05-03-2025
A Cruel Love, review: Lucy Boynton's Ruth Ellis is less criminal, more feminist hero
'A woman like her, they were never going to let her off,' says the barrister in A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story (ITV1). Ellis was a nightclub manager, a former escort, a neglectful mother, a bottle blonde. She was also a domestic abuse victim. The man she murdered, David Blakely, was a violent womaniser who had recently caused her miscarriage by punching her in the stomach.
If the case were heard today, she could plead diminished responsibility; the book on which this drama is based, Carol Ann Lee's A Fine Day For a Hanging, argues that she was suffering from PTSD. But this was 1955. A jury found Ellis guilty in under 15 minutes, and she became the last woman in Britain to be hanged.
Then again, should the jury really have found otherwise? Ellis shot Blakely four times. He went down after the first shot, and she fired the other three bullets at close range while he lay helpless on the ground. At her trial, she coolly said: 'It's obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.'
It's a complicated case, and A Cruel Love reopens the debate over whether or not the verdict was justified. It's a thought-provoking drama powered by a strong central performance from Lucy Boynton, who seems to offer little more than clipped tones and a gimlet glare in the early scenes but comes into her own in the final episode as the minutes tick by until the execution and Ellis tries to suppress her fear. Those last moments are a horror.
The story has been told several times, including in Mike Newell's excellent 1985 film, Dance With a Stranger. The key difference between these two is the role of Desmond Cussen. In the earlier telling (played by Ian Holm) Cussen was an essentially benign figure, hopelessly in love with Ellis and concerned with protecting her. Mark Stanley plays him in the new version as a weasel who gives Ellis the loaded gun and ultimately betrays her.
Toby Jones is here as John Bickford, the doleful solicitor who tries in vain to convince Ellis to reveal Cussen's involvement. He gets the key speech, when he says that Ellis represents everything that the Establishment fears: an ambitious woman with no respect for class or sexual boundaries. In a neat bit of casting, Nigel Havers plays his real-life grandfather, who was the trial judge in the case.
What the drama lacks is chemistry between Ellis and Blakely (Laurie Davidson). In the film, Miranda Richarson and Rupert Everett had it in spades, making it clear why neither party could stay away from this toxic relationship. This Blakely is forgettable, but perhaps that's intentional in a drama that wants to reframe the case with Ellis as the victim.
