Let Him Have It

Derek Bentley is nineteen, illiterate, epileptic and functioning far below his age. He falls in with sixteen year old Christopher Craig, they are cornered on a warehouse roof, and Craig shoots a policeman dead. A sentence Bentley may or may not have said, the one that gives the film its title, was treated in court as an instruction to fire. Craig was too young to hang. Bentley was hanged in 1953. Peter Medak resists the temptation to editorialise, and Christopher Eccleston, in his first film role, plays Bentley without begging for pity. A royal pardon came in 1993 and the conviction was finally quashed in 1998. Who it is for: viewers drawn to miscarriage of justice stories and the argument over capital punishment. Who it is not for: anyone wanting suspense, since the ending is known from the first reel.