Jack the Ripper [1959]

A phoney feature whipped together from episodes of an aborted TV series called The Veil, which traded - as the later, more successful One Step Beyond would do - in dramatisations of allegedly authentic [but rarely dramatic] cases of the supernatural. When the show didn't sell, the producers tried repackaging the episodes as anthology-style movies. Most episodes were made in Hollywood with genial host Boris Karloff taking a variety of lead roles surrounded by stooges, but with the odd British-made episode distinguished by more imaginative direction and generally better acting. With obvious snips where opening and closing credits would have gone, this feels less like a film than a back-to-back marathon of episodes.

The first three episodes are American-made, and only really have Karloff going for them. The first is a familiar anecdote that, done also as a One Step Beyond, about a city-dweller [Harry Bartell] who witnesses a murder in the rooming house across the street only to discover the scene of the crime is an unrented apartment. When the crime happens as foreseen, the police suspect the unwitting psychic [a situation that recurs in the final episode] until he can identify the strangling burglar. Next up is a period tale of a contested inheritance, with the ghost of a fellow who had the irritating habit of making successive contradictory wills without telling anyone directing his decent son to find the testament that prevents a villainous brother from selling the family farm and putting Mom in a home. Neither of these add up to much as spook stories, and Karloff simply pops in as a decent, concerned psychiatrist or lawyer to deliver exposition.

The star gets more of a work-out in the third story, which casts him in a black wig and sideburns as an EC Comics-style murdering husband, a sea-captain who poisons his nagging wife on a voyage and suffers undramatic vengeance from beyond the grave. An unseen ghost repeatedly pulls the cloth off a table and ruins a celebratory dinner, getting the murderer thrown out of the captain's club. Later, offscreen, his ship goes down. It's an ineptly told tale but Karloff gives it the good old villain glower, pretending concern over his ailing wife as he doses her with poison and even expressing genial lechery around a bosomy barmaid [whose appalling cod accent makes her by far the most terrifying thing in the piece].

The title comes from the final, Karloff-free episode, a British-made effort that dramatises that familiar anecdote about the Victorian psychic Robert Lees, who allegedly had visions of the Whitechapel Murders and then encountered the killer on an omnibus, pursuing him to a respectable home and realising that he was a distinguished but mad doctor. Though less elaborately staged than Murder By Decree and Jack the Ripper [1988], which use the real names of the historical characters involved, this benefits from a fine, nervous lead performance as the psychic by Niall MacGinniss [Night of the Demon] as Lees, renamed Walter Durst. It may be the first Ripper dramatisation to pay attention to details like the correct street locales of the murders, though it drops the most famous killing from the case. It also has a more dramatic shape than the flat anecdotes presented in the other episodes, with an eerie effect as the psychic's hand intrudes into his visions and a disturbing monologue by Mrs Willowden, [Nora Swinburne], the Ripper's agonised wife, describing the retired and embittered doctor's progression from torturing animals to going out at night and coming home stained with blood. Here, in a variant of familiar Ripper lore, the police [represented by Clifford Evans, of Curse of the Werewolf] find out the culprit's identity but 'Dr Willowden' is declared dead by his scandalised family and confined to a Scots asylum for the rest of his life, leaving the case open forever.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Ripperologist

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