Films
Farmer Spudd and His Missus Take a Trip to Town (1915, director JVL Leigh) is the first supposed cinematic sighting of the Ripper. The riotously-named Spudd (and presumably, his missus) apparently encounters the Ripper in waxwork form at Madame Tussaud’s. Other Wax Rippers were to appear. Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924, Paul Leni) featured William Dieterle as a young poet hired to write stories about the waxworks and Werner Krauss as the Ripper, coming to life and pursuing him through his dreams in the third and most Expressionist of the three segments. Terror at the Wax Museum (1973, George Fenady) featured John Carradine and Ray Milland in a badly-written effort where a Jack the Ripper waxwork might just be committing murders (it’s all right, it’s not).
The Lodger – A Story of the London Fog (1926)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Cast: Ivor Novello, June, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney
The first (silent) screen outing for Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel. Hitchcock considered this to be his first proper film. Ivor Novello plays the young man suspected of being the Ripper by his landlady. Hitchcock had wanted an ambivalent ending, but Novello was a big enough star for the producers to insist that he must be innocent. The other adaptations were The Lodger (1932, Maurice Elvey), a sound version, again featuring Novello in the lead, The Lodger (1944, John Brahm) which had Laird Cregar turn out to be the Ripper and The Man in the Attic (1953, Hugo Fregonese) which had Jack Palance as the sinister lodger, who is eventually tracked by his fingerprints (something the police in 1888 were still pooh-poohing) and drowns himself. Case closed.
Although based on a BBC feature written by Margery Allingham, Room to Let (1949, Godfrey Grayson) was similar in story, featuring Valentine Dyall as the strange lodger and Jimmy Hanley as a nosy (and irritating) reporter. It was one of the first films from the fledgling Hammer studio and was co-scripted by John Gilling.
Die Büsche Der Pandora (1929) (aka Pandora’s Box)
Director: GW Pabst. Cast: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Gustav Diessl
Adapted from Franz Wedekind’s plays Erdgeist and Die Büsche Der Pandora, it follows the fall of pharmacist’s daughter, Lulu (Brooks) through murder and prostitution to her fatal encounter with Jack the Ripper, the Thanatos to her Eros. The plays were refilmed as Lulu aka No Orchids for Lulu (1962, Rolf Thiele, Nadja Tiller as Lulu), Lulu (1978, Ronald Chase, Elisa Leonelli) and (surprise) Lulu (1980, Walerian Borowczyk, Ann Bennent). The plays themselves have been staged on many occasions – in London most recently with Anna Friel earning middling reviews for her Lulu. None of them have achieved the iconic status that Brooks managed back in 1929.
The Ripper has had cameos in other films. GW Pabst’s 1930s adaptation of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera and the 1963 version (director Wolfgang Staudte) with Sammy Davis Jr and Gert Frobe (of course I’m serious) had their Mack the Knife. Marcel Carné’s Drôle de Drame (1937) poked fun at English society and featured a Ripper-like character. There is allegedly a Ripper sub-plot in the dreadful-sounding porno comedy The Groove Room (1963, Vernon Becker, it has plenty of other titles) featuring Diana Dors. Played by Sir John Mills in Deadly Advice (2003), Jack tries to help Jane Horrocks bump off her mother. Peter O’ Toole played a demented aristocrat adopting the persona of Jack the Ripper in The Ruling Class (1971, Peter Medak). Sterling Hayden’s deranged general in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) was named ‘Jack D Ripper’ and caused more mayhem than his namesake could ever have achieved. The real Jack appeared through a mirror, fraudulently acquired by David Warner in ‘The Gatecrasher’ segment of the Amicus portmanteau horror, From Beyond the Grave (1973, Kevin Connor). Needless to say, Warner ends up doing Jack’s dirty work.
Jack the Ripper (1958)
Directors: Robert S Baker, Monty Berman. Cast: Eddie Byrne, Lee Patterson, Ewen Solon, John Le Mesurier
‘London 1888’ reads the opening subtitle, and that’s about all they bother to get right. The Ripper turns out to be the VD-crazed surgeon who’s got a down on whores. Rumbled by the American detective (he’s on vacation), Jack hides in a lift shaft and gets crushed. Some prints of this sprang into Technicolor at this point. As a horror movie it’s a bit plodding and, despite the running time of 86 minutes, still feels padded out with endless scenes of can-can dancers’ bottoms.
