Cheryl Bradshaw (Anna Kendrick) is a struggling actress in 1978 Hollywood. When she's persuaded by her agent to appear on The Dating Game (Blind Date for UK readers) her choice of bachelors is predictably disappointing. Bachelor #1 (Matt Visser) can barely string a sentence together and Bachelor #2 (Jedidah Goodacre) is a common or garden sleazeball. But Bachelor #3 seems alright. He's the funniest and the most charming, he knows "what girls are for", and he's got all the right cultural references.
The problem is that Bachelor #3 is Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) and we, the viewers, know that he's already murdered at least two women. One unnamed young woman in Wyoming two years earlier (who opens up to him as he takes photos of her only for him, in return, to strangle her to death) and another, Charlie (Kathryn Gallagher), in New York in 1971 whom he murders after helping her move into her new flat.
Woman of the Hour (directed by Kendrick herself, written by Ian McDonald, and now available to watch on Netflix) tells the story of both Alcala and Bradhsaw and though it's a slighter film than I'd expected it packs quite a powerful punch as it excoriates the horrendous misogyny of the time and shows how that allowed for violent murderers like Alcala to escape the consequences of their actions for so long.
It's a era of heightened chauvinism. When Cheryl explains she won't do nude scenes she's told "I'm sure they're fine" - and nobody can doubt that 'they' is a reference to her boobs, and it's a time when women are told not to be too smart so as not to intimidate men. Advice that Cheryl, brilliantly, ignores.
Other women are simply ignored. Like Laura (Nicolette Robinson) who's in the audience for the Dating Game and recognises Alcala as the man she saw with a friend of hers just before she was murdered. The trouble is nobody, no men certainly, want to listen to Laura. Which puts Cheryl (who, of course, has chosen Alcala as her date) in imminent danger.
An imminent danger she soon begins to sense. But what will she do about it? And how will he react to whatever she does about it? And how will she react to his reaction? It's not just the (male) behaviour that's of its time. Woman of the Hour comes good with period detail. The cars, the clothes, and the hair all reek of the 70s but perhaps nothing does so more than Dating Game host Ed Burke - based on Jim Lange, the real life host (Tony Hale).
In most films, he'd be one of the creepiest characters in it but, obviously, Alcala owns that title here and Zovatto is great at showing how a supposed charmer can turn evil very quickly, Kendrick, also, is excellent as usual, and props should also go to Pete Holmes as Cheryl's friend Terry who appears to harbour an unrequited - or at least not fully requited - love for Cheryl and Autumn Best as Amy, another young lady who is unfortunate enough to fall into Rodney Alcala's toxic orbit.
I don't know if the real life Alcala was a fan of Roman Polanski or if that's simply the film maker's way of reminding us of another powerful man who pretty much got away with sexually abusing and raping women and girls but it's a handy reminder of how prevalent this kind of behaviour once was and, in some places, still is. Woman of the Hour is a creepy, tense, film but it's also a reminder to anyone who needs it that when women talk of dangerous men they should be listened to.
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