After reading over 50 Epinions of FROM HELL, some excellent, and almost all written by people who must have seen the movie, I have but a few notes to add -- and those to the Video Section, where this film will soon appear:

After Midnight: In the half-dark, I am walking up an aisle of the soon-to-be-closed, cavernous Coronet Theater, Geary Street, San Francisco: Marilyn Manson groans at my back under the end-credits of FROM HELL. By the exit in front of me, a lone girl stands transfixed, staring past me toward the screen. The lobby is deserted. I find the Men's Room with some trouble. Snap the switch, and the white tiled interior reflected in the direct light, like a dissection room from my college days, makes me somehow uneasy. I turn back to find the door is ajar. I shut it with more shove than necessary. Push the button in the door handle to lock it. What in hell did I learn FROM HELL? Why does anyone come to such films about Red Jack?

I -- Of course, I have seen my share of these pictures -- no, not the first, such as Paul Leni's WAXWORKS (1926), Hitchcock's THE LODGER (1926), or its 1932 sound remake -- but I have seen G. W. Pabst's German Expressionistic silent masterpiece, LULU (1928). [With the American Louise Brooks creating one of the last century's iconic figures, luring Jack to slaughter her.] And of course, he appears again as Mack the Knife in Pabst's 1931 film version of the Brecht/Weil THREE PENNY OPERA. (In referring to Jack (and sometimes, Adolph Hitler), the Germans often dub him -- or a figure like him -- Jack Springheels!) I also saw James Hill's A STUDY IN TERROR (1965) -- Sherlock Holmes tracking Jack -- and Christopher Plummer and James Mason as Holmes and Watson doing likewise in MURDER BY DECREE (Clark, 1979), which has a rather similar explanation for the murders to the one offered in FROM HELL.

[Arthur Conan Doyle's initial Sherlock Holmes' story, the novel A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887, a year before the first Ripper murder. The first short stories, which came in the next three years, established the modern consciousness of fictional detective work. Also the idea of a master criminal who defies conventional civilization.]

And there was the Michael Caine's 1988 mini-series, JACK THE RIPPER, like FROM HELL drawing on the same (now largely discredited) book about the case which came out in the late 1970's.

While I avoided most of the Hammers and have only foggy memories of Jack Palance in MAN IN THE ATTIC (Fregonese, 1952), I do remember with a certain nostalgic, retrospectively guilty excitement, John Brahm's remake of THE LODGER (1944), the third remake of Marie Belloc Lowndes' sturdy Victorian thriller. I still remember the hulking, brilliant Laird Cregar climbing to a theater catwalk, cross bars of light reflecting on his face, a much more effective conveyance of dread and suspense than any of the gore in FROM HELL. And of course, there is genteel Merle Oberon, the landlords' niece, tricked out in fur-trimmed tights, like an early day Playboy Bunny, for her starring music hall gig -- the epitome of what Mr. Sleuth (Cregar), like some Christian Osama bin Laden, loathes and lusts for, what he must purify with the flame his terrible knife.

[Freudianism was then at its high-water.]

I remember Cregar's eyes, full of desire and disgust, as he watches Miss Oberon do a number with her chorus line: "Watch me dance the Polka/Watch me cover the -- " Or was that that the ditty Ingrid Bergman sang in the second sound remake of DR. JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE (Fleming, 1941)?

Yes, I think so.

[Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 short novel, an allegory of alcoholism and addiction, among other things, was later seen as a simulacrum of the person Jack might have been. "Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde" holds up to middle class society for the first time a fiend, who in his daily activities may be a person like you and me.]

I had planned to attend a showing of JOY RIDE, but it had been taken off, and because the time listing for FROM HELL in the Chronicle was incorrect, I found myself in front of an empty ticket booth, and the deserted, locked lobby of The Coronet, at 8:45 p.m. A grimy typed sheet on the glass let me know the last show was to go on at 9:45, rather than 9 o'clock. The coffee shops were closed by this time, and because I was taking antibiotics to knock out an acute Sinusitis, I didn't want to go into a bar (the only other establishment reliably open at that time). And so, I wandered farther out Geary Street, giving quarters to beggars, passing someone rolled up in an old quilt every twenty feet or so.

