The film was produced to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Whitechapel murders, and was originally screened on British television in two 90-minute episodes, broadcast on consecutive evenings, in October 1988, to coincide with the dates of some of the original events, advertising itself in advance as a solution to the century-old mystery of the murderer's identity using newly discovered original evidence.
Plot
London, autumn 1888. Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline of Scotland Yard is assigned by his superiors to investigate the murder and brutal mutilation of a prostitute in the East End of London. As the mutilated corpses of other "shilling whores" turn up in the same area, London's tabloid journalists – particularly Benjamin Bates of The Star – whip up a public frenzy. The killer is nicknamed "Jack the Ripper" after a letter bearing that name and supposedly from the killer, is forwarded to Scotland Yard. As the Ripper terrorises London, public outrage erupts throughout the country, and Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren fears that a revolution is in the air in London's East End.
There is no shortage of suspects for Abberline and his partner, Sergeant George Godley. These suspects include the American actor Richard Mansfield (appearing in the play Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in London); police surgeon Dr Henry Llewellyn; socialist agitator George Lusk; Queen Victoria's clairvoyantRobert Lees; the Queen's grandson Prince Albert Victor; and Dr Theodore Dyke Acland, the son-in-law of Sir William Gull, Royal Surgeon to Queen Victoria and expert on diseases of the brain. The police and the authorities want the murders solved at any cost, but Abberline and Godley face huge obstacles as they search for the truth – and hindrance from their superiors when the killer is finally unmasked.
Jack the Ripper presents a fictionalised portrayal of Frederick Abberline, with details of his personal life (including alcoholism and his relationship with artist "Emma Prentiss") invented via dramatic licence. (In real-life, at the time of the Ripper murders, Abberline was married to Emma Beament, the daughter of a merchant. In Jack the Ripper, Emma Prentiss is not married to Abberline.) Furthermore, the series' portrayal of Abberline unmasking the Ripper as William Gull contradicts the fact that the real-life Abberline believed that the Ripper was actually George Chapman. George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee was depicted in the film as a violent, argumentative troublemaker when in fact he was very quiet, a good local business man who was known for his peaceful nature, a churchwarden and a Freemason. Hugh Fraser wore clothing that his character, Sir Charles Warren, had actually worn.
The series is constructed as a Whodunit in which viewers are led to suspect, at various points, that Prince Albert Victor, Richard Mansfield, George Lusk, Henry Llewellyn or Theodore Dyke Acland could be Jack the Ripper. Before Jack the Ripper was broadcast, director/co-writer David Wickes claimed that he had been allowed unprecedented access to the Scotland Yard files on the Ripper case and stated that his production would be revealing the 'true' identity of Jack the Ripper for the first time. After pressure from Ripperologist Melvin Harris and others, Wickes was forced to withdraw this claim.[5] Nevertheless, the series begins with a disclaimer on behalf of the production staff, stating, "Our story is based on extensive research, including a review of the official files by special permission of the Home Office and interviews with leading criminologists and Scotland Yard officials." The series' "revelation" that Sir William Gull was Jack the Ripper was not new: Stephen Knight's 1976 book alleged that Gull was the Ripper, and prior to that, the theory had been cited in the 1973 BBC TV series Jack the Ripper (two episodes of which were directed by David Wickes). Furthermore, the Ripper character in the film Murder by Decree, assigned the fictitious name "Sir Thomas Spivey," was based on Sir William Gull.[6]
Marlowe and Wickes retained The Final Solution's contention that William Gull was Jack the Ripper, but dispensed with most of the rest of the theory: the involvement of Prince Albert Victor is dismissed as a red herring; there is no mention of Walter Sickert, Annie Crook, an illegitimate Royal baby, blackmail or Freemasons; and the explanation given for the murders is dementia, acquired by Gull from a stroke. The original script adhered more closely to The Final Solution but was changed during the course of production: interviewed in 2017, Jane Seymour stated "when we first got the script, they kind of implicated the Masons as being involved, and by the time we finished the movie, there was pretty much no mention of the Masons."[7]
The series ends with Gull's son-in-law, Dr. Theodore Dyke Acland, theorising that Gull was using himself as a case-study of multiple personality disorder (giving free rein to his murderous impulses in an effort to understand his own multi-faceted mind). The series presents Gull acting of his own accord (with only coachman John Netley complicit in his crimes), and conspiracy only coming into play after Gull's arrest: according to the series, Gull's murders were covered up at the behest of police commissioner Sir Charles Warren to avoid a scandal, as Gull was Queen Victoria's physician. The series' denouement thus differs to Stephen Knight's claim that Warren was aware of the Ripper's identity as the crimes were being committed.