Other attempts vaguely circled around proper retellings: Das Ungeheuer von London City (1964, Edwin Zbonek) finds an actor playing Jack the Ripper who is immediately suspected when the murders start up again. Low-budget master Lindsay Shonteff weighed in with Evil Is... (1969, aka Night After Night After Night) in which Jack May (Nelson Gabriel in The Archers) is a judge who turns out to be (gasp) a Jack the Ripper-style murderer. Jack El Destripador de Londres (1971) was a standard ham-fisted Paul Naschy vehi-cle.The Spanish exploitation-movie king finds himself under suspicion when the Ripper starts up again. But it’s not him. Klaus Kinski was him, but then you’d have guessed that, in Jack the Ripper (1976, Jesus Franco). A full-blooded retelling in the style you’d expect from Jesus Franco, it’s still dreadful.
Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)
Director: Roy Ward Baker. Cast: Ralph Bates, Martine Beswick, Gerald Sim
The first of Hammer’s two Ripper tales, released in 1971. This one starts with the premise of male Jekyll (Bates) turning into the female Hyde (Beswick). To continue his experiments Jekyll needs female hormones. Hyde obliges by taking some from the local prostitutes.
Robert Louis Stevenson had written The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886. At the time of the Ripper murders it was being successfully staged at the Lyceum. Richard Mansfield’s performance in the lead(s) was so enthusiastic that it drew criticism for inciting serial murder. Its audiences fell and the play closed early. Since then, many screen adaptations of Stevenson’s novel have included elements of the Ripper crimes. Most blatant was Edge of Sanity (1988, Gerard Kikoine) which starred an ill-looking Anthony Perkins and Victorian prostitutes who all seemed to be dressed for a Madonna lookalike contest.
Hands of the Ripper (1971)
Director: Peter Sasdy. Cast: Eric Porter, Angharad Rees, Jane Merrow, Keith Bell
One of the last great Hammer films. Rees plays the daughter of Jack the Ripper driven to kill by certain external stimuli. Porter is the psychiatrist who attempts to cure her. It all ends badly in St Paul’s Cathedral. A notably cinematic and cine-literate film, not even marred by the photographic backdrop of the Whispering Gallery at the climax (Sasdy and his crew weren’t allowed into the cathedral).
In the seventies attempts were also made to cross-polli-nate the Ripper with standard American genres: A Knife for the Ladies (1973, Larry Spengler) was a horror-western with the odd-eyed Jack Elam; Black the Ripper (1975, Frank R Salteri) was a proposed low-end blaxploitation movie that possibly never got made. They both sound as good as the lame Bob Hope vehicle Here Come the Girls (1953, Claude Binyon) where ol’ ski-slope nose is accused of being Jack the Slasher but turns out not to be.The songs are no better than the plot.
Murder by Decree (1978)
Director: Bob Clark. Cast: Christopher Plummer, James Mason, David Hemmings, Genevieve Bujold, Anthony Quayle, John Gielgud, Frank Finlay, Donald Sutherland
Clark’s movie adapts the theory proposed in John Lloyd and Elwyn Jones’ The Ripper Files (itself based on the BBC drama-documentary) – the same one that would fuel Stephen Knight’s book. Sherlock Holmes (Plummer) and Dr Watson (Mason, a well-rounded portrait) are summoned once more to solve the Ripper murders and stumble upon a nest of corruption (illegitimate royal children, blackmailing prostitutes, Masonic cover-up). The drama is well judged but the pride of the film is its set design and cinematography
– rendering the East End streets as a surreal labyrinth of menacing alleyways and dark, dark recesses where corruption and terror hang in the air. The film has some truly disturbing scenes, such as when Holmes stumbles upon Spivey and Slade at Mary Kelly’s. With so much going for it, its convict
ions falter. Gull and Netley become Dr Thomas Spivey and William Slade. Anthony Quayle (Lord Salisbury) is only referred to as ‘The Prime Minister’. Most unforgivably, after a very lengthy explanation at the climax, Holmes goes completely against his character and lets the Freemasons off the hook.
The Ripper had already met Holmes on screen before in A Study in Terror (1965, James Hill) with John Neville as Holmes and Donald Houston as Watson.This is a fairly poor film which bumbles along tiresomely (not unlike Houston), throwing in some gory moments and fogbound sets. The cast’s obvious uncertainty as to how straight they should play it means that there are times it almost teeters into ‘Carry on’ territory. Barbara Windsor as one of the victims doesn’t help.
