Jack the Ripper [1988]

In 1988, as the centenary of the Whitechapel Murders approached, book shops were awash with all manner of publications  expounding one crackpot theory after another as the public demonstrated its continuing fascination with the greatest of all unsolved murders. It was no surprise, therefore, when Thames television announced that it would be making its own attempt to solve the mystery in a three part mini-series. After a false start - Barry Foster was initially cast as Scotland Yard's Inspector Frederick Abberline until money came in from the States and the project was hastily shut down, upgraded then restarted with Caine in the lead role - it finally aired in the autumn of 1988, 100 years after the Ripper's real life depredations.

As one might expect from the company who brought us the definitive small screen Holmes, Jack the Ripper looks wonderful, if a little glossy - the streets of Whitechapel are far too clean and don't seem quite as menacing as they should, but the costume designs and attention to period detail are spot on. Though it uses the same since discredited Masonic / Royal Family conspiracy theory as Murder By Decree [1978] - first expounded in the 1960s by Thomas Stowell [he wrote up his theory in a 1970 issue of Criminologist] and later turned into the best selling Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution by Stephen Knight - it dispenses with the fictional Sherlock Holmes who uncovered the conspiracy in Bob Clarke's film and instead concentrates, for the first time on screen, on the real-life Abberline.

As played by Michael Caine, this is a far cry from the modest, quietly spoken married man that the records suggest Abberline was. Caine plays him as a constantly enraged crusader after truth and justice who, in the memorable words of Mark Whitehead and Miriam Rivett in their Pocket Essentials: Jack the Ripper [2001] "always seems to be on the verge of chinning [co-star] 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!'" A far cry then from what little is known about the real Abberline but it's always comforting to see Caine doing what he does best and his presence alone makes the whole enterprise bearable. It should, perhaps, be noted however that the descendants of Frederick Abberline objected to Caine's portrayal, particularly the assertion that he was an alcoholic - God what they made of Johnny Depp's drug-addled opium fiend in the subsequent From Hell [2001]!

Lewis Collins, as the likely-to-be-thumped-at-any-moment Sergeant George Godley puts in a good turn that impresses hugely in spite of a ridiculous moustache. Elsewhere, the performances are less persuasive. It's long been a tradition for dramas produced by the British independent television network to rely heavily on familiar faces to ease viewers into the drama and to allay the fears of advertisers. Thus, we get the not overly-convincing spectacle of Susan George playing Catherine Eddowes and Lysette Anthony - sporting an 'Irish' accent that occurs naturally nowhere in the real world and often lapses into a sort of pseudo Black Country twang - as the screen's least likely Mary Kelly. Good to see Edward Judd still finding work, albeit in a small supporting role, his few all-too-brief scenes with Caine reminding us of just what an under-valued talent he is.


The need to stock the production full of familiar faces is the only real justification for the inclusion of Jane Seymour as Emma Prentiss, newspaper artist and love interest for Abberline. The unbelievable relationship between the two plunges the film into soap opera territory, signaled unsubtly by John Cameron's clumsy score, and is just another example of how producers seem terribly insecure if they can't have a bit of love and romance to spice up the quieter moments [From Hell also made the same mistake]. Her presence in the production seems to have been designed purely to give Abberline something other than the murders to worry about and to allow for pictures of Seymour with Caine, all the better to help 'sell' the finished product. It also further distorts the script's already tenuous grip on the facts - as has already been noted, in real life Abberline was a married man - as indeed does the presence of Armand Assante as American actor Richard Mansfield [where did he manage to get those bladder effects for his 19th century stage show?], prime suspect until Abberline and Godley stumble upon the truth by accident.