Jack the Ripper ends with the following disclaimer:
In the strange case of Jack the Ripper, there was no trial and no signed confession.
In 1888, neither fingerprinting nor bloodtyping was in use and no conclusive forensic, documentary or eye-witness testimony was available. Thus, positive proof of the Ripper’s identity is not available.
We have come to our conclusions after careful study and painstaking deduction. Other researchers, criminologists and writers may take a different view.
We believe our conclusions to be true.
Production
The series was originally mounted on a relatively low-budget, with interior photography shot on video-tape and location footage shot on 16-mm film (as was common practice for British television productions of the time). Filming commenced in October 1987, with Barry Foster of Van der Valk cast in the role of Abberline. Production was halted in December 1987 after the American television network CBS became interested in the project, and most of the original cast and crew were paid off.
Jack the Ripper was consequently re-tooled as an Anglo-American co-production with an $11 million budget (provided jointly by Thames Television and CBS), shot entirely on film. It was decided that a more famous actor would be required to headline the series if it was to sell in the United States, so the role of Abberline was recast with the actor Michael Caine[8][9] – ironically, Foster had earlier replaced Caine in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, when Caine refused to play a serial killer who mutilates women.[10] The casting of Michael Caine was considered to be a major coup, as the actor was not known for doing television work. Jack the Ripper reportedly earned Caine a fee of $1 million.
This was both Harry Andrews and Edward Judd's last production. Armand Assante's stand-in died during filming. Of her experience filming Jack the Ripper, Jane Seymour said, "That was fun. I played it as a redhead, it was a great role, and of course I got to work with the great Michael Caine. I had been warned that Michael is tough on actors and actresses unless they know their lines and are very professional, which mostly I was, but they didn’t tell me that he literally liked to do one take and then go and have lunch with his wife. Which is basically what happened! So you’d show up, and unless the [microphone] landed on you or the camera bumped onto you or he messed up, which he never did, that was it. It was one take, and then you’re on to the next. So that was interesting."[7]Michael Caine worked with Jack the Ripper director David Wickes on another television film: the four-hour, two-part Jekyll & Hyde (1990), based on the book by Robert Louis Stevenson. The story of Jekyll and Hyde is a plot-point in Wickes' Jack the Ripper series.
In the original version of the series, Abberline's partner George Godley was to have been played by Brian Capron.[11][12] He was replaced by Lewis Collins who was best known as Bodie in the ITV action series The Professionals. American actor Armand Assante and British actress Jane Seymour, both well known to American audiences, were added to the cast at the suggestion of CBS. Ken Bones, George Sweeney, Edward Judd and Kelly Cryer all played the parts they were cast for in the unfinished version of the series.
Jack the Ripper began filming in February 1988, with principal photography at Pinewood Studios. David Wickes was determined that as few people as possible should know who would be unmasked as the killer, and shot four dummy endings (revealing George Lusk, Inspector Spratling, Chief Superintendent Arnold and Sir Charles Warren as the Ripper) to put the cast and crew off the scent. He also mocked up a scene with Godley pulling William Gull from a coach in a case of mistaken identity, and then edited them all together to produce the result. Reportedly, only eight members of Wickes' staff knew the truth before production wrapped.[11]
The series premiered in the UK on 11 October 1988, and in the USA on 21 October 1988. (The original broadcast thus occurred within the timeframe of the centenary of the Ripper's "Canonical Five" murders, 31 August-9 November 1888.) The series enjoyed extremely high ratings on both sides of the Atlantic.[11]
Several DVD editions of Jack the Ripper include, as extra features, audio commentary by director/co-writer David Wickes and production assistant Sue Davies, and twenty minutes of footage from the original shoot starring Barry Foster and Brian Capron. The series was released on Blu-ray on 27 March 2017. This edition features two versions of the series over two discs, the first presenting the series in two parts as originally broadcast and in its original 4:3 aspect. The second disc contains the series as one film and in a 16:9 widescreen aspect. The blu-ray release contains the same extras contained in the previous DVD releases.
British nostalgia television channel Talking Pictures TV aired both episodes on Wednesday 1 and Thursday 2 April 2020, the first time the miniseries was repeated on British television for some years.
From Hell is a graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell, originally published in serial form from 1989 to 1998. The full collection was published in 1999 by Top Shelf Productions.
