DB7

Hi all, just had a mail from a production company looking for a list of fact or loosely-based crime thrillers for use in a CH4 doc.

Any additions to this list would be appreciated:
Ordinary Decent Criminal
Robbery
Jack the Ripper
The Young Poisoner's Handbook
The Krays
Wanted for Murder
The Great Riviera Bank Robbery
10 Rillington Place

noglea

The General (based on the same story as Ordinary Decent Criminal)
Veronica Guerin & When the Sky Falls (both based on same story)
Buster
Prisoner of Rio
Let Him Have It
Resurrection Man (fictional version of Shankhill Butchers)
McVicar

noglea

Charlie

noglea

Intimate Relations
Another Life
Yield to the Night & Dance With a Stranger (same story)

noglea

Dr. Crippen

dylan

Brighton Rock (based on the Brighton Racetrack wars of the 30s)
The Criminal (Stanley Baker's character very loosely based on Albert Dimes)
A is for Acid (Martin Clunes as John Haigh)
Performance and Get Carter (based on the Kray empire of the 60s)
Essex Boys

DB7

That's great, cheers folks.

dylan

A couple more:

The Siege of Sydney Street and Hitchcock's fictional version, The Man Who Knew Too Much ( 1934 version).

penfold

The Lodger is inspired by Jack The Ripper; who appears as a character in Pandora's Box; further back, real crime films were very popular in the 1900's...Charles Peace; one of the Mitchell and Kenyon films was about a bank fraud, forget the name; The Dreyfus case was one of the very first subjects, back in the 1890's; Edison faked the execution of an assassin; and so on.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Aenima

What about James Bolam playing Harrod Shipman in the ITV drama. It's a TV production I know.

I'll 'av 'arf

jacobean

Villain with Richard Burton

(Must be based on Ronnie Kray - homosexual psychopath with mother fixation)

jacobean

Ohh and another - although scraping the barrel maybe
The Mackintosh Man - I heard that this was very loosely based on the 'springing' of George Blake from jail

Kurious Oranj

The Black Panther (1977) - Ian Merrick's excellent depiction of Donald Neilson's crimes in the Midlands during the mid seventies.

Billy Liar

A Sense of Freedom - based on the life story of Jimmy Boyle, the 'capping' scene stayed with me for many years.

samkydd

Yes I saw this film in the 80s on VHS and I think Donald Sumpter played the lead. The case was still fresh in people's minds at the time it came out in the 70s, but I've no idea how factual the film was because I didn't read up on the original case. I think Lesley Whittle was one of The Black Panther's victims and she was found in some drainage pipe or tank, pretty horrendous how she died.

Others based on real cases were made many years/decades after the original cases, like The Ripper and Christie so there's a good chance that some of the real stories were corrupted with a bit of folklore.

The Krays film wasn't really very factual at all and having read accounts by rival gang contemporaries, Billy Webb for example in Running With the Krays, and The Profession of Violence account by Jonathan Pearson it would seem that their almost celebrity status was cultivated by themselves, and the "it wuz better round 'ere when the twins wuz abaht" myth wasn't really the case at all! However in later years the twins became media darlings and many people jumped on the glorification bandwagon, the Krays' gangland atrocities conveniently forgotten and no doubt put down to laddish high spirits! Or even jolly old Cockerney inter-borough rivalry!

I would say that the film was based more on the Monty Python sketch Ethel the Frog, featuring Doug and Dinsdale Pyrana (on whom Hale and Pace based their entire career), Vince Snetterton Lewis, Luigi Vercotti, and detective genius Harry "Snapper" Organs from the Yard!

"...the chairman of Littlewoods stores made a Keynote speech!"