Time After Time (1979)
Director/Writer: Nicholas Meyer. Cast: Malcolm McDowell, David Warner, Mary Steenburgen
Proof that you can’t keep a good Ripper down, Meyer’s entertaining and bloody movie proposes another reason why the murders stopped: time travel. Warner’s Ripper, chased by the police, escapes using a time machine designed and built by his friend HG Wells (McDowell). Projected into modern San Francisco, Jack sets about his trade once more, with Wells in hot pursuit.
Other Ripper-thru-time movies came from the TV movie Bridge Across Time (1985, EW Swackhamer, aka Arizona Ripper, Terror on London Bridge). David Hasselhoff and Adrienne Barbeau have a hard time when they discover that the Ripper has somehow been transported to Arizona along with London Bridge (you saw the titles, you knew what to expect). William F Nolan rewrote his script as the short story, ‘The Final Stone’, which included a different identity for the Ripper. The Ripper (1985, Christopher Lewis) was an exploitation cheapie featuring effects and a cameo appearance by Tom Savini. The Ripper’s ring passes on his evil to a modern-day college professor. Screaming women ensue.
Sadly, these two were just three years shy of the Ripper Centenary, thus missing the boat. Jack’s Back (1988, Rowdy Herrington) was dead on time and played upon genuine public concerns that some maniac would see fit to celebrate in the spirit of the season. Or, perhaps, the real Jack would re-emerge. Not in this he didn’t. James Spader plays a struggling medico in the poor end of town. Women are dying in a Jack the Ripper style. Spader figures it out but the Ripper kills him. Enter Spader’s twin brother, err... James Spader, to flush out the killer. As a cash-in it’s pretty unfocussed but there are some neat twists and turns to the cheerfully convoluted plot. And it’s got two James Spaders. Ripper Man (1996) had none, instead featuring Timothy Bottoms as a modern-day hypno-eyed psychopath being chased by cop-on-the-edge Mike ‘son of Chuck’ Norris. Mike’s fighting style isn’t much; instead he seems to have inherited his father’s ability to pick scripts.
Jack the Ripper (1988)
Director: David Wickes. Cast: Michael Caine, Armand Assante, Jane Seymour, Ray McAnally, Lewis Collins, Susan George
At the ‘quality’ drama end of the market – or rather the ‘mid-quality, mid-evening’ drama end – there was Euston Films’ self-proclaimed ‘proper’ telling of the story of Jack the Ripper. Well, okay. The three one-hour episodes were appropriately mounted, with newspaper-wielding urchins, horses, carts and the occasional odd-looking bicycle to the fore. However, the Vigilance Committees are played like torch-bearing lynch mobs out of a Frankenstein movie, and there is an odd focus on Assante’s Richard Mansfield as a prime suspect. His Hyde might have been good but I would be more concerned about how he got hold of 1980s bladder effects than whether he was the Ripper.
Along with the usual ‘faces’ of 1980s mid-range drama (Susan George as Catharine Eddowes!), Michael Caine attacks his role of the reportedly mild-mannered and reserved Inspector Abberline with both fists. Permanently annoyed and shouting at everyone in sight, Caine’s Abberline always seems to be on the verge of chinning Lewis Collins. It starts to become uncomfortably possible that Abberline will lose it completely, march out into the street and yell: ‘Oy! You, bloody Ripper! Leave those bloody prostitutes alone!’ On the plus side, the plot unrolls at a decent gallop over the film’s worst offences.
Taking more liberties with history than David Irving, Janet Meyers’ The Ripper (1997) features a fictional copper (Patrick Bergin’s Beethoven-haired Inspector Hanson) and a fictional prostitute (Gabrielle Anwar’s Oirish washerwoman Florry Lewis) hot on the trail of Jack as Heir-to-the-Throne, Samuel West’s barking Prince Eddy. Mind you, ‘barking’ is a relative term: Michael York’s Sir Charles Warren (one of the few ‘real’ people in it) is a fuzzy old buffer more interested in pairing off his protégée (Hanson) than catching the Ripper. If you’ve stayed with us this far then you’ll flinch like we did when Hanson shows Florry Mary Kelly’s murder photo just after the ‘double-header’ (itself bumped up the running order). By now, it should be clear that we’ve no problem with fictional retellings of the case but… the muddle! Historical verisimilitude is attempted with slops being chucked out of East End windows and the most men with absurd facial hair filling the screen since Gettysburg (1993).The line (delivered completely straight),‘He may be insane but… lovely penmanship’, deserves some kind of recognition. Although, for the life of us, we couldn’t say what kind.