II -- The Whitechapel district of London was a scene of tremendous poverty at the end of the 19th Century. Refugees of revolutions, small wars and disasters from Russia, Eastern Europe, Ireland, France Italy and Greece flooded the Capital of Great Britain. Displaced families, religious and political exiles, lonely men, wanderers, sailors, ex-convicts, pimps, abandoned women, runaway girls, girls in trouble -- all resided here amid small merchants and public houses.

Not incidentally, large numbers of Jewish people escaping from the pogroms, which followed on the 1881 assassination of Alexander II of Russia, ended up in London, where (as elsewhere in the West), they were ready scapegoats for any of society's ills. When the first Ripper murder occurred in August 1888, over 50,000 Jews lived in the East End, perhaps 35,000 in Whitechapel. Early on, given their arcane rituals, real and imagined, the finger was pointed at the possibility that a Jew was Jack. FROM HELL touches on this factor several times. For instance, Police Inspector Charles Warren (Ian Richardson, in the movie) did order destroyed a chalked message on a wall at one of the murder sites: "The Juwes are not the men to be blamed for nothing." (He did so to prevent an inflamed situation from possibly getting out of control, and besides, it was unclear whether or not the graffito was there before the crime.)

And of course, there were the Irish, often poor, ignorant, desperate -- largely Catholics in a profoundly Protestant nation -- considered following the Irish Potato Famine of the 1860's, the largest criminal element in England (and on the East Coast of the United States, for that matter). They came in larger numbers to London every day. An Irish butcher would do nicely as the Ripper, it was widely asserted. Perhaps "The Royal Conspiracy Theory," concocted by "The Whitchapel Club of Chicago" in the 1890's and "The Masonic Theory" later on were counter-attacks to this view on Ireland's culpability. The Hughes Brothers wed both of the notions in FROM HELL.

And then there were the Anarchists, much like the Al-Qaida of today, assassinating the President of France and the Crowned Heads of Europe following the Commune of 1871. Bombs and bodies were everywhere, it seemed, and the English, as we Americans today, looked about for foreigners to suspect and blame for any ugly or unexplained act. The riots, like that of "Bloody Sunday" in November 1887, exacerbated the mystery which developed around the case. The officials and newspapers found this group a ready source for everything evil, including the Ripper murders amidst London's East End. Strangely, though the movie, which throws everything else into FROM HELL, neglects this factor.

Large numbers of these various immigrant groups lived in rooming houses, if they could afford rooms. If they could not, they stayed in Doss Houses, communal quarters for sleeping, paid by the night, as we see in FROM HELL, on straw palettes or held vertical by devices as simple as a clothes line. The initially projected suspects for the murders were butchers, veterinarians or medical assistants from these "foreign elements" struggling to rise out of Britain's version of The Melting Pot.

I made my way west in San Francisco this night through a group of men speaking Italian, who stood smoking outside the Bella Trattoria. A blowzy, bloated middle-aged woman, underdressed for the chill of the night in a short fur-collared jacket, mini-skirt, black stockings and high heels, loomed up to ask me to buy her a drink. (Others like her, but younger, more attractive, even more flashily dressed, wander parallel streets closer to downtown.) At last, I came to a forlorn Burger King and went in for a large coffee.

III -- The most interesting part of FROM HELL concerns the contrast between the lives led by the women on whom Jack preyed and the officials charged with apprehending Red Jack, first and most famous of modern serial killers. Unlike Katrin Cartridge (the best performance in the movie, in a small part) or Leslie Sharpe, Samantha Spiro, and Susan Lynch -- the actresses who play the unlucky women in FROM HELL -- the victims of "Red Jack" were well past their prime "Dark Annie" Chapman, Kate "Polly" Nichols, Martha Tabram and Catherine "Kate" Eddowes were overweight, consumptive, pox ridden, toothless and/or graying:

1. Polly Nichols, 43, found in Bucks Row, Whitchapel, August 31, 1888. She had married a locksmith, William Nichols, at 19. Separated Mother of five.

2. Anne Chapman, 47, murdered in a backyard at 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfield, September 8, 1888. She had married a coachman, John Chapman, a good catch, but the first of her three children died of meningitis. The second was a cripple. Separated from her husband.

3. Elizabeth Stride, 45, dead in a narrow yard, Berner Street, Whitechapel, September 29, 1888. Swedish, she came to England as a domestic. Married a carpenter, Thomas Stride in 1869. Separated and widowed. Three children. [It was near her body, in a drain, that a stalk devoid of grapes was found. Speculation suggested a connection, which FROM HELL makes much of, simply because a bunch of grapes in the life of Elizabeth Stride would have been such a seductive luxury.]

