Jack The Ripper in Fiction - Film

Film

Marie Belloc Lowndes' book The Lodger has been made into five films: Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), The Lodger (1932), The Lodger (1944), Man in the Attic (1953), and The Lodger (2009). Hitchcock decided to cast romantic lead Ivor Novello as the title character in his version of The Lodger, with the consequence that the film company, Gainsborough Pictures, insisted on a re-write to make Novello's character more sympathetic. In a change from the original story, whether the lodger is the killer is no longer left ambivalent at the end. Instead, the lodger's strange behaviour arises because he is a vigilante, trying to catch the real killer. Novello remade the film in 1932 with a more dramatic ending, in which he throttles the killer, who is his demented brother, the "Bosnian Murderer". Novello played both roles, and Maurice Elvey directed. It was released in an abridged version as The Phantom Fiend in 1935. The 1944 version dispensed with the ambivalence of the novel and instead casts the lodger, "Slade" played by Laird Cregar, as the villain "Jack the Ripper". Unlike the earlier versions, the film is set in 1888, rather than in the year of the film's making. The 1953 version, Man in the Attic with Jack Palance as "Slade", covers much the same ground. The 2009 film casts Simon Baker as "Malcolm Slaight".

Room to Let (1949) was similar to The Lodger story but was based on a 1948 radio play by Margery Allingham. It was one of the first horror pictures made by Hammer Films. Valentine Dyall plays the lodger, "Dr Fell", who has escaped from a lunatic asylum where he has been incarcerated for 16 years since committing the Whitechapel murders. Hammer released two Ripper-inspired films in 1971. In Hands of the Ripper, the Ripper's daughter played by Angharad Rees grows up to become a murderess after she sees her father kill her mother. In Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, a male Dr Jekyll transforms into the evil predatory woman Sister Hyde and is also responsible for the Ripper murders. InTerror in the Wax Museum (1973), a murderer disguises himself as a waxwork of the Ripper.

The Veil episode "Jack the Ripper" (1958) was a made-for-television film introduced by Boris Karloff, in which a clairvoyant identifies the Ripper as a respectable surgeon whose death has been faked to cover his incarceration in a lunatic asylum. The story's basis was an 1895 newspaper report that Robert James Lees had used psychic powers to track the Ripper to the home of a London physician. Jack the Ripper (1959), produced by Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker and written by Jimmy Sangster is loosely based on Leonard Matters' theory that the Ripper was an avenging doctor. It borrowed icons from previously successful horror films, such as Dracula (1958) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), by giving the Ripper a costume of a top hat and cape. The plot is a standard "whodunit" with the usual false leads and a denouement in which the least likely character, in this case "Sir David Rogers" played by Ewen Solon, is revealed as the culprit. As in Matters' book, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, Solon's character murders prostitutes to avenge the death of his son. However, Matters used the ploy of the son dying from venereal disease, while the film has him committing suicide on learning his lover is a prostitute. In a reversal of this formula, the German film Das Ungeheuer von London City (1964), released as The Monster of London City in 1967, casts the son as the villain with the father as the victim of syphilis.

Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) was a 1929 German silent film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst based on Frank Wedekind's play about a woman, Lulu, played by Louise Brooks. Her uninhibited lifestyle leads her to walk the streets of London until she meets her end in an encounter with Jack the Ripper played by Gustav Diessl. An earlier German film, Paul Leni's Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett) from 1924, used a Ripper-style event in one of three dreamed vignettes. The "Jack" character was played by Werner Krauss, who had achieved enormous success with his portrayal of the evil title character in the influential early horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

