The Boston Strangler

The Boston Strangler (1968) is a crime thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Director Richard Fleischer adapted Gerold Frank's account of the real killings that shook Boston between 1962 and 1964, casting Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda in a film that refuses easy answers.

Eleven women murdered over eighteen months, no pattern, almost no physical evidence. Henry Fonda plays investigator John Bottomly running out of leads — the case gets so desperate they bring in a psychic. Then Curtis arrives as the suspected killer, and the film pivots: it stops being a whodunit and becomes something stranger, a portrait of a man who apparently didn't know what he was doing.

Fleischer shot it in a then-unusual split-screen style, several angles running in parallel, which gives the picture the unnerving feel of surveillance footage. For 1968, that was genuinely unsettling. Stream The Boston Strangler (1968) online on iFILM.