If you were alive and aware of what was going on around you in the UK in the 1970s, The Black Panther will ring all sorts of bells. Because it tells the story of the man behind the abduction and death of Lesley Whittle. She was a blameless teenager who wound up suspended by her neck on the end of a wire in a reservoir drain, where her abductor had hidden her while he tried to scare up a ransom from her family.
The tabloids ran with the story and it became a national talking point. So much so that when this film came out two years after Lesley’s death, many councils in the UK banned it, sight unseen. It was only when it was remastered for DVD release in 2012 that it finally got a fair hearing.
The general consensus on its re-release was that it was a good film. I watched it yesterday and I’d agree – dour but good and determined not in any way to glamourise the man behind the killing, Donald Neilson, whom the papers had already dubbed the Black Panther on account of the black hood he wore when carrying out a string of robberies (the abduction and the robberies were only later connected).
The picture that The Black Panther paints of Neilson is of a useless human being. An ex army man who cannot adjust to life outside, Neilson is introduced as the classic loner, camping out in the woods, cooking in mess cans, burying his rubbish so as to leave no trace, going on training runs with rocks in his rucksack.
From these locations, Neilson mounts raids on small out-of-the-way post offices, all of which he botches, sometimes with fatal consequences for the postmaster on the other end of his shotgun.
It comes as a surprise to discover that Neilson is married and has a daughter, though life at home varies between tense silence and furious eruptions every time Neilson loses his rag over some small thing – food not up to scratch and so on. He’s not a bad father and husband exactly, just a very difficult one.
Neilson’s “jobs away” are clearly a great relief to wife and daughter.
Neilson’s big job – which he’s planning all the way through in his locked study full of maps, vigilante gear, old photos of his army days and Nazi memorabilia – is to abduct a rich family’s daughter, hold her hostage, pick up the ransom money and set her free. But Neilson, as we have already seen, is crap, cannot think ahead properly, does not factor in the role that chance might play in any of his plans, and cannot think quickly on his feet when things do go wrong.
It is a brilliant portrait of a useless man, allied to a punishing portrait of life in the 1970s which makes Britain look like East Germany – crap cars, crap clothes, crap food and crap decor in the crap houses people inhabit. The press, meanwhile, are venal and the police hopeless amateurs.
Donald Sumpter plays Neilson as a closed-off man, entirely lacking in self-awareness, periodically smugly self-congratulatory – like when he learns that he’s being called the Black Panther by the newspapers – a long way from a hero and just as far from an anti-hero. Anti-heroes are good at something; Neilson just isn’t.
As the wife and daughter Marjorie Yates (you might remember her in Shameless decades later) and Sylvia O’Donnell play it like Sumpter – terse and watchful. This is a film of very few words all round.
Debbie Farrington has a tough role as Lesley, the victim, playing her as Lesley undoubtedly was, absolutely terrified, especially once squirrelled away in a concrete shaft in the dark, with no idea what’s going on out in the world.
You’d call it true crime these days, but there wasn’t so much of that on screens in those days. True crime was a creature of books or true-crime magazines. It has all the recognisable features of the genre – forensic and often unlovely detail, low-end production values that actually suit the story being told. Everything has been wiped down with the tawdry. The grim. It’s a powerful and horrible story, which writer Michael Armstrong and director Ian Merrick have told with admirable restraint.
The Black Panther – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
