True story of The Last Woman to Be Hanged in England, a "nightclub hostess" (read "tart") named Ruth Ellis, who shot her high-born lover in the mid-1950s. Although the sympathies of the filmmakers are quite certainly anti-capital punishment and pro-feminist (the screenwriter is Shelagh Delaney of A Taste of Honey, the director is Mike Newell of heretofore nothing special), their handling of the case is dispassionate in the best scientific manner. And best artistic manner, too. The protagonist makes no ready martyr or avenging angel or other type of hero-figure; she is too self-destructive and self-deceptive for that, and even her decisive last act lacks self-awareness. The viewer who wants something "positive," not something neutral, who wants prescription, not description, will find cold comfort here. The absolute reality of the overall context is crucial to the film's central problem: how to make believable what makes no sense. And in that respect the film is a triumph of conjecture (as well as of period production). Its main avenue to credibility, or at least to internal consistency, is simple repetition. Each of the three principals (the woman, one faithless lover, and one faithful one) is as driven and obsessive as the next: credibility by generality. And the story would best be described as viciously cyclical. Too few works of fiction, perhaps with an overawareness of the audience as backseat drivers or vicarious participants or whatever, are willing to reproduce human behavior in all its awesome irrationality. Perhaps Dance with a Stranger gains courage by being partly a work of fact. In any case its deviation from logic and good sense, aside from its perfect believability, is mystifying, suspenseful, gripping. This is one way to revive that most basic narrative interest in What Happens Next. With Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett, and Ian Holm. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd