Rating: 
Summary: DEATH AT THE TOP.
Review: A WORTHY sister to Susan Hayward's "I Want to Live" both based on fact, this scorching look at 'fatal attraction' across the Class line will stay with you for a long long time. Depressing? Of course! MIRANDA RICHARDSON as the much abused real life Ruth Ellis glistens in the sultry expose of 'Life Reaching for the Top' - you just cannot take your eyes off this woman as she battles through this hellish liason with the upper-class David [another brilliant turn by Rupert Everett]. One almost applauds when she is driven to the inevitable conclusion of the affair, but it gets even worse ..... Yes, it's a shocking ride though this mangled life. This IS the versatile and highly gifted Ms. Richardson's movie. Other viewings? "Tom and Viv", "Enchanted April", "Damage".
Rating:
Summary: Some dance to remember.
Review: Before Brit director Mike Newell became famous for rom-coms starring Hugh Grant, he directed this intense little masterpiece called *Dance with a Stranger*, based on the true-life story of the Last Woman Hanged in England, Ruth Ellis. Firstly, one is shocked to discover that they were still HANGING people in England 50 years ago! -- in the progressive United States, we had moved on to electric chairs and other inventive methods for dispatching our undesirables. Onward and upward! At any rate, this film is an engrossing experience, with dynamite acting from the British Meryl Streep, Miranda Richardson. (Another shocking thing to consider is that this was her first starring role in the movies! She carries herself like a 20-year screen veteran, here.) A very young Rupert Everett acquits himself well as the lover that Ellis eventually guns down. He plays the part with a curious mixture of viciousness and sleepiness. And Ian Holm finds himself in the type of role he was born to play; that is, the repressed, lip-gnawing little man on the sidelines. His character is a torch-carrying friend of Ellis, as equally obsessed with her as she is with the Everett character. (The Everett character is equally obsessed with himself.) There's some social commentary here, if one cares to search for it: it's a feminist saga by its very nature, in which the heroine serves as either a) a repository for Everett's "jam", or b) a punching bag . . . and sometimes as a combination of the two. As you might imagine, Ellis finally gets her fill of this treatment, but don't expect a feel-good, you-go-girl speech as a side-dish for the vengeful main course. This is a woman in living damnation. She's not Susan Sarandon with an accent. There's also a nod toward the caste system in post-war Britain. Ruth Ellis was little better than a hooker, one of those "very friendly" bar-maids who indifferently sings torch songs and keeps the gentlemen company. The Everett character, despite his moonlighting as a race-car driver, came from a family whose home in the country resembled Blenheim Palace. And Everett's comfortably bourgeois friends can muster only contempt for this woman, who -- to them -- seems no better than a tarty and shrill Marilyn Monroe look-alike. Yah yah yah, the social commentary is there, all right; but the movie isn't terribly interested in it. You're better off just watching Richardson portray this woman whose life spirals vertiginously out of control. One senses that she has been waiting all along for a chance to self-destruct: it's not an easy life, coming home to your young son reeking of gin and cigarette smoke. As she slowly but surely turns into a masochistic, lust-soaked monster, pulling down three different people (including her own son) into the abyss right along with her, we can only watch with appalled fascination. I highly recommend this ice-cold film.
Rating: 
Summary: My son tells me birds eat twice their own weight every day.
Review: 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 *****
Rating:
Summary: British Class System, Murder and Most of All: Obsessions!
Review: I love this movie. I saw it first back in 1985 when it first played in the art house theaters in the USA and have seen it a few times since. I believe it was the first time I'd ever seen Richardson or Everett in anything and they both completely knocked me out. When I saw Everett in "Ideal Husband" last year, I didn't even realize it was the same actor at first. He's that good. When you immediately recongize actors doing the same role, year after year, it is a bad sign. This is a notorious British murder case that ended in Ruth Ellis's (Richardson's) execution in Britian for murdering her lover. The thing that always stands out to me in this movie is how obsessed these two become with their sick relationship with one another. This is something everyone can relate to because everyone knows someone in a sick relationship. Many people have even been in sick relationships themselves. Because neither character can break the strangulating force of their combined obsession, the obsession snares and turns on both of them. I also thought that it was pretty effectively conveyed throughout that she just wasn't good enough for him and didn't meet any minimal standards of British respectability. By any objective standard, however, he was not a laudatory individual either and would be easy to classify as big trouble to know or get involved with personally. Yet the country had more sympathy for him. I think Ellis's being considered rather trashy was also why it was so easy to execute her in Britain. Had she been a member of the aristocracy and/or upper class, a different movie would have had to be written. He probably would have been falling all over himself trying to marry her then even if she otherwise remained exactly the same and with the same physical appearance. Then she would have been merely a British eccentric.
