1888: Whitechapel in the East End of London: Inspector O' Neill (Eddie Byrne) is coming under intense pressure from the Yard, the Home Secretary and the terrified local population to bring to book a serial killer known as Jack The Ripper who murders and mutilates street women. His close friend, a visiting American policeman called Sam Lowry (Lee Patterson), is keen to help him track down the Ripper since his own force has a deep interest in the case too. The Mercy Hospital for Women falls under great suspicion of the local people who are developing a lynch mob tendency. A mute employee at the hospital, Louis Benz (Endree Muller), drops a medical bag he is carrying at the scene of a crime spilling all its surgical contents on to the pavement. Assuming him to be the Ripper, the locals pursue him through the cobbled streets arming themselves with the scalpels and surgical knives and it is only by chance that O' Neill and Lowry happen to be passing that he is saved from being hacked to pieces by the mob. O' Neill puts Benz in protective custody and the assistant chief commissioner of the Yard is keen to charge him for the murders, but O' Neill thinks that it is too easy and does not believe that the unfortunate Benz is his man. But who is the elusive Jack The Ripper and what are the motives behind his frenzied, bloody and insane killings?There has been countless films and documentaries made and numerous books written about the world's most famous unsolved case about the mysterious serial killer who terrified London's East End during 1888. Naturally, there has been countless suspects and theories behind the motives of the Ripper murders. Anybody who has even just a passing interest in the case will see the solution in this British b-pic from Monty Berman and Bob Baker coming from some distance off. Yet, the identity of the culprit is well enough concealed until the film reaches its shocking denouement. Jimmy Sangster, Hammer's regular screenwriter whom Berman and Baker hired for their copy of that studio's gothics, The Blood Of The Vampire (1958), teases us with a number of red herrings and possible suspects. Berman and Baker, here multitasking as cinematographers/directors and producers admirably rise to the occasion in generating the tension; sometimes to very high levels. The climax, for instance, where O' Neill and Lowry trap the killer in the hospital tricking him into thinking that the porter he has just stabbed to death is still alive and on the brink of regaining consciousness and could reveal his identity. As they intended, he breaks and tries to make a run for it hiding at the bottom of a lift shaft. But, the mortuary attendants use the lift to take the porter's body down to the morgue and he is crushed to death in a suitably effective and lurid moment. My DVD, an Italian import, used an American print in which that scene turns into Technicolor to reveal the Ripper's blood seeping through the floorboards of the elevator. That gimmick was not seen in UK prints of the film although it still got an 'X' certificate. The murders are fairly shockingly staged combining just the right amount of graphic horror and leaving the rest to the imagination, which is so much more effective. Effective set design and b/w cinematography succeed in creating a chilling atmosphere and convincingly recreates the fog shrouded, cobbled streets and dank alleyways of Whitechapel in the Ripper era. It has to be said as well that the picture's low budget is pretty well concealed. Berman and Baker also capture quite well the effect that the murders have on the community transforming it from a happy thriving place into one where decent people live in fear and develop a mob mentality. Performances are generally good all round with Eddie Byrne offering a good down to earth portrayal as the dogged and frustrated police inspector and John Le Mesurier is noteworthy as a surgeon whom we are teased and lead on to believe is the Ripper throughout the film sustaining the suspense. Film buffs will recognise Lee Patterson, the imported American leading man, who was a 'B' picture stalwart in Britain at this time. Many of the low budget programmers he appeared in were largely forgotten after they were first screened to fill the lower half of the double bill, but many are enjoying a resurgence in the age of DVD.All in all, Jack The Ripper's solution behind the killings can be seen coming from some one way off, but it is still a highly enjoyable atmospheric and sometimes shocking fictionalised account of the world's most famous unsolved cases.

This version of the Jack the Ripper saga opens rather poorly by serving up a lot of dull and incredible hoke about a visiting police detective to the London scene by our star player, Lee Patterson, here playing an American detective (although he is in fact a Canadian in real life). Personally, I wouldn't care a fig if our visiting "American" had stayed at home and left the investigation in the more capable hands of Sherlock Holmes. But once the plot really gets into stride, both the story and its presentation improve enormously. Producers/directors/photographers Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker are obviously much more at home with action than standing still. And happily, they have outlaid a fortune (at least by quota quickie standards) on sets and extras.

The titular serial-killer has captivated film-makers and audiences ever since the Silent days: in fact, this was already at least the sixth time – after the 1926, 1932 and 1944 versions of THE LODGER, PANDORA'S BOX from 1929 and 1953's MAN IN THE ATTIC – his vicious exploits were brought to the screen (and countless more would follow)! Other notorious Victorian figures to which the cinema would return time and again are grave-robbers Burke and Hare and their eminent accomplice Dr. Robert Knox: indeed, THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS (which would also see the involvement of Baker and Berman) appeared shortly after this one…and, interestingly enough, both would be released in "Continental Versions" – a brief trend that incorporated entirely gratuitous and often jarringly-inserted nudity intended for more liberal markets, such as France (the copy I acquired of the title under review actually reverts to that language for its three 'alternate' scenes)! Anyway, the script here (by the late Hammer stalwart Jimmy Sangster) attempts to give a face and a motive to the reputedly methodical perpetrator of these crimes – making him a respectable surgeon deranged by the obsession to seek out and chastise the ex-prostitute apparently responsible for his similarly-gifted but eventually wayward son's suicide; to be fair to it, some of the earlier and later 'Ripper' outings did likewise and their conclusions proved just as simplistic! Nevertheless, Sangster managed to subtly touch upon a number of issues along the way such as female emancipation (and the way it was looked at with suspicion by the male gender), illicit 'after-hours' cabaret activities (and how defenseless young women were practically blackmailed into acquiescing) and also the immediate socio-economic effect of the killings (resulting in deserted streets and a people constantly on edge and distrustful of strangers and authority who find mob violence an efficient outlet for their frustration, with a hunchback and mute morgue attendant – initially a clichéd device – the most convenient scapegoat).More pragmatically, the finger of guilt seems to be pointing in the direction of John Le Mesurier, a sterling presence in many a classic British comedy but here playing it atypically – albeit effectively – stern (especially given his character's declared aversion to the Police, seedy environments and foreigners, notably Americans: with respect to the latter, let us not forget that the events of 1776 were little more than a hundred years removed from this era and the natural animosity between the two sides had not abated completely).Incidentally, here we have fictitious support to the manhunt from the United States, with the young cop not only involved in the obligatory romance (as it happens, Le Mesurier's ward and also unwitting sponsor of the Ripper's intended target) but actually solving the case!; however, so as to uphold the established truth of its being an affair still shrouded in mystery, Sangster concocts an improbably bloody demise for the villain.Despite the obvious low-budget (not helped by the fuzziness of the print on display), the period reconstruction seems fairly authentic – even if such thoroughness, at this stage, did not extend to the murder sequences, which are dealt with too swiftly for them to give an inkling of the adopted clinical approach (that said, the film-makers could have easily worked their way around this hurdle by turning the camera away while keeping the brutal action going in the background!).

The part of the American sleuth ,Sam Lowry ,is absolutely pointless:he seems to be here just to provide the screenplay with a bland love interest.Aside from that,this low-budget flick is watchable ,if not particularly memorable.The atmosphere of the foggy streets of London is just what you expect from the subject.There are some relevant lines from the heroine who says that if these crimes took place in the chic parts of the city,the Police would already have caught the murderer.Like in other versions,the government does not seem to care ,but here the "explanation" is not "political"