Hammer only rarely explored that most enduring of real-life Victorian monsters, Jack the Ripper, who appeared in Room to Let in 1950 and then turns up in the prologue of Peter Sasdy’s 1971 gem Hands of the Ripper (elements of his crimes were pressed into service in the same year’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde). It’s a beautifully written – by L.W. Davidson and Edward Spencer Shew – morally complex and wonderfully acted film that went a long way to redeeming Sasdy’s reputation after the plodding Countess Dracula (1971).
In 1880s East London, an angry mob angrily pursues Jack the Ripper (an uncredited Danny Lyons) to his house where he murders his wife, a gruesome crime witnessed by his traumatised young daughter Anna. Years later, a Anna (Angharad Rees) has been raised by the fake medium Mrs Golding (Dora Bryan), who makes Anna take part in her deceptions. Her scam is exposed by psychiatrist Dr John Pritchard (Eric Porter) who takes her under his wing after Golding tries to prostitute her to the politician Dysart (Derek Godfrey) and Anna brutally murders her, apparently placed into a murderous fugue by the flickering of light from her broach. Anna is triggered as the flickering reminds her of the firelight on the night of her mother’s murder. Anna is introduced to Pritchard’s son Michael (Keith Bell) and his blind fiancée Laura (Jane Merrow) and seems to be settling into a happier new life. But the trauma of her childhood keeps resurfacing and she commits several more grisly murders, her hands physically transforming into those of her late father. Things come to a head in the whispering gallery of St Paul’s Cathedral where Anna starts to realise what she’s been doing and a badly injured Pritchard races to stop her from killing Laura.
In some respects, Hands of the Ripper anticipates the following year’s Demons of the Mind, with its Freudian themes (it revolves around a young woman with the ultimate in daddy issues) and its rationalist pioneering psychoanalyst struggling with a problem that his science simply has no explanation for. It’s the better film of course, one of Hammer’s very best in fact thanks to the fantastic performances and a literate and sometimes moving script. Angharad Rees is particularly good, just heart-breaking as the tormented orphan haunted by the “sins of the father”, a particularly popular theme at Hammer at the time (see also Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969), Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971) and Demons of the Mind). Anna is one of Hammer’s most satisfyingly ambiguous human “monsters”, our sympathies see-sawing back and forth throughout. She’s alternately sweet and vulnerable and terrifyingly violent, played to perfection by Rees, still a few years from becoming a household name in the UK playing Demelza in the original incarnation of the BBC’s Poldark (1975-1977). Porter is fantastically intense as her saviour (there’s a hint of Shaw’s Pygmalion about their relationship), his Pritchard so pompously sure of himself that he continues to believe that he can save Anna right to the end even in the face of logic (“you can’t cure Jack the Ripper,” Dysart warns him).
The ending is as devastating as anything Hammer ever did. A mortally wounded Pritchard dragging himself halfway across London with a serious wound in his side might stretch credibility somewhat, but Porter sells it wonderfully and Anna’s awful realisation of what she’s done and her tragic death dive from the whispering gallery is one of Hammer’s most emotionally charged climaxes.
Among the various victims and interested parties are Margaret Rawlings, essentially playing the Robert Lees part in the story, the psychic with some insight into the killings, the unusually strong juvenile leads are nicely played by Jane Merrow (whose blindness is only there to facilitate the ending) and Keith Bell (Tom Bell’s brother) who is made to look like Edgar Allan Poe for some reason and Lynda Baron plays the only character in the film named after one of the real-life participants of the horrors of the late summer and early autumn of 1888, Long Liz. Dora Bryan is wonderful, channelling Margaret Rutherford in Blithe Spirit (1945) and gets a nasty death scene early on, skewered to a door on a poker, setting up the bloody tone of the what’s to come – but that’s only the beginning. Hands of the Ripper is a notably grisly film with each successive murder becoming increasingly nasty, just as the Ripper’s murders had done in fact. Marjie Laurence’s throat-slashing and Lynda Baron’s eyeball distress are among of the more vicious moments but there’s plenty of blood and gore being splashed about at regular intervals, supervised by Hammer’s veteran make-up artist Roy Ashton who was returning to the company after a short spell away for the final time. So much so that when the film was released in the States, the censors at the Motion Picture Association of America made their own savage cuts.
The emotionally charged finale sees Hammer venturing outside for some unusual location work that doesn’t involve a trip to Black Park. Much of the film was shot at Pinewood using sets left over the from The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1969) but they were denied access to the whispering gallery of St Paul’s Cathedral. Exteriors were shot at St Ann’s Church in Beaconsfield and as the gallery was strictly out of bounds Sasdy was forced to sneak in a few extras, their costumes hidden under raincoats, to shoot still images that were then used for front projections (supervised by Zoran Perisic, later an Oscar winner for his work on Superman (1979)) back at Pinewood where the floor of the cathedral was also recreated.
Hands of the Ripper has to jump through some narrative hoops to contrive reasons for why Anna is being triggered and there’s a surfeit of “gor blimey guvnor” accents but really, who cares? When you’ve got a story as engaging and intelligent as this, so beautifully shot (by Kenneth Talbot) and emotionally acted, it hardly seems to matter. It remains one of Hammer’s very best films and was released on a marvellous double bill with another of the company’s finest, Twins of Evil (1971).
As of 2012, the revived Hammer were planning to return to Whitechapel during the autumn of terror with Gaslight, based on a script by Ian Fried that had featured on Hollywood’s Black List of the best unproduced scripts in 2011. Described as being “in the vein of From Hell meets The Silence of the Lambs.” Sadly nothing ever seemed to have come of it.
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