4. Catherine "Kate" Eddowes, 46, slashed to death the same night as Elizabeth Stride, in Mitre Square, Aldgate. She was the common-law wife of Thomas Conway. History of domestic abuse. Separated . . . Three children.

[I remember, when I served in England in the Army after World War II, how American soldiers, with plenty of money to dazzle working class and lower middle class girls, thought it strange that their dates often insisted on having sex standing up. It was, they said, more dignified, and they claimed that it was a form of birth control.]

The exception to the mature victims, Mary Jane "Fair Ginger" Kelly (played by Heather Graham), was 24, horrendously murdered over a month after the others, generating speculation that her murder might have been a copy cat crime. Found in a room on Dorset Street, dressed out as if she were a deer, November 8, 1888. A native of Limerick, Ireland, she married a collier who was soon killed in a mine explosion. Came to London, worked in brothels. After various lovers, she took up with a fellow named Joe Barnett. They had quarreled when he lost his job in early November. He was not able to identify her, so mutilated was her body, which gives FROM HELL one of its plot twists.

[Five women, all poor, diseased, all but one middle-aged, nearly toothless, close to destitute, make up what is one of the first crime-media industries. The fact is, had a flurry of letters by "Yours truly, Jack the Ripper" not been sent to the newspapers and the police (many of the pieces shown later to be by different persons), the case might not have become a cause celebre. A dozen other women, similarly butchered over the next couple of years, were attributed to the Ripper by the newspapers, but police investigations failed to make definite connections. Fact is such murders of women, aside from a certain ferocity in two of the examples, were rather common. As I finish this laggardly review, it is believed that "The Green Valley Killer," who killed hundreds of prostitutes and runaways in the American Northwest, may have been identified, after 30 years, through DNA evidence.]

The contrast between the victims and Queen Victoria (Liz Muscrop), the future Duke of Clarence (Mark Dexter, morphed here with another suspect, Albert Sickert), and the Royal Physician, Sir William Gull (Ian Holm), is marked. Victoria is seen as a concerned but distant woman, appalled by the affronts to decorum the killings have created. The Duke is portrayed as a hyperactive, unstable Syphilitic. Sir William Gull, magnetically turned out by Holm, is a man with something on his rather loftily closed mind. Yet he seems cooperative with the investigation of Inspector Abberline. He emerges early, involved in a subplot about the potentially embarrassing fatherhood of a child born to yet another young Whitechapel woman, Annie Crook (Joanna Page).

[True, Sir William Withey Gull believed in rigorously clinical treatment rather than psychological approaches, and in discredited procedures such as drastic pre-frontal lobotomy techniques for dementia (ironically enough, refined and perfected later by Dr. Loyal Davis, father of Mrs. Nancy Davis Reagan). But Dr. Gull was also a distinguished and brilliant Victorian physician. It was he, for instance, who recognized and named the now common condition known as anorexia.]

After writing monthly bills out in the hamburger joint for nearly an hour, I returned to the Coronet. The audience for FROM HELL, when I went to my seat in the Orchestra section, was about fifty widely scattered couples and individuals. A fair number of them, I was surprised to see, were women, in pairs or singly. I had misgivings at having waited to such a late hour to view a film that would, I knew, involve legal voyeurism at its most depraved. I had been given an opportunity to back off and go home early to a warm bed. There must be some primal tie, I thought, which unites both men and women in a fascination with the unspeakable of this sort.

[In the IMBd poll, women rated FROM HELL higher than men (7.4 to 7.2), but males over 45 found it a better film than women of the same age (7.7 to 7.1). Google lists 78, 500 web entries for Serial Killers.]

