In 1976, Stephen Knight published his sensationalist best seller Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution which audaciously suggested that the Whitechapel murders were committed as a part of a conspiracy between the British royal family, the Freemasons and the painter Walter Sickert, a conspiracy that encompassed an illegitimate heir to the throne born to an East End prostitute, the murderous rampage of physician William Gull and a wide-ranging cover-up by the British government. Knight’s claims have been discredited a number of times by other “Ripperologists” and historians, but that did little to prevent the book enjoying enormous popularity and impressive sales. The film Murder by Decree (1979), television documentary Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1980), the mini-series Jack the Ripper (1973) and Jack the Ripper (1988) and the stage plays Force and Hypocrisy (1986) and Sherlock Holmes and the Ripper Murders (by no less a luminary than Brian Clemens) all drew from aspects of the fanciful theories advanced by Knight and they formed the spine on which Alan Moore hung his take on the Ripper story, the graphic novel From Hell, serialised in Taboo and it’s own series before being gathered into a single volume in 1999.

Like Knight, Moore and his artist colleague Eddie Campbell cast the Ripper as the product of zealous monarchist Freemasons, specifically Gull, but it’s not a theory that Moore himself actually subscribed to: “I believe the book was an ingenious hoax,” he later said, “based very solidly on fragments of fact or rumour or guesswork. I think that Knight was basically having some fun in coming up with a fictional solution to a real crime. Of all the Ripper stories, it was the best story, and it didn’t contradict the known facts in any vast areas.” Moore takes the basic ideas proposed by Knight (though he claims not to have read The Final Solution before starting on his scripts) and uses them as a launchpad for his own ideas and philosophical musings (one whole chapter/issue follows Gull and his coachman Netley around London’s landmarks as he explains their mystical significance).

The film adaptation by brothers Albert and Alan Hughes was the first film adaptation of Moore’s work and the wholesale changes wrought on his original scripts would have done little to persuade Moore, already cynical about the workings of Hollywood, that getting involved with film types was a good idea. Indeed a few adaptations later we would start to insist that his name not be credited or used in any form of promotion.

The basics of his plot remain but the details are significantly altered. In 1888 Whitechapel, prostitutes Mary Kelly (Heather Graham), Martha Tabram (Samantha Spiro), Polly Nichols (Annabelle Apsion), Annie Chapman (Katrin Cartlidge), Elizabeth Stride (Susan Lynch) and Kate Eddowes (Lesley Sharp) do what they need to do to survive the grinding poverty, rampant misogyny and ever-present threat of violence that makes up their daily lives. One of their friends, Ann Crook (Joanna Page), has escaped the grind thanks to a relationship with wealthy painter Albert Sickert (Mark Dexter) to who she has recently borne a daughter, Alice. Martha is murdered and Ann kidnapped, drawing the women into a dark conspiracy and putting them in the sights of a brutal killer soon being dubbed Jack the Ripper. On his trail is absinth and opium addicted Whitechapel copper Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp), a gifted but troubled investigator still haunted by the death of his wife (Sophia Myles) during childbirth two years earlier. Combining the real life Abberline with Robert James Lees, the dubious psychic associated with the Ripper case, the screen Abberline has visions of the murders.

Trusting both his mystical visions and his detective skills, Abberline, with his trusty sidekick Sergeant Peter Godley (Robbie Coltrane) often in tow, consults Sir William Gull (Ian Holm), a physician to the royal family, unaware that Gull himself is the murderer. Gull has been tasked by his fellow Freemasons with tracking down all witnesses to the marriage of Sickert (actually the syphilitic Prince Albert, grandson of Queen Victoria) to Ann Crook and track down baby Alice who will be the heiress to the British throne. Complications set in when Abberline falls in love with Mary…

Moore was understandably dismayed by what the Hughes’ had done to his original, particularly disliking the transformation of Abberline from middle aged flatfoot to young, drug addled Hollywood heartthrob. And he has a point (though Depp is pretty good in the role) but there’s a lot else wrong with From Hell which is not a particularly faithful or even close adaptation of the novel. It does clear up the somewhat obtuse ending of the book which makes a lot more sense after seeing the film – in his many annotations, Moore described “the cryptic scene upon page twenty-three” which “must go without an explanation for the moment. Work it out for yourself.” The film removes any ambiguity which will have pleased some and infuriated others.

Overall, the script is muddled and sometimes even contradictory – early on, Tabram is murdered in a stunningly shot sequence, dragged into the dark of an alleyway where the glare of light from a knife arcing through the air tells us all we need to know without being too graphic. It seems to be suggesting that the film will be adding Tabram to the official “canon” of Ripper victims, yet only moments later Abberline completely poo poos the idea and besides describes her as having been “raped, tortured and killed,” which certainly doesn’t tally with what we were shown. Elsewhere, the script ditches the social satire and philosophical musings of Moore in favour of something more akin to a standard Hollywood blockbuster which should really have come as a surprise to no-one. The Hughes’ saw Victorian Whitechapel as just another ghetto and try to turn it into the Victorian equivalent of the Watts of their debut film Menace II Society (1993), a commendable effort but the film doesn’t really work that well in practice.

But its biggest liability is its far too starry cast. Depp is fine as a tormented and tragic young cop out of his depth investigating a particularly brutal series of murders but as Frederick Abberline, he’s very wide of the mark. In life, as in the comics, Abberline was just shy of 50 when the Ripper murders occurred and while he had indeed lost his wife, he was a father of four children who he raised himself and was certainly no East End drug fiend. Coltrane is far better as Godley though in real life the sergeant was named George Godley and had been born in Sussex, and Ian Holm is often quietly chilling as the deranged Gull. Of the women, Cartlidge and Lynch come off best. Graham never convinces for one second that she’s a Victorian Whitechapel prostitute and, although she’s not the only one afflicted, suffers from having to carry around an accent that very likely never existed anywhere in London or anywhere else for that matter.

In the credit column we should acknowledge that the film is gorgeously designed, by Martin Childs, and photographed, by Peter Deming, together with the Hughes recreating a squalid Whitechapel that may have been no closer to historical fact than any of the characters that stalk its streets but which gives the film a pleasing Gothic atmosphere. The murders are expertly staged, ranging from the almost impressionistic killing of Tabram to a spectacularly grisly throat slashing (though we get nothing here to match the hellish charnel house vision of Kelly’s murder in Murder by Decree) and in place of Moore’s loftier concerns about London, its architecture and the mysticism of Freemasonry, we do get an intriguing if underdeveloped bit if business drawing parallels between the Ripper’s street butchery and the surgical horrors meted out by the learned doctors.

But nothing adds up to anything of any weight. To fit into a traditional movie mystery thriller format, the identity of the killer is delayed until near the end whereas in the graphic novel we knew it was Gull all along and its psychological study of a serial killer is abandoned in favour of a more mundane police procedural. As an adaptation of the graphic novel, it’s a crushing disappointment and as a film in its own right it has too many flaws (if you hear one other actor saying that “sumfink” has happened you’ll want to scream). Murder By Decree remains the superior take on the Freemasons-as-Ripper theory.