Sir William Withey Gull, 1st Baronet was an English physician. Of modest family origins, he established a lucrative private practice and served as Governor of Guy's Hospital, Fullerian Professor of Physiology and President of the Clinical Society. In 1871, having successfully treated the Prince of Wales during a life-threatening attack of typhoid fever, he was created a Baronet and appointed to be one of the Physicians-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria.
A series of murders that took place in the East End of London between August and November 1888 have been attributed to an unidentified assailant nicknamed Jack the Ripper. Since then, the identity of the Ripper has been widely debated, with over 100 suspects named. Though many theories have been advanced, experts find none widely persuasive, and some are hardly taken seriously at all.
Frederick George Abberline was a British chief inspector for the London Metropolitan Police. He is best known for being a prominent police figure in the investigation into the Jack the Ripper serial killer murders of 1888.
The "From Hell" letter was a letter sent with half of a preserved human kidney to George Lusk, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, in October 1888. The author of this letter claimed to be the unidentified serial killer known as Jack the Ripper, who had murdered and mutilated at least four women in the Whitechapel and Spitalfields districts of London in the two months prior to Lusk receiving this letter, and whose vigilance committee Lusk led in civilian efforts to assist the police in identifying and apprehending the perpetrator.
Mary Jane Kelly, also known as Marie Jeanette Kelly, Fair Emma, Ginger, Dark Mary and Black Mary, is widely believed by scholars to have been the final victim of the notorious unidentified serial killer Jack the Ripper, who murdered at least five women in the Whitechapel and Spitalfields districts of London from late August to early November 1888. At the time of Kelly's death, she was approximately 25 years old, working as a prostitute and living in relative poverty.
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution is a book written by Stephen Knight first published in 1976. It proposed a solution to five murders in Victorian London that were blamed on an unidentified serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper".
Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski, better known under his pseudonym George Chapman, was a Victorian era Polish serial killer known as the Borough Poisoner.
Jack the Ripper, an unidentified serial killer active in and around Whitechapel in 1888, has been featured in works of fiction ranging from gothic novels published at the time of the murders to modern motion pictures, televised dramas and video games.
Brian Capron is an English actor who trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
From Hell is a 2001 period detective horror film directed by the Hughes Brothers and written by Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias. It is loosely based on the graphic novel of the same name by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell about the Jack the Ripper murders. The film stars Johnny Depp as Frederick Abberline, the lead investigator of the murders, and Heather Graham as Mary Kelly, a prostitute targeted by the Ripper. Other cast members include Ian Holm, Robbie Coltrane, Ian Richardson and Jason Flemyng. It is an international co-production film between the United Kingdom, the United States and Czech Republic.
Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer who was active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer was also called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron.
Jack the Ripper is a six-part BBC police procedural made in 1973, in which the case of the Jack the Ripper murders is reopened and analysed by Detective Chief Superintendents Barlow and Watt. These characters were hugely popular with UK TV viewers at the time from their appearances on the long-running police series Z-Cars and its sequels Softly, Softly and Barlow at Large. The programme was presented partly as a discussion between the two principals in the present day, interspersed with dramatised-documentary scenes set in the 19th century. The series discusses suspects and conspiracies, but concludes there is insufficient evidence to determine who was Jack the Ripper. The experiment was seen to be a success, and the formula was repeated in 1976 with Second Verdict, in which Barlow and Watt cast their gaze over miscarriages of justice and unsolved mysteries from the past.
George Akin Lusk was a British builder and decorator who specialised in music hall restoration. He was the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee during the Whitechapel murders, including the killings ascribed to Jack the Ripper, in 1888.
John Charles Netley was an English cab driver who was later claimed to have been involved in the 'Whitechapel Murders' committed by the unidentified serial killer Jack the Ripper.
Anno Dracula is a 1992 novel by British writer Kim Newman, the first in the Anno Dracula series. It is an alternate history using 19th-century English historical settings and personalities, along with characters from popular fiction.
The Whitechapel murders were committed in or near the impoverished Whitechapel district in the East End of London between 3 April 1888 and 13 February 1891. At various points some or all of these eleven unsolved murders of women have been ascribed to the notorious unidentified serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.
George Albert Godley was a police officer of the Metropolitan Police who was involved in the hunt for Jack the Ripper in 1888.
Detective Inspector Edmund John James Reid was the head of the CID in the Metropolitan Police's H Division at the time of the Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper in 1888. He was also an early aeronaut.
Love Lies Bleeding is a 1999 drama film directed by William Tannen.
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