"HANDS OF THE RIPPER" (1971)

Starring

Eric Porter

Angharad Rees

Jane Merrow

Keith Bell

Derek Godfrey

Directed by Peter Sasdy

82 minutes

"Hands of the Ripper" is Hammer’s best horror flick. It is also a film that would have been even better than it is if it hadn’t been made by Hammer at all.

Barely a second has gone by as our feature opens before we are greeted by a bunch of ravenous cockneys yelling "It’s the rippa’!" and rushing about the dingy streets of London with flaming torches held aloft. Their top-hatted quarry makes it back to his place to comfort his frightened wife and daughter, but before you can say "It’s you they’re looking for!" he ends up stabbing the former to death whilst the latter looks on through the bars of her crib. Already we’re presented with one problem – given that Jack and his wife have been together for a fair while, since they have a child who looks about three, how come the missus has never had an inkling about her husband’s rather violent and antisocial habits before? And why does he carve her up there and then? No, scratch that – what’s all this guff about Jack having a cosy little family in the first place? Whilst these ponderings have been whirling through your bonce, Jack picks up her daughter and kisses her on the cheek before legging it, leaving her to stare at her dying mother by the fireside as a rather hauntingly melancholic piece of music overlays the proceedings – a scene that would have been extremely touching had the action not been paused every few seconds to flash up the credits.

You’d expect this first scene to pretty much doom the film straight off – within 65 seconds we’ve had some exceedingly clumsy opening exposition (even by Hammer standards) and a juicy murder, with the title of the film being laced across a still of the ripper’s hand (hence "Hands of the Ripper", I’ll be bound). Hammer was never renowned for its subtlety, but this is taking the mickey. And yet the following eighty minutes are rather wonderful, interrupted only by that popular Hammer staple, the "OTT grizzly murders". And yet all of these things, including the film’s title, are mere window dressing – originally put there to entice a bloodthirsty 70s audience into watching the thing, they now rather obscure the finer points of the feature.

The film advances by about twelve years to see the young girl, Anna, hiding behind a grating during a séance, providing the voice of the spirit world for a group of gobsmacked punters and a cynical bloke with a beard, whilst medium Dora Bryan (I kid you not) leers on and says things like "According to the stars, the spirits will be very auspicious next Wednesday." As everybody leaves, the beardy chap, Dr. Pritchard (our hero, ladies and gentlemen, and played by classy Eric Porter, who gets shot in a theatre in "Nicholas and Alexandra" don’t you know?), discovers exactly how everything was faked but declines to make Bryan a laughing stock and buggers off with his son instead, leaving a colleague to go upstairs for a bit of the other with Anna, having paid Dora on the way up. However, said greasy political type (played by Derek Godfrey), gets more than be bargained for when he reawakens the violent emotions deep within Anna’s soul when the firelight casts shimmering reflections off his jewellery bribe, and a kiss upon the cheek turns her into a murderous psychopath, whereupon she sets about impaling Dora Bryan through a wooden door, letting her oily "client" run free. But when Dr. Pritchard returns and discovers the mess, he decides there and then to take Anna under his wing, to look after her properly – and maybe even to analyse and to cure her deadly condition.

What sets this up above the other Hammer horrors is a combination of three things: the script, the performances, and the musical score. Whereas other entries in the Hammer output let melodrama and ghastly shocks roam free in the audience’s imaginations, "Hands" takes a more thoughtful and meandering approach, with the central concept of the story being one of a man trying to understand why murderers do the things that they do. It isn’t a concept that’s taken very far, admittedly – the circumstances surrounding Anna would baffle even the most ardent psychoanalyst, and, besides, we’ve got some more bloody murders to show off as well – but at least the thought was there to try and make the film something a bit more than a run of the mill slasherthon.

Many of the central characters are flawed in some way, and there are no dashing young heroes to save the day here either. Instead we have Dr. Pritchard, whose motivations, though laudable, are actually rather murky. Though he’s attempting to find out the cause of psychopathic behaviour, he freely states at one point that if some lives have to be lost along the way for the greater good then so be it, and makes sure that Anna’s misdemeanours are never discovered. There’s even a hint of a repressed sexual element running there as well – he obviously finds Anna attractive, and his lending her of his deceased wife’s dresses raises an eyebrow, as does his wandering in on Anna being bathed by a servant (using some excuse about modesty not meaning much at his age to allow himself to remain in the room). At the end of one scene in which he implores her to trust him, it looks as though he considers going in for a quick kiss, but decides against it at the last moment. Whether this is love of a father/daughter type, or something slightly darker than that, we are never told, and it ultimately doesn’t really affect the plot very much anyway. However, it’s nice that there are a few undercurrents underpinning the story, which again puts "Hands" on a higher plain than, say, "Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell".

The acting itself is uniformly strong, with Eric Porter imbuing Dr. Pritchard with dignity and lashings of controlled emotion and sadness. Angharad Rees as Anna is similarly wonderful, switching from childlike innocence to murderous grief with utter conviction, and has the kind of smile that you feel compelled to return – her elation when shown the room where she is to live from now on, having spent several days in a prison cell, is particularly lovely. Again, it’s a restrained performance, and never once does she go into hysterics or, alternately, seem at all wooden. She’s nothing less than totally believable all the way though; even her "in a trance acting", difficult for even the most accomplished actors to pull off, is compelling, and she always engages the viewer’s sympathy – perhaps the only antagonist (though even that’s debatable) in a Hammer horror to ever do that. Particular praise must also go to the beautiful Jane Merrow as young Michael Pritchard’s fiancée, Laura, who gives the most convincing portrayal of a blind character that I’ve yet seen – and, somewhat refreshingly, the point isn’t driven home, nor does the character angst about her blindness. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; Laura views it merely as an annoyance, to be cursed only once every so often, the way that I’d imagine many people would regard a similar disability once they’d learnt to live with it after twenty odd years.

The musical score, too, is something to be applauded. I believe I stated in my review for "Twins of Evil" that that film had the best music for a Hammer. I would hereby like to aim that superlative at "Hands of the Ripper" instead. Though "Twins"’s score is more enjoyable for its over the top adventure posturing and melodious derring do, the music for "Hands" exemplifies the often melancholic tone of the scenes, and as a result is quite unlike any other Hammer score. "Anna’s theme", used over the opening credits and intermittently afterwards, is especially marvellous.

However, as I said, the typical trappings of a Hammer are often to the film’s detriment. Any depth the story may attempt to achieve is instantly undermined by the gory murders that the makers felt inclined to put in to make the trailers look more interesting. This was also around the time that Hammer decided that it needed to be more explicit in its sex and violence, and so the blood quotient is somewhat upped here, which ironically lessens the effect of the murders themselves and makes them more laughable than anything else. Those seen towards the end of the feature come off far better since we never actually see the stabbing itself, the camera lingering on the face of the victim instead, or cutting away to something completely different at the last moment. Those murders in which we see everything in tomato-sauce drenched detail just look silly, the modesty of the special effects becoming glaringly obvious. A scene in which Lynda Baron as a lady of the night with lesbian tendencies (a mental image I’m sure nobody wanted) gets rather brutally offed is quite well done, but her following theatrical floundering in a street outside diminishes the effect somewhat. But the climax in the Whispering Gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral is, it must be said, rather top notch, and ends the film on more of a lugubrious note than you might expect.

So, "Hands of the Ripper" is well worth your time as a good bit of Victorian psychological drama (OK, that summation is stretching it a bit, but I’m running out of platitudes), and boasts some fine performances and sets, and a good atmosphere. Only some sub-par murders and the central conceit of the film itself spoil it a bit – would it really have affected the story at all if Anna had been the daughter of a random serial killer rather than the infamous Jack himself? It would have made things far less sensationalistic – though, of course, that probably would have made the film suffer in advertising at the time of release…

Score out of Ten