Dr. Crippen (1962 film) Dr. Crippen (1962 film) Dr. Crippen is a 1962 British biographical film directed by Robert Lynn and starring Donald Pleasence, Coral Browne and Samantha Eggar. The film's plot concerns the real-life Edwardian doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen, who was hanged in 1910 for the murder of his wife. The cinematography was provided by Nicolas Roeg. The film ostensibly covers Crippen’s trial but the story is fleshed out with flashbacks to the doctor’s relationship with his coarse, overbearing wife and his affair with a young mistress. Bosley Crowther in "The New York Times" wrote, "well, one must give good scores to Mr.
Hawley Harvey Crippen his wife because she had syphilis. Whether Crippen murdered his wife has been disputed. The novelist Raymond Chandler commented that it seemed unbelievable that Crippen would successfully dispose of his wife's limbs and head and then, rather stupidly, bury her torso under the cellar floor of his home. Dornford Yates, a novelist who was a junior barrister at the trial, records that the remains were placed in lime so that they would be destroyed, but suggests that Crippen failed to realise that while dry quicklime destroys, if water is added, it becomes slaked lime and preserves. Yates used this fact