Jack the Ripper (1976)

Jack the Ripper (1976) is another of those European co-productions that seeks to completely fictionalise a piece of British history, filtering it through very distorted lens.   To ensure that Victorian London's most notorious serial killer is well and truly distorted, this German-Swiss co-production was written and directed by Jesus Franco, with the sort of off-beat results you might expect.  Beyond the fact that it features a murderer who stalks around Whitechapel murdering and dismembering prostitutes, the film bears little relationship to the actual Jack the Ripper murders of the 1880s.  None of the killings resemble any of theactual murders and the number of victims is vague, with bodies piling up left, right and centre, (in actuality there are five murders attributed to the real Ripper).  Perhaps most bizarrely, the film ends with the Ripper being arrested!  (To be fair, he utters the words 'You'll never prove it' to the police as he's led away - despite the fact that he has been caught in the act of trying to murder another woman - presumably explaining why official records in the real world list the case as being 'unsolved' and the perpetrator as being 'unknown').   The depiction of Victorian London is likewise somewhat off the wall, with the streets looking far too clean and continental, with the murders all seemingly taking place in one small area.  Indeed, the sense of geography, as in many continental films supposedly set in England, is all over the place.  'Are we going to Sherwood Forest?' asks one potential victim as the Ripper takes her on a carriage ride, ignoring the fact that Nottinghamshire is considerably to the North of London.  (Unless, of  course, 'Sherwood Forest' was some sort of speciality performed by prostitutes in Victorian London - 'Sherwood Forest?  That'll be two shillings extra sir').

But the lack of historical (let alone geographical) veracity is irrelevant to Franco.  In crafting his script, he was clearly more interested in exploring the psycho-sexual motivations of his fictional killer than he was in recreating the actual historical situation.  The fact that the real Jack the Ripper's identity remains unknown provides Franco with a blank canvas on which to create his version of a Victorian psycho killer.  Whereas other Jack the Ripper films and TV series have woven elaborate conspiracies involving illegitimate Royal offspring, Freemasons and deranged Royal surgeons, Franco's film provides a personal psychological explanation for his Ripper's desire to murder prostitutes.  As we learn in the course of the film, his own mother was a prostitute and he had suffered abuse at her hands while a child, engendering a love-hate relationship with her memory.  He seeks out prostitutes who resemble her, having sex with them before dismembering them.  most, he abducts and takes to a botanical garden somewhere up the Thames, where he sexually assaults them, then cuts them up while they are still alive.  With the aid of a female accomplice who works there, he then dumps their remains in the river.  (In one memorable sequence, a pair of fishermen snag a dismembered hand as it floats downstream).  Franco's approach means that the film is strong on character development but lighter on gore than you might expect from the subject matter.  (There are, nonetheless, a couple of disturbingly bloody sequences, one showing the aftermath of the Ripper's murder of a prostitute at a brothel, the other when he cuts off the breast of his penultimate victim).

The portrayal of the Ripper is by far the film's strongest aspect, with Franco benefitting from the casting of Klaus Kinski in the role.  Kinski was always reliable casting when it came to weirdos and psychos but his performance here goes beyond the regular sort of Euro-horror psycho often seen in such films, giving a somewhat nuanced characterisation of a deeply disturbed character who is a kindly doctor tending to the poor by day (Dr Orloff, no less), but a ruthless killer by night, with the lines between the two gradually blurring as the police close in and his madness reaches a crescendo.  His Ripper is as much sexual predator as he is crazed killer, homing in on potential victims, setting them at ease with his gentlemanly demeanour before sexually assaulting them.  Kinski's frenzied sexual assaults on his victims, clawing their clothes away and physically molesting them, are actually far more disturbing than any of the gore in the dismemberment scenes.  The realism and conviction he brings to these scenes is all the more disturbing in light of what we now know about the real Klaus Kinski - a sexual predator and serial sexual abuser of female co-stars.  Indeed, the sexual assaults in Jack the Ripper are uncomfortably close to those described by real-life actresses who worked with him, leaving the contemporary viewer suspecting that he wasn't so much acting a role than enacting a sexual fantasy.  

Which isn't to take anything away from Franco's direction which, even without this knowledge on the viewer's part, stages these assaults in such a way as to ensure maximum discomfort for the audience.  The assault on the 'Sherwood Forest' girl, in which she is pinned against a tree in a fog wreathed wood, evoking memories of classic monochrome horror movies where the worst a girl could face in such a setting was a mummy or a werewolf, for instance, Kinski's frenzied sexual attack culminates in him stabbing her in the abdomen with a scalpel - a clear and twisted substitute for sexual penetration.  His last attack, on a ballerina who is also the girlfriend of the chief detective on the case, is made even more disturbing through the fact that she, pf all the women he targets, most resembles his mother, with whom he explicitly identifies her as he tries to rape her.

With it being clear that Franco's focus is exploring the psyche of his main protagonist, the film's plotting becomes perfunctory -  there is no suspense as we know that every time he targets another woman, she will die horribly.  Moreover, Franco's approach to the subject matter means that the Ripper's identity is known to the audience from the outset, severely compromising any opportunities for mystery. The police investigation, for instance, quickly becomes repetitive as the victims stack up, with the leading police inspector bizarrely gathering together anyone connected with the victim variously in pubs or Scotland Yard, Agatha Christie-style, and asking them the same questions over and over, (bizarrely, it always seems to be exactly the same group of people called in this way each time).  The only 'witness' who proves remotely helpful is a blind man, who gives cryptic comments about the killer's smell, (medical spirits and the aroma of an exotic plant not native to the UK and found only in botanical gardens).  Things only pick up toward the end of the film when, the inspector having finally put together the clues, it becomes a race against time as to whether he can get to the botanical gardens in time to stop Kinski from carving up his girlfriend.  While the production values are generally pretty good, with lots of location shooting on narrow, fog-wreathed continental back streets pretending (badly) to be Whitechapel, Franco is never able to conjure up any real atmosphere - everything is too clean and brightly lit.  This, along with the lacklustre plotting and some bland performances from the supporting cast, leaves Jack the Ripper relying upon Kinski's performance and sheer screen presence to carry the entire film.  Which it almost does.

Franco's Jack the Ripper also demonstrates the difficulty of properly judging a foreign-language film when presented in an English-language version.  Whoever prepared the English version I saw clearly did it as cheaply as possible.  All of the dialogue has been dubbed by what sound like the cast of an amateur dramatics society doing a read-through in a village hall, (the reverberation on every voice is terrible).  The delivery is universally flat, with absolutely no intonation or variation feeling completely detached from the on-screen action, exactly as if the dialogue was simply being read from a script at a table, without the benefit of the voice artist being able to see a playback of the scenes they are dubbing.  Various 'Cor blimey, guv'nor' type accents being sported by the working class characters simply adds to the sense that one is watching an elaborate parody play out.  The situation is made even worse by the fact that whoever prepared the English language script seemed to think that the action was taking place in Elizabethan rather than Victorian England, with the dialogue full of people sating things like 'Prithee'.  Obviously, this completely undermines the film as a whole, reducing the dialogue to farce and making it extremely difficult to judge it on its own merits.  (It is to Kinski's credit that his performance retains much of its power, despite some terrible dubbing).  But, if one can set aside the awfulness of the voice acting and script of English language version and ignore the fact that it is meant to be based on historical events, Jack the Ripper makes for an interesting viewing experience, a period curiosity from Jess Franco with a stand out (and very disturbing) performance from Kinski.