Ordinarily, it wouldn't matter that the facts were being played with in this fashion - what Ripper film hasn't indulged in a little [or in some case, an awful lot!] twisting of what few hard facts we have on the killings. And indeed, Jack the Ripper can be enjoyed for what it is, an insubstantial but eminently watchable reworking of familiar themes. What makes it somewhat harder to do so, however, are the claims made by producer / writer / director David Wickes who, before the series was shown, made much of the fact that he'd allegedly been allowed unprecedented access to the Scotland Yard files on the Ripper case and boasted that his production be revealing the 'true' identity of the killer for the first time. Quite apart from the fact that this betrayed Wickes' appalling unfamiliarity with the body of Ripper research already available - not to say his apparent ignorance of Murder By Decree which had already exposed the same conspiracy plot as is explored here - it also throws into considerable doubt the veracity of his own research.

When the Ripper paperwork was actually published in book form in Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner's invaluable The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook [2000] the first thing anyone even remotely familiar with Wickes' show would notice is the marked absence in the records of Richard Mansfield. In real life, Mansfield's name came up only when the popular press - then beginning its obsession with trying to link popular entertainment with real-life acts of carnage - suggested that he might be the killer, so frightening was his portrayal of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde at the time. Yet in the mini-series, Abberline goes to extraordinary lengths to try to implicate him in the killings, partly motivated by sexual jealousy over their rivalry for Emma's attentions.

Immediately, we begin to suspect anything that Wickes said about the veracity of his research - if he couldn't work out from the paperwork he'd supposedly seen that Mansfield hadn't apparently been interviewed by the police let alone been in the frame as a serious suspect, how are we to take seriously his claims that he will be revealing the 'true' identity of the killer? Of course, we can't, especially when he holds up the long-discredited notion that it was royal physician William Gull and his coachman Netley as his proof.

Although the far superior Murder By Decree and From Hell both used the same frankly ridiculous notion, neither film made any attempt to pass themselves off as factually accurate. When a producer goes to the lengths that Wickes did to promote his offering as a serious look at the possible identity of the world's most notorious never-caught killer, we surely have a right to expect more than trying to fool us into believing it was a man who was never even seriously questioned before again blaming a pair of men who had only come into the frame in the mist suspect of ways to begin with. The fact that Abberline and Godley stumble across the identity of the killers almost by chance damages it dramatically too.

In the end it shouldn't really matter, but it does. Certainly it mattered enough to Ripperologist Melvin Harris [author of recommended works like The Ripper File [1989] and The True Face of Jack the Ripper [1996]] and several journalists who harangued Wickes and successfully got him to eventually withdraw his obviously bogus claims. Harris would later also be instrumental in blowing the whistle on that other great Ripper scam, the so-called Ripper Diaries.

No-one would really expect a narrative film to paint a factually accurate portrait of what really happened and really no-one should really want to see such a thing. It would, after all, be extremely dull - if it had relied solely on the facts, Jack the Ripper would have been three hours of perplexed Cockney coppers scratching their heads as prostitutes drop like flies and then it would just end, with no satisfying resolution. Any Ripper film is going to need to blame someone and of course they all do, though most producers have the good sense to admit that they're clutching at straws and not aiming to expose the truth; indeed some films [including Jack the Ripper [1959], A Study in Terror [1965] and Jesus Franco's bonkers Jack the Ripper [1976]] simply make up entirely fictional perpetrators for the occasion.

Had Wickes just owned up to the fact that this was just another take on a hoary urban legend, it might have been more palatable. But because and in spite of his claims, it remains unconvincing and unsatisfying, particularly when the Hughes Brothers later did a much more atmospheric job of it in From Hell, a film that makes no claims for authenticity, one based on a graphic novel whose author quite plainly admits that the Masons / Royalty plot is, at best, highly unlikely.

If you can distance yourself from the claims of its creator, Jack the Ripper is a lightweight but mostly enjoyable re-telling of the tale [just try not to laugh too loud when Anthony's accent wobbles into earshot] that perhaps relies to heavily on soap opera clichés to keep going through its three hours. But anyone really expecting the 'truth' promised by the publicity is going to be sorely disappointed.
KEVIN LYONS

Last Updated: 6 March, 2007