Rating:
Summary: British Class System, Murder and Most of All: Obsessions!
Review: I love this movie. I saw it first back in 1985 when it first played in the art house theaters in the USA and have seen it a few times since. I believe it was the first time I'd ever seen Richardson or Everett in anything and they both completely knocked me out. When I saw Everett in "Ideal Husband" last year, I didn't even realize it was the same actor at first. He's that good. When you immediately recongize actors doing the same role, year after year, it is a bad sign. This is a notorious British murder case that ended in Ruth Ellis's (Richardson's) execution in Britian for murdering her lover. The thing that always stands out to me in this movie is how obsessed these two become with their sick relationship with one another. This is something everyone can relate to because everyone knows someone in a sick relationship. Many people have even been in sick relationships themselves. Because neither character can break the strangulating force of their combined obsession, the obsession snares and turns on both of them. I also thought that it was pretty effectively conveyed throughout that she just wasn't good enough for him and didn't meet any minimal standards of British respectability. By any objective standard, however, he was not a laudatory individual either and would be easy to classify as big trouble to know or get involved with personally. Yet the country had more sympathy for him. I think Ellis's being considered rather trashy was also why it was so easy to execute her in Britain. Had she been a member of the aristocracy and/or upper class, a different movie would have had to be written. He probably would have been falling all over himself trying to marry her then even if she otherwise remained exactly the same and with the same physical appearance. Then she would have been merely a British eccentric.
Rating:
Summary: A Cinematic Masterpiece You must See
Review: If there is one problem with Dance With a Stranger it has to be that inevitably one becomes so mesmerized with the performance of Miranda Richardson there is a danger of missing the other performances. The nuances of her character's brittle emotions are perfectly pitched with the arch of penciled eyebrows, the tightening of blood-red lips, and the lisp of her tense voice. A total victim of her own weakness she is drawn into an emotionally and physically abusive relationship, but is powerless to escape. Even under the wing of a man who truly loves her, she throws his devotion aside in a reckless and indeed masochistic spiral. In Richardson's potrayal Ruth Ellis seems almost to crave the violence and mercurial passion, watch her eyes and face as Blakely hits her. The movie drips ambience, wonderfully creating the London nightclub scene in the early 50's. Costumes and makeup are impeccable. Superlative performances from Ian Holm and Rupert Everett, and indeed all members of the cast. Mike Newell has taken a wonderful slice of an evocative era and portrayed a tragedy that we must hope, could never have reached such an awful conclusion today. Breathtaking.
Rating:
Summary: Beware the passion of a lonely human being !
Review: 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:
Summary: A Suspicious Woman Pulls The Trigger
Review: 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:
Summary: Flawlessly Cast And Expertly Directed
Review: This a rivoting story, made all the more incredible given the fact that it is based on the true-life events surrounding the life of Ruth Ellis, the last women to be hanged in the UK. The casting of Miranda Richardson as the love obsessed, call girl in a seedy London hostess club is inspiried to say the least. The intensity of her character in all its frailty and flaws is meticulously portrayed by Richardson. As she endures disappointment and humiliation at the hands of her young lover, David Blakley, (Mike Newell) her obsessive love grows to a heated frenzy, as she is compelled to distroy the object of her obsession. Rubert Everett deserves kudos for his flawless recreation of the seedy London night-life as seen through the eyes of the denizens of the hostesss club. The overall effect I felt in watching Dance With Stranger was like unwittingly being pulled into a strange and troubling atmosphere...Almost like being in a place where the undercurrent of danger and intrigue have a grasp on you and you can not let go. I've seen this move four times and find it fresh and rewarding with each repeated viewing.
Rating:
Summary: This is a seductive work that propelled me into another time
Review: This film is one of a few that had me mesmerized.Miranda Richardson should have received every award that is out there.I am sympathetic to Ruth Ellis plight.Everett was so convincing as playboy Blakely that I wanted to shoot him myself!I do not condone murder, but human beings commit murder for less reason than Ruth Ellis did. I saw Miranda Richardson in "Damage"with Jeremy Irons, and the character was so different, I was amazed!This is a piece that provides an insight into the so called fatal attraction.I do not know the full story of Ruth Ellis, and David Blakely, but this masterpiece turns a terrible tragedy for everyone involved, into a cinematic journey of absolute delight!
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