Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Nice effects though.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The serial killer known as Jack the Ripper is loose in London, 1888. As the police frantically search for the maniac through the East End smog, a whole bunch of suspects hone into view...Murder by person or persons unknown.Surprisingly little known, this Jack the Ripper picture belies its obvious budget limitations to produce an atmospheric and suspenseful piece. This is not in any way an accurate account of the actual story, so interested newcomers should be aware of that fact. It is basically an interpretation of Jolly Jack, a serial killer mystery to be solved.There's plenty of cobbled streets and smog, dim gas lamps, top hats, tails and medical bags et al. The more severe parts of the story come with tilted camera perception, and the narrative embraces ladies of the night workings and vigilante justice. Which all builds to an absolute beaut of a finale.Well worth a look by fans of Ripper period fare. 7/10

Jack the Ripper stories are always rather fun. Historically, Saucy Jack killed (and mutilated in varying degrees) five known whores in Victorian England. They must have been easy prey, down and outers with bad teeth, alcohol problems, and no place to sleep. Then, too, the murders were never solved, so movie makers can dream up all kinds of plots to explain the heinous goings on. It was an actor. Or it was some mysterious lodger. Or it was Queen Victoria's psychopathic relative. Or it was Victoria herself in drag.This film endorses the common belief that the Ripper was a man of medical knowledge. (It's a lot of horse hockey. It's like the speculation that Son of Sam was a draftsman or architect because his printing was neat.) In fact, Jack is a surgeon here -- Ewan Solon, as the mythical chief surgeon of some equally mythical hospital. John Le Mesurier provides a red herring as another surgeon, an edgy one, perhaps too fond of his niece, played by Betty McDowall. Assorted other characters provide color and texture to an interesting movie that offers the viewer a satisfactory climax in which Jack the Surgeon gets squashed in the shaft beneath an elevator descending to the morgue."We know who it was but we can never prove it," concludes the requisite police inspector, Eddie Byrne. Wouldn't it be pretty to think so.It's fairly well done. The cobblestoned back streets of Whitechapel are effectively represented. The performances are all good, especially Solon's, and the characters well portrayed, except for the visiting American detective, Lee Patterson with his Elvis Presley do, put into the script presumably to appeal to American audiences.Not bad, if not exactly original or surprising in any way.

Jack the Ripper (1959) ** (out of 4) Atmospheric and moody version of the infamous serial killer. This isn't quite as good as the version with Klaus Kinski but it remained entertaining throughout. The director does a great job building up the atmosphere of 1888 London but for some strange reason he never pushes the "mystery" surrounding the case. He throws a lot of suspects at us but for some reason he never tries to build up a mystery film as to who the killer is. There's a big twist at the end, which makes one think the film is going to do something with it but it never does. I'm not exactly sure what the filmmakers were going for but the movie still works.

One of the strange things about Jack the Ripper movies is that, as we get further away in time from the events of 1888, filmmakers seem much more concerned with providing a 'real', historically accurate solution to the mystery. This is in marked contrast to earlier movies about the Ripper, which only used the name as a framework for Gothic horror tales, and the 1959 version is no exception. Absolutely nothing in this movie really happened, but, this actually makes the film more entertaining; I always find it irritating when a director claims to have made a historically accurate Ripper movie, and then falls down on minor details. The makers of this film clearly had no such intentions, something clearly demonstrated by star Lee Patterson's 1950's Elvis quiff, unless his character was seriously ahead of his time where fashion was concerned.As for the story itself, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster (who wrote several of Hammer's best movies) seems to have based his script very loosely on the 'Doctor Stanley' theory put forward by Leonard Matters in his 1929 book 'The Mystery of Jack the Ripper'. In this book, Matters alleged that the murders were committed because Stanley's son caught syphilis from Mary Kelly, the last of the five Ripper victims, and the not-so-good doctor went out looking for her, asking (and then killing) the other four victims for info about Kelly. In the film, Jack the Ripper is looking for a woman named Mary Clark, and he murders women after asking them if they either are, or know the whereabouts of, Mary Clark. The main difference, other than the name of the woman he's looking for, is that the Ripper's son committed suicide (sexually transmitted diseases being a no-no as far the BBFC were concerned at the time).The film is generally pretty good, with decent performances from its two imported American leads (the producers were clearly taking no chances when it came to getting the film a U.S release), with Patterson making a likable hero, and Eddie Byrne (probably best known for playing a similar role the same year in Hammer's 'The Mummy') being suitably dogged as the Inspector on the Ripper's trail. There are maybe too many obvious red herrings, notably the mute, hunchbacked assistant who carries knives around and is nearly lynched by a mob, and John Le Mesurier's doctor who always comes into a room after a murder dressed in the stereotypical Ripper garb, but the revelation of the killer's identity is actually quite surprising, and the end sequence, with the Ripper crushed by a lift in a brief colour sequence, is suitably melodramatic (even if it does look like what it was, that is to say red paint squirted through a hole).