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Dance with a Stranger Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 7 Reviews)

A Disturbing Movie With Extraordinary Acting
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.

Beware the passion of a lonely human being !
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!

A Suspicious Woman Pulls The Trigger
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.

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