The Black Panther 1977 BrRip Mp4 Lee1001
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075764/ 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Panther_(1977_film)
Thirty-five years after it vanished, The Black Panther – Ian Merrick's 1977 film about serial killer Donald Neilson – emerges as a gripping and highly responsible true-crime movie.
 
After nearly four decades, Donald Neilson, aka the Black Panther, seems in retrospect like some figment of the phantasmagoric north England of the 1970s, the gothic, occult north of David Peace and the Red Riding trilogy. His crimes – countless burglaries, three murders (of village postmasters), and the kidnapping of teenage heiress Lesley Whittle – took him on meticulously planned nocturnal peregrinations across the north and the Midlands against the unfolding background of the three-day week, the oil crisis, and the IRA's first sustained mainland bombing campaign. (Or, if you prefer, between the decline of glam-rock and the rise of punk.) The dead years, in other words, a leaden age.
Neilson's arrest in December 1975 came just two months after the apprehension of another largely forgotten apparition of the period, the Cambridge Rapist, Peter Cook, and shortly after the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, began in earnest his years-long reign of terror in the red light districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire with the murder of Wilma McCann in October 1975. Neilson's trial was overseen by Judge William Mars-Jones, who had earlier prosecuted the Moors Murderers and overseen the ABC official secrets case and compiled the report that engulfed the Met's Vice Squad in corruption trials – and who was himself the son of a village postmaster.

Neilson's trial took place during the sweltering heatwave of 1976, in a courtroom so subtropically torpid, even in October, that counsel were permitted to forego their customary wigs and gowns. Neilson was given five life sentences, with Mars-Jones stressing that, in his opinion, "life should mean life". And it did: when he died of complications from motor neurone disease in a Norwich prison hospital last year, his Black Panther nickname having long since been re-appropriated in folk-memory by Bobby Seale and Huey P Newton, it was as though some horrible, stinking odour of the dread 70s had been belched up by history's alimentary canal.

The Whittle kidnapping was one of the sadder public melodramas of the decade, with the media playing an entirely discreditable role, and with the police of several different county forces apparently helpless to solve the case, which eventually resolved itself almost accidentally, with a little help from the hapless killer. Once the papers got their hands on the story, presumably through a police leak, Whittle was probably doomed.

With Neilson now dead, we have at last the opportunity to examine another victim of the media's dishonesty and malevolence in this case: Ian Merrick and Michael Armstrong's superb low-budget film about Neilson's crimes. Entitled The Black Panther, it was a victim of the public furore over the Panther case, which had barely subsided when the film was released (kind of) in 1977. The media availed itself of the chance to destroy a film which highlights in a couple of scenes – reporters showing up en masse as Ronald Whittle awaits a call at a public phone box designated by Neilson – the heedlessness and callousness of the headline-chasers. Sue Lawley went after director Ian Merrick on the Tonight programme, accusing him of having made a "sick" movie, despite not having seen an inch of the film herself. (I remember watching that programme myself as a kid, and I've despised Lawley ever since.) The press took up the clarion call of faux-outrage and local councils were soon refusing permission for it to be shown. The few audiences that saw it seemed to admire the film, which of course counted for nothing amid the escalating heat. And then it vanished for 35 years.

Set loose from this unfavourable context and viewed now in sober hindsight, The Black Panther emerges as a meticulous, tactful, well-made and highly responsible true-crime movie, featuring a knockout lead performance by a young Donald Sumpter (whose rather older, still mesmerising face can be seen in Game of Thrones and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).

Director Ian Merrick – until then only a producer – had spent some years in New York before returning to England in 1976, just as Denis Healey was asking the IMF to bail out the nose-diving British economy. The British film industry was in no less parlous shape; these were dead years for domestic production, and most well-known directors were either exiled in Hollywood or internally exiled at the BBC. Merrick, as he says in the DVD liner notes, was transfixed by the innovative low-budget, small-crew film-making he had witnessed in New York and insisted this method could invigorate British film-making from below: it cost less, and you didn't have to deal with the rightwing British craft unions. His fellow directors thought he was barmy; we now can see that he was just too prescient, too early.

Merrick had an outline in mind about an ex-special services soldier whose military brainwashing can't be switched off after his return to civilian life, and after pitching it around Wardour Street he fell in with Alpha Films, a firm he already knew, having sold some of their properties to US distributors. They offered him the money he needed, but insisted the film deal with the not altogether unsimilar story of the Black Panther, which was also their preferred title.

