sleep with her- not because she is sexually attracted to him but because she cannot bear the idea of any man not being sexually attracted to the great Belle Elmore. (For some reason, Belle always calls her husband "Peter", but Ethel calls him by his real name, Hawley).

Pleasence's Crippen is outwardly a quiet little worm of a man who will meekly accept all the humiliations which his overbearing wife loads upon him, but, as they say, even a worm will turn, and Crippen gradually begins to stand up to Belle's bluster. The one acting contribution I felt was weak came from Samantha Eggar as Ethel, as she did little to suggest just why such a beautiful young woman should have fallen so deeply in love with such an unprepossessing and physically unattractive older man. Although Ethel Le Neve was found not guilty of being an accessory to Belle's murder, I suspect that in real life she was not as sweet and innocent as Eggar makes her seem here.

At the end of the film Crippen claims that he did not intend to kill Belle but accidentally gave her an overdose of a sedative he was using (without her knowledge or consent) to calm her aggressive nature. Similar claims have been made on his behalf by commentators on the case, but he never raised this claim at the trial. Perhaps preferred to gamble on the possibility of being acquitted altogether than to raise what would effectively have been a defence of "not guilty to murder, guilty to manslaughter". Although manslaughter did not carry the death penalty, it carried the possibility of a long prison sentence which would have separated Crippen from his beloved Ethel.

Unlike most crime movies, films like this one which recreate real-life crimes from the past are not really "thrillers"; most of the audience will be well aware of Crippen's story so his eventual conviction and execution will come as no surprise. Such films can, however, shed light on the underlying pressures and psychological factors which lead to crime. 7/10