Although the killer is identified only by his boots throughout most of the movie, it is through a clever play of presence and absence that director Fleischer builds up a profile of the social disenchantment and cultural changes he feels underlying the mass murder. Indeed, the first few minutes of the film suggest an Americanized culture of violence impacting itself on a very British sense of class resentment. In this way, the resultant mass murder is both a form of violent social protest and the work of a mediocrity with little but his resentment to sustain what is a sense of wronged pride. All of this is suggested through small details of behaviour within the surrounding culture. In that respect, the mannered country estate is held against the fast, vice-ridden urbanity which inspires the killer to restlessness. For Fleischer, the new England of Americanized youth culture and social hedonism is inevitably going to destroy what is the old, landed England. It is a clash of values in transition, born in a class resentment which is uniquely English but perhaps irrevocably changed through exposure to American values. See No Evil thus is about such homicides as being the impending collision between social classes. Symbolically, it is the unseen or the easily dismissed underclass which harbours the most danger to the establishment here. Fleischer, however, refuses to wholly condemn these acts as the aberration they seem, being more interested in context.
Social resentment, economic disillusionment and cultural programming are for Fleischer the underlying factors in such abominable crimes. Hence, Fleischer utilizes the film’s subplot concerning the gypsies to slyly cast aspersions on the stereotyping that perhaps influences the resentments which affect almost every character in this film, whether they are aware of it or not: except for the symbolically blind Farrow, forced to deal with the terrible aftermath of the same tensions. All retreat into resentment – whether it is the killer or the cowboy-style posse organized by the boyfriend to search for the killer – as ingrained and reactive. Sadly, Fleischer can see no way out of this predicament and the sense of socio-cultural entrapment would stay with him throughout the 1970s, particularly in the despair of The New Centurions and Soylent Green. Although See No Evil invited some unfavourable comparison to the hit Audrey Hepburn film Wait Until Dark, that film’s tense theatricality is here replaced with the gradual revelation of truly awful circumstances to contextualize mounting consequence as a means of socio-cultural implosion: a society consuming itself – hence the cannibalism motif in the later Soylent Green. The yearning to understand the aberrant actions that underpinned his early works and the subsequent balance between behaviourist profile and social portrait find their locus in what is a most deliberate aesthetic game. read more