Thirty-five years after it vanished, The Black Panther – Ian Merrick's 1977 film about serial killer Donald Neilson – emerges as a gripping and highly responsible true-crime movie
After nearly four decades, Donald Neilson, aka the Black Panther, seems in retrospect like some figment of the phantasmagoric north England of the 1970s, the gothic, occult north of David Peace and the Red Riding trilogy. His crimes – countless burglaries, three murders (of village postmasters), and the kidnapping of teenage heiress Lesley Whittle – took him on meticulously planned nocturnal peregrinations across the north and the Midlands against the unfolding background of the three-day week, the oil crisis, and the Ira's first sustained mainland bombing campaign. (Or, if you prefer, between the decline of glam-rock and the rise of punk.) The dead years, in other words, a leaden age.
Neilson's arrest in December 1975 came just two months after the apprehension of another largely forgotten apparition of the period,...
After nearly four decades, Donald Neilson, aka the Black Panther, seems in retrospect like some figment of the phantasmagoric north England of the 1970s, the gothic, occult north of David Peace and the Red Riding trilogy. His crimes – countless burglaries, three murders (of village postmasters), and the kidnapping of teenage heiress Lesley Whittle – took him on meticulously planned nocturnal peregrinations across the north and the Midlands against the unfolding background of the three-day week, the oil crisis, and the Ira's first sustained mainland bombing campaign. (Or, if you prefer, between the decline of glam-rock and the rise of punk.) The dead years, in other words, a leaden age.
Neilson's arrest in December 1975 came just two months after the apprehension of another largely forgotten apparition of the period,...
- 6/6/2012
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
★★★★☆ New to Dual Format DVD/Blu-ray courtesy of the BFI Flipside stable, Ian Merrick's serial killer drama The Black Panther (1977) was hounded out of cinemas upon its original release thanks to a media-driven witch hunt, appalled by the film's non-sensationalist, clinical exploration of real-life murderer Donald Neilson. Comparable with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), though marginally the inferior film, The Black Panther represents the very best of 1970s British filmmaking - and the very worst of humanity in its titular psychopath.
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- 5/29/2012
- by CineVue
- CineVue
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