A fog shrouded street in London’s seedy Whitechapel district in 1888. A woman stumbles drunkenly from a bar and totters down the circuitous streets, dropping her purse at one point and she unsteadily collects her possessions spilled out on the cobblestones. A mysterious deep voice cuts through the fog. “Mary Clarke? Are you Mary Clarke? Where can I find Mary Clarke?” Then he grabs the frightened woman by the throat and reaches into a doctor’s bag, pulling out a knife and viciously plunging it into her.
That’s the effectively creepy opening to Jack the Ripper, directed by Robert S. Baker & Monty Berman, a British thriller picked up my master showman and producer Joseph E. Levine who tweaked it and released it in America in 1959.
The original film negative is considered lost, and a few years ago Severin released a Blu-ray of the best elements they could find of the American and British release. But in 2024 they discovered a 35mm fine grain positive of the European version and a 35mm dupe negative of the U.S. version. This new 4k UHD & Blu-ray set is available now and it’s bloody gorgeous.
I saw the film when I was very young but quickly became obsessed with it, watching it repeatedly in the theater and even buying the soundtrack album, little knowing then that the original score by Stanley Black had been replaced by producer Joseph E. Levine with a soundtrack by Jimmy McHugh and Pete Rugolo.
This notorious, unsolved crime has fascinated filmmakers for decades. From Alfred Hitchcock’s silent film version- The Lodger, to the superior 1944 version starring a chilling Laird Cregar. Jack Palance picked up the blade in Man in the Attic (1976), and Klaus Kinski starred as the “Ripper” in a grisly 1976 version. Hammer films turned out Hands of the Ripper in 1975 and Sherlock Holmes tried to solve the crime in A Study in Terror (1965) and Murder by Decree (1974) H. G. Wells had to pursue Jack into the 20th Century in Time After Time (1975). Johnny Depp played a police inspector investigating the crime in From Hell (2001). Then there’s Jack’s Back (1988) and the TV series Whitechapel (2009), not to mention countless others. I’m still haunted by Louise Brooks as Lulu fatefully encountering “Jack” at the end of Pandora’s Box (1929)
I still have the original paperback of Robert Bloch’s wonderful short story- Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper, which was made into a fabulous Thriller episode in 1961 directed by Ray Milland.
But I’ve always thought this 1959 British version was severely underappreciated. It’s well made, well cast, and has a clever screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, who wrote all those sensational scripts for Hammer films. The film has real atmosphere and suspense, and there is this startling brief color sequence at the end that had the audience whooping it up at the theater I saw it in as a kid.
The treat on the Blu-ray is the racier European version- in those days occasionally they would include alternative scenes for the foreign markets. Here, in a backstage scene at a nightclub, the gals are lounging around topless, which still seems wild to see. And that version has the original Stanley Black score.
Extras on this must-own 2-disc set include audio commentary with co-director Robert S. Baker, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and assistant director Peter Manley moderated by British horror historian Marcus Hearn. Plus, an interview with Denis Meikle, author of “Jack the Ripper: The Murders and the Movies.” Also: “Choice Cuts: The Two Faces of Jack the Ripper,” an interview with “Ripperologist” Alain Petit; plus, the trailer and a poster and still gallery.
