Tag Archives: Jack the Ripper

Reviews

Old film review: ‘A Study In Terror’

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It was back in the 1970s, when it was still a fairly recent film, that I first saw “A Study In Terror” – on a small, black and white TV, I believe.

I was very happy with it at the time. I very much liked John Neville (a top rank English stage actor who never quite made the A list in the movies) as Holmes. I was delighted when Robert Morley showed up as Holmes’ brother Mycroft (Mycroft’s first appearance ever on screen). And I relished a fight scene where Holmes snapped a spring-loaded blade from his walking stick and fenced with his attackers (“Nothing like cold steel, eh, Holmes?” says Watson).

I watched it again on YouTube the other day. I didn’t like it quite as much this time (my tastes have matured, I think) but it deserves more attention than it’s gotten.

This 1965 movie was produced in collaboration with Sir Nigel films, a company controlled by the Conan Doyle estate. However, it’s not based on any Doyle adventure, but is rather an original story in which Holmes investigates the Jack the Ripper killings. The story flirts with the slasher/horror genre, within the bounds of what you could get away with in theaters in those days. The blood and gore is mostly just suggested. Which is fine with me.

I was somewhat disappointed by the look of the film. This was “Mod” 1960s, and the costuming is unnecessarily bright for Victorian tastes. I also regretted Donald Houston’s performance as Watson. He’s closer to Nigel Bruce than to Edward Hardwick – though not quite as cartoonish as Bruce.

If you’re fond of Hammer Films’ “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” “A Study In Terror” is very much in the same vein, and John Neville was every bit as good a Holmes as Peter Cushing (whom I revere) was. In some ways, I think, he anticipated Jeremy Brett’s approach. I wish Neville had had a chance to play the role again.

Fiction, Music, Non-fiction

Jack the Beowulf Singer

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Jason Craig and Dave Malloy have written a rock opera based on Beowulf, just what you didn’t know you never wanted. A. M. Juster describes it.

We meet the dimwitted hipster Beowulf and the snarkier Hrothgar, who are backed up by a chorus of four female “warriors” who resemble strapping Cyndi Laupers in football pads and Goth makeup. We hear pulsing but mediocre rock, which at least drowns out such dull refrains as “Hey, it’s that guy,” “It’s my body,” and “That was death and then they died.”

It has a few perks, but Juster was not thrilled by the whole.

On another horrific, somewhat more gruesome, note, Otto Penzler has compiled The Big Book of Jack the Ripper. Steve Donoghue says it’s very good. “This editor is an old, practiced hand at picking these kinds of stories; his anthologies are always masterworks of combining old favorites with carefully chosen new surprises.”

The real payoff of Penzler’s book is its opening section, “The True Story,” and the main reason is clear: the raw events of the true story are more bizarre, more sordid, and more horrifying than any concoction a writer could dream up.

(via Prufrock News)

Fiction, Reviews

‘I, Ripper,’ by Stephen Hunter

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Stephen Hunter, after years of writing successful sniper novels, has taken a flyer with a change of genre—a historical thriller. I, Ripper is a fictional retelling of the Jack the Ripper murders which is not intended to solve the historical mystery, but to illuminate the history of modern ideas.

The story is told through the eyes of three characters. One is a young London reporter who calls himself “Jeb” (we don’t learn his true identity until late in the story). By luck he’s the first newspaper man on the scene of the initial prostitute murder in Whitechapel, and he becomes his paper’s chief man on the story. He even bestows on the murderer the nickname by which he’ll be known to history.

The other narrators are the Ripper himself, in a fictional journal in which he does not reveal his identity, and a young prostitute who describes in a series of letters how she and her fellow streetwalkers react to the killings.

Jeb wants to do more to uncover the killer, in the absence of effective work by the official police. He makes the acquaintance of a renowned linguistics scholar, who produces what today we’d call a “profile” of the killer. Armed with this profile, Jeb and the professor reduce the pool of suspects to a few men, and then one.

Then the investigation explodes in surprises and a dramatic confrontation.

I, Ripper isn’t a bad novel on its own terms. I found it difficult to read at the beginning, because the murders are described in unpleasant detail. The final working out of the story was much to my liking, however.

But I don’t think I can recommend it to our audience, unless you have a strong stomach.