Dr. Crippen. The brick was loose.
Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard bent down and carefully removed it from the cellar floor. Ten minutes later, he sat on a pile of earth and stared in disgust at the putrid and dismembered remains of Belle Crippen. Some months later, Belle’s husband, Dr. Hawley Crippen, was brought to trial for her murder. The penny press played him up as Britain’s own Bluebeard, and the scandal provided some of the least savory sensations of the Edwardian era. Dr. Crippen was convicted, and on Nov. 23, 1910, he went to the gallows, protesting his innocence.
Was Dr. Crippen telling the truth? This tidy thriller makes a fascinating case that he was. With considerable acuteness Director Robert Lynn demonstrates that murder can sometimes be understood as a species of double suicide, that sometimes in moral truth the victim is a killer and the killer a victim.
Dr. Crippen emerges as one of those improbable figures that hold the headlines of the British penny-dreadful press. He is a poor man’s pill-pusher, a sallow runt with “codfish eyes” and a large compensatory mustache, which doesn’t impress his wife. “You’re not a man!” she hoots at him. “Go clean the lodger’s boots!” And while her husband cleans the lodger’s boots, she nibbles the lodger’s ear. After several years of playing the cuckold, creepy little Crippen dares at last to play the man—with a pretty young typist (Samantha Eggar).
Belle (Coral Browne) demands that he come back to her, and gets so importunate he gives her a sedative. Absentmindedly, without really meaning to, he gives her much too much. She dies, a victim of what might be called a Freudian sleep. The audience is left with the impression that Belle was practically begging to be murdered, and that Dr. Crippen, as usual, was just too weak to say no.
The doctor is portrayed with formidable skill by Britain’s Donald Pleasence. Fans of British films have long been aware of the unpleasant presence of Pleasence, and he is remembered by Broadway audiences as the transcendental tramp in The Caretaker. In most of his roles, Pleasence resembles something dragged unwillingly out of a drainpipe. As Dr. Crippen, he contrives to look like something sculptured in grey JellO.
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