• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 160 0

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)