What Myra Hindley hoped to achieve by her collaboration with Duncan Staff for Modern Times (BBC2) is a mystery. Greater public sympathy for her appeal against continued imprisonment? A fuller understanding of what could drive a young woman to what she did? Whatever the intentions, the results could only serve to remind all and sundry of the overwhelming horror of the moors murders. The careful planning and execution of each crime was described alongside extracts from the 150 pages of Hindley's letters to Staff - and the yawning discrepancy between the cold facts, and Hindley's recollection of them, was there for all to see.
Staff's film was impressive in its objectivity. "It is always wrong not to seek to understand," said crime expert Brian Masters at the start of the film, "but to understand is not necessarily to condone or forgive". The focus of the next 20 minutes was on Hindley's relationship with Ian Brady, a charismatic sadist who, Hindley stressed in her letters, corrupted her both sexually and morally. Again and again she cast Brady as the homicidal pervert, herself as his brainwashed disciple - if only I hadn't met him, ran the constant refrain, all would have been well. "All I'd ever hoped for from a relationship with him was marriage and children", Hindley said, plumbing new depths of disingenuousness.
Hindley had no control over the editorial content of Modern Times, as was clear from the fact that, after this bout of special pleading, Staff's film shifted focus to the murders. As the stark narrative of first victim Pauline Reade's abduction and death unfolded, Hindley's excuses seemed transparent. Brady had beaten Hindley up and threatened to kill her grandmother in the days before the murder, and so "I sacrificed Pauline so that my own family would be safe". Not only did she stand by while Brady killed the girl - Hindley went home with Brady, shared a romantic evening on the sofa and, four months later, went out looking for a second victim.
And so it went on, Hindley's credibility wearing thinner and thinner with each crime. Faced with the prospect of writing about the murder of fourth victim Lesley Ann Downey, whose cries for mercy were tape recorded, Hindley pleaded that the memory was still too painful for her to go into detail. Psychiatrist Malcolm MacCulloch, who has heard the tape, said that there was "no sympathy" in Hindley's recorded voice. Finally, the film's big question - was Hindley a brainwashed accomplice or an active perpetrator - was answered. Another of Brady's disciples, Hindley's brother-in-law David Smith, was in the house when the final victim, Edward Evans, was battered to death. Unlike Hindley, he lost little time in going to the police.
Duncan Staff, to his credit, resisted the temptation to indulge in too much discussion of the rights and wrongs of Hindley's current situation. He ended on a canny note, reminding us that any question of her freedom is academic as she would very likely be murdered within days of release. Hindley's final remarks - that it would have been better if she'd hanged - at last had the ring of conviction.
While Modern Times: Myra Hindley was an exemplary film in many ways, it made for profoundly uncomfortable viewing. Why was it made at all? And why was it screened just now, when Hindley is once again challenging the home secretary's right to keep her in prison? Yes, it's extraordinary that Duncan Staff corresponded with Britain's most hated person, and fascinating to pick apart the flimsiness of Hindley's "oh my God what have I done?" routine. But beyond that, did the film add substantially to an understanding of what makes people murder, as it set out to do? Of course not, because Hindley's testimony is unreliable, the facts of the case still too horrifying to comprehend in a 50-minute format.
TV is always proving the old adage that if something can be done, it will be done - and in this case the fact that Staff had Hindley's "confessions" in his hand proved too much for BBC2 to resist. The material is astonishing, but why make it into television, where it nestled uneasily between Home Front: Inside Out and The Fast Show? However intelligent Staff's film, it could only serve to whip up hatred against Hindley - and hatred, as Hindley's former prison chaplain pointed out, corrodes the soul.
Rupert Smith (The Guardian, 2 March 2000)
Информация по комментариям в разработке