From Hell (2001)
Directors: Albert Hughes, Allen Hughes. Cast: Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm, Robbie Coltrane, Ian Richardson
Filmed mainly in Prague, the troubled production finally hit the screens with a hole in its heart. Johnny Depp played Inspector Abberline as a fin de siècle occultist a few notches more experienced than his Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow (see the lovingly-filmed scene where Abberline fixes himself a glass of absinthe). His romance with Heather Graham’s Mary Kelly (apparently voiced by Dick Van Dyke) leads up to one of the most jaw-droppingly cynical deus ex machina ever foisted on the movie-going public. Finally, the Whitechapel Murders gets a happy ending. Thanks, Hollywood, that’s just what it was missing. Bloody, stylish and with a credible recreation of the Whitechapel streets, From Hell misses the point of Moore and Campell’s creation by a mile. This isn’t really its fault. You try pitching Fox a lengthy dissection of the Victorian era and the impending birth of a new century.What we end up with is a flashier version of Murder by Decree with the real people reinstated. Arguably the most noticeable lack is the filtering of the murders through Gull’s spiralling messiah complex, lending them a horrifying grandeur. Instead, Ian Holm’s Gull has little to do except some weary verbal-jousting with Depp, and seems to be killing simply to get some screen time… we’ll stop moaning.We should know the drill by now.We’ve seen Swamp Thing, after all.
More recently, John Eyre’s Ripper (2003) is an efficient slasher movie with a killer whose m.o. echoed Jack’s. Sort of. Students of a forensic science class (whose initials match those of the original victims) end up with their insides outside. Ripper makes some interesting points about contemporary consumption of true crime narratives while supplying the requisite twists and jolts. The increasingly cadaverous Jurgen Prochnow appears as a red herring. Not literally, you understand.
If you’ve ever wondered what a horror movie made by a bunch of goths would look like, then I Am the Ripper (2004) might give you an idea. An amateur French cast get killed, come back to life, and get killed again by a hooded figure who may be Death or possibly Skeletor. Exactly how Jack fits into the story may be just the result of an opportunistic retitling for this incomprehensible mess. At one point someone does appear wearing a top hat and a cape but by then our brains had shut down our retinas as a precautionary measure and we knew no more.
Television
Just as he does in crime books, the Ripper often crops up in TV series to fairly average and unimaginative effect. So far, these appearances have included:
The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1955)
The Big Story (1956)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1957)
The Veil (1958), episode titled ‘Jack the Ripper’
Cimarron City (1958) ‘Knife in the Darkness’.W
estern series, episode written and disowned, after directorial tampering, by Harlan Ellison
Thriller (1961). ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’, from the Robert Bloch story. Series hosted by Boris Karloff
The Green Hornet (1966) ‘Alias the Scarf’. Crime-fighting superhero stuff with Van Johnson and Bruce Lee
Star Trek (1967) ‘Wolf in the Fold’. Scripted by Robert Bloch
The Avengers (1969) ‘Fog’. Linda Thorson-era episode, directed by John Hough
The Sixth Sense (1972) ‘With Affection, Jack the Ripper’
Kolchak the Night Stalker (1974) ‘The Ripper’. Darren McGavin’s reporter finally electrocutes immortal Ripper in Chicago
Fantasy Island (1980) ‘With Affection, Jack the Ripper’. ‘Boss! Boss! It’s Leather Apron!’
Sliders (1997) ‘Murder Most Foul’
Babylon 5 (1997) ‘Comes the Inquisitor’
Plus Jack has had cameo appearances in shows such as Dave Allen At Large and Till Death Us Do Part. And how could we forget the sublimely daft Spike Milligan-scripted The Phantom Raspberry of Old London Town in The Two Ronnies (1976)?
And Jack the Ripper? Who was he really? After nearly a century of speculation, Amazon Women on the Moon (1987, Joe Dante, John Landis, Peter Horton, Carl Gottlieb, Robert K Weiss) puts forward its own final solution: the Loch Ness Monster.
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