Merrick hired writer Michael Armstrong, resolving to avoid an exploitation approach and adhere as closely as possible to known facts, witness testimonies and official court records (which included Neilson's own detailed confession) to answer the question, as Armstrong phrases it in the liner notes, "What makes someone like Donald Neilson?"

They answered it by reducing dialogue to a minimum, and ensuring that nothing that could not be verified by lawyers and backed up by the record made it into the film. Thus Whittle's death occurs out of shot, since there is no certainty at all that Neilson actually killed her himself, or that she fell and accidentally strangled herself with the wire Neilson had secured around her neck to prevent escape. (Neilson's defence team unanimously believed his account; after all, he had freely confessed to the post office killings, though he blamed his victims for their misplaced "heroics".)

Accounts of the killer's domestic life were gleaned from extensive press interviews granted by his wife, who had no idea that Neilson's criminal exploits dated back to the mid-1960s, when his taxi and joinery businesses went belly-up, or that in 1974 he had graduated from armed robbery to murder, having three times killed postmasters with a sawn-off shotgun. The police investigation, which was wide-ranging and heavily staffed, is of budgetary necessity reduced to a few scenes between a police inspector and Ronald Whittle.

Neilson himself had been an enthusiastic if indifferent soldier, serving in Aden, Kenya and Cyprus, and after his demob had carried his military fantasies about himself into the domestic realm. He made his wife and daughter yomp across the countryside on weekends and holidays, dressing them in military uniforms, arming them with wooden rifles and fake stick-grenades and ferrying them around in his army-surplus Land Rover. He would pose them for photographs as if they were dead or wounded, with ketchup for blood. He enforced a monosyllabic version of military discipline on them at home, particularly his daughter, who was three years younger than Whittle, and rarely permitted them to visit friends, or even have friends.

Where poetic licence is used in the film, it works well. There are mirror-image moments between Neilson and his daughter and his kidnap victim. He shouts at his daughter in a quasi-military bark ("do it now – at the double, quick march!") but also uses a more tender and fatherly tone of voice. When he is guiding the frightened but obedient Whittle down a shaft to her place of imprisonment beneath Bathpool park in Kidsgrove in Staffordshire, he breaks off from his fake-accented vocal disguise ("Obey! No one get hurt!") to calm the poor girl in his own everyday accent.

Merrick's absence from England for the mid-1970s likely sharpened his ability to see the crumbling, rotting Britain of that time very clearly. It's obvious, as Neilson happily leafs through photo albums of his military service (lots of corpses) that he is subject to the same consoling delusions of past military glory and continued imperial reach that afflicted the national consciousness in the long aftermath of the war.

At the heart of it all is an astonishing performance by Donald Sumpter. Neilson was a pathetic failure as a criminal, despite his undoubted skill at preparation and execution. Often his robberies netted him paltry sums, and his kidnapping was rife with blunders, not all of them arising from his own actions. Sumpter plays him as an inadequate little man, unequipped for real life, trapped in delusions about himself and his crimes, and driven to instant rage by setback or resistance. He shoots a security guard six times without warning, and his final apprehension came about because instead of talking politely to policemen who had no reason to suspect he was the Panther, he kidnapped them at gunpoint but was unable to make his escape. We last see Sumpter's Neilson, bloodied and handcuffed to a shopfront, screaming in frustration through his tears. Somehow he remains, if not sympathetic, then human.

The Black Panther, disinterred after so many years, now stands as an excellent companion piece to the other notable fictional account of Neilson's exploits, Adam Mars-Jones's riveting true-crime story Bathpool Park, published in 1981. While Mars-Jones's father ran the Panther trial, his son witnessed every minute of the trial, and saw and heard Neilson up close and at length.

It is to Ian Merrick and Michael Armstrong's credit (to be shared with Sumpter) that, with no equivalent access, they travelled by a different route to the same outcome as Bathpool Park, a sober-minded, unsensational, rigorously fact-based but utterly gripping and suspenseful account of a terrible crime spree and its protagonist. British cinema of the 1970s – that near dead-zone – is suddenly richer by one very fine, too-long forgotten movie.

VIDEO
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Duration.... 01:37:28
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AUDIO
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