FROM HELL was directed by the Hughes Brothers. The twins made their movie debut with MENACE II SOCIETY in 1993, and followed up their promise in the stylish DEAD KENNEDYS (1995). They have a vivid visual and editing technique. In FROM HELL, the visual is more successful than the editing. Production Designer Martin Childs (SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, Madden, 1998) and Peter Deming, who hit his stride with David Lynch's current MULHOLLAND DRIVE, give the Brothers a dark, smoky, damp late 19th Century London: the wretched, packed slums; the comfort of the middle class, aristocracy, and royalty. An occasional marmalade sunset and the bluish blush of St. Paul's Cathedral in the middle distance seem to suggest God's mockery of the hopeless, diseased, drunken denizens of The Ten Bells Pub (still there). As FROM HELL suggests, it was at the Ten Bells, many of the prostitute victims of Jack took a few minutes rest from their duties in fog shrouded alleys of Whitechapel. (In real life, the "pinch pricks" and "bang tails," as they are referred to in the film, also frequented The Forrester Arms, The Prince Albert, and The Britannia, etc). The Hughes are to be given deserved credit for crossing over with panache in visualizing these scenes for a general audience.

IV -- Whitechapel, Spitalfield, and Aldgate are much changed. Some of the streets have new names. At least one, Dorset Street, which figures strongly in the plot, refuge of heroine Mary Jane Kelly, has disappeared. But Bucks Row, Hanbury Street, Berner Street and Mitre Square remain. All the streets are paved now, as some were not in 1888, and the area has become fairly prosperous, even gentrified, as the Dot.com Revolution spread in the East End of London. Several years ago, I wandered without any particular purpose along some of these streets, ending my day at the tiny, grand Elizabethan pub, "The Prospect of Whitby."

[Whitby, incidentally, was the seacoast town where Count Dracula, another Ripper-like figure, came ashore in his 1897 invasion of England.]

V -- FROM HELL, for all its fine atmosphere, period detail, and generally strong performances, fails because of the illogical character presentation of the investigating detective, Inspector George Frederick "Fred" Abberline (Johnny Depp). He is depicted as a moody clairvoyant, who has visions of Jack's murders, with the assistance of Absinthe laced with Laudanum, and sessions in an Opium den. I can find no good evidence for this characterization, and the Hughes fail to realize the opium dreams effectively. Depps' slightly threatening features might have been attractive to Mary Jane Kelley, but the relationship does not work in the film, and that gives cause for us to question how logical it would be for a police inspector to idealistically and romantically involve himself with a woman like Mary Jane.

[Life provides complications, which movie plots can overcome if they are done well. Actually, not only did Inspector Abberline have no love affair with Mary Kelly, but his relationship to his partner, Peter Godley (Robbie Coltrane), is presented upside down. In the ranking of 19th Century London police, Abberline, 45 and portly, was the subordinate of Sergeant Godley, who was but 32 at the time. Abberline, contrary to the dire fate suggested for him in FROM HELL, lived on until 1929.]

VI -- None of what I have presented would matter if the picture were exciting and compelling. FROM HELL is not. Have I mentioned the ghoulish coachman (Jason Fleming), McQueen (David Schofield) of the thuggish "Nicols Boys," Dr. Ferral (Paul Rys) or Captain Ben Kidney (Terrence Harvey) of a pioneer Special Branch? The Hughes seem to enjoy these Victorian names, many of which surface in the annals of the case itself, but they try to combine most of the dozen theories of Red Jack's identity in their plot, before settling on their own choice. Too many red herrings do not bring justice to the victims . . . nor to the audience.

And yet the fascination of this far off chronicle, here atmospherically reproduced, remains. Without a war to capture the attention of Western Civilization, without some larger atrocity to get our blood up, we turn again and again to Red Jack.

[Perhaps, the three best films about the psychology and hold of Jack the Ripper upon the Western imagination do not concern the "historical" Jack at all. I refer to THE BODY SNATCHER (Wise, 1945), THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (Lewin, 1945) -- both coincidentally at the end of WWII, one based on a story by Stevenson, the other on one by Oscar Wilde -- and Peter Medak's THE RULING CLASS (1972). Each, without blood and gore, conveys horror and suspense excitingly along the lines of sadism, madness and class the Hughes Brothers pursue. (Of their kind, I consider THE BODY SNATCHER the most artistic horror film ever made, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY the most philosophical and THE RULING CLASS the most witty and humorous -- if you can stand for that.)

After emerging from the Coronet Theater, on my way back home, about 12:30 in the morning, two women climbed on the bus with me, and sat behind me. They excitedly rehashed the five gory killings in FROM HELL. I was glad to pull the warm covers of my bed over me and fall into a fitful, troubled sleep.

By the way, a musical, entitled Jack the Ripper, had its premiere in Boston, in 1997.






Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age