A Study in Terror (1965) and Murder by Decree (1979) both pit Sherlock Holmes against the Ripper. A Study in Terror, and its companion novel written by Ellery Queen, feature the often insane family of the Duke of Shires, with a motive provided by one of his son's becoming enamoured of a prostitute. Murder by Decree, starring Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes and James Mason as Watson, follows the masonic/royal conspiracy plotline popularised by Stephen Knight, in which a royal physician is the murderer. Coincidentally, in both movies, character actor Frank Finlay plays Inspector Lestrade. Part of the conspiracy plotline was followed in the TV series Jack the Ripper (1988) starring Michael Caine as Inspector Frederick Abberline. In the 1997 film The Ripper, Samuel West starred as Prince Eddy, who was revealed as the Ripper. In 2001, the Hughes Brothers made the comic book From Hell into a film of the same name starring Johnny Depp as Abberline. The film again sticks to the Knight storyline, though Depp's character differs significantly from Caine's heroic Abberline and exhibits aspects of both Sherlock Holmes (deductive powers, drug addiction) and Robert Lees (psychic ability, foresight).

The Ruling Class (1972) is a satire on the British aristocracy, and it also linked the Ripper to the British upper class. Jack Gurney, the mentally ill 14th Earl of Gurney played by Peter O'Toole, spends part of the film believing himself to be Jack the Ripper, and performs a pair of Ripper murders. The black comedy Deadly Advice (1994) features Jane Horrocks as a serial killer who imagines that she is given advice by the incarnations of famous murderers. John Mills plays Jack the Ripper as an outwardly mild-mannered hairdresser. "Just be the sort of person nobody suspects," he tells her. In an earlier black comedy, Dr. Strangelove, the antagonist is named General Jack D. Ripper, but the comparison goes no deeper. Amazon Women on the Moon is a 1987 comedy film that parodies theories of the Ripper's identity by speculating that Jack the Ripper was the Loch Ness Monster in disguise. Marcel Carné's Drôle de Drame (1937) is another parody of the Ripper, featuring Jean-Louis Barrault as an East End vegetarian who slaughters butchers in revenge for their slaughter of animals.

Night After Night After Night (1969) was a low-budget production that cast a high court judge (played by Jack May) as a demented copycat Ripper who attacks prostitutes in London's Soho. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s tenuous links with the Ripper case were introduced into films for commercial reasons; sexploitation horror movies Blade of the Ripper (1970), The Ripper of Notre Dame (1981) and The New York Ripper (1982) have little relation to the Ripper beyond the title. The Ripper of Notre Dame was directed and co-written by Jesús Franco, whose Jack the Ripper (1976) stars Klaus Kinski as a murderous doctor whose mother was a prostitute. What the Swedish Butler Saw (1975), in which Jack the Ripper hides in a photographic studio, is little more than softcore pornography. Thrillers Jack the Mangler of London (1973), Fear City (1984), Night Ripper (1986) and Jack's Back (1988) received poor reviews, as did the Japanese pink film Assault! Jack the Ripper. Edge of Sanity (1989) is lent "post-Psycho gravitas" by the casting of Anthony Perkins as "Dr Jekyll" and his alter-ego "Jack Hyde", but was still condemned by critics "as a tasteless exercise". The Dolph Lundgren vehicle Jill the Ripper (2000) reverses the traditional genders of victims and villains, with a female Ripper and male victims.

In Time After Time (1979), based on the novel of the same title, Jack escapes in a time machine to modern-day San Francisco and is pursued by H. G. Wells. The pursuer was originally slated to be Robert Louis Stevenson in a link to the author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but he was written out in favour of Wells. In Terror at London Bridge (1985), starring David Hasselhoff, Jack's spirit is transported to Arizona in a cursed stone from London Bridge. In The Ripper (1985), his spirit is instead concealed in a cursed ring. Ripper Man (1994) depicts a killer who believes himself to be the reincarnation of George Chapman, who was suspected of being Jack the Ripper after his arrest and execution for murder in 1903.

Released in the same year as From Hell, and consequently overshadowed by it, were Ripper and Bad Karma (retitled as Hell's Gate). Ripper centres on psychology student Molly Keller (played by A. J. Cook) who studies serial killers. Her classmates start dying at the hands of a Jack the Ripper copycat, who targets victims with the same initials as the originals. Bad Karma is another play on the reincarnation theme with the addition of Patsy Kensit as the Ripper's female accomplice.