A cruel love: The Ruth Ellis story ★★★ ½
“I’m guilty; I’m a little confused. ‘ That’s how Ruth Ellis, a 28-year-old Welsh-born nightclub gas woman, spoke after she fired five bullets in her lover, Racing driver David Black, one Easter Sunday night in London.
The death of Blakely urged a notorious chapter in British legal history and won Ellis who hung the last woman in Britain. Her execution brought the opposition to the death penalty to the boiling point (permanently abolished for murder in 1969) and played a role in the launch of the defense of ‘reduced responsibility’, which enabled the pronunciation of manslaughter.
Lucy Boynton played as Ruth Ellis in a cruel love: the Ruth Ellis StoryCredit: 7 plus
It also brought a light on the disturbing rapid process of convicting Ellis and the treatment of women, especially those in the lower classes. It is the latter that A cruel love: The Ruth Ellis story, ITV’s magnetic, if occasional hollow, four-part work crime drama, enlarged with Swish, hypnotic eloquence.
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Adapted from Carol Ann Lee’s biography, A fine day to hang: the right Ruth Ellis story, The series was shot so nicely that the lighting, set and costume colors and poetic positioning of faces and body turned each frame into an Edward Hopper painting. The camera is either withdrawn for beautiful theater compositions (the watery natural light in the prison of the Ellis, the smoking-filled velvet-joint nightclub where his husbands offered, the ordered establishment of the wooden panel language with a male jury), or extraordinarily close-up.
The Hair’s Breedth’s Away Lens is the reason this series belongs to actor Lucy Boynton (Bohemian Rhapsody). She plays Ellis, a small red lipstick platinum blonde and single-mother-of-two, with a strong and compelling delicacy. There are times to look at this series when I searched her face, his pores millimeters of the camera, for any glitter of the reason why Ellis initially refused to defend herself after her arrest. Boynton’s facial movements are few, yet intensely noticeable, which reveals the inner turmoil and Ellis’s long -term resolution to endure less treatment.
It is clear, if a little out of the series ‘160 minutes’, that Blakely (Laurie Davidson), who meets Ellis at the Little Club in Knightsbridge she managed, is a job. His chaotic presence, which includes repeated beats, portrayed as a privileged, hard drinking and violent manipulator, two years before Ellis shot him. It is clear why the people who could help soften her actions and sentence are everywhere – and equally wrong.