Pandering to Prejudice and Paranoia

Rating: 5/10 (19 May 2020)

Violent crime. Sex. A true-life mystery. An atmospheric setting in foggy, gas-lit Victorian London. The Jack the Ripper murders would seem to have all that is needed for a great thriller, apart from one thing. A solution. Unsolved crimes do not make for good cinema. Who wants to watch a murder mystery film which ends with Sherlock Holmes, or Poirot, or Columbo, admitting "Well, frankly, I'm baffled. I don't think we're ever going to find the killer"?
So anyone wanting to make a film about the Ripper needs to come up with their own solution. And there's no shortage of possible suspects. More than a hundred individuals have been suggested as Jack the Ripper, including many with no known connection to the case and even some who would not have been able to commit the crimes. Some, for example, have proposed a Scottish-born American doctor named Neill Cream, even though he had a perfect alibi; at the time of the Ripper murders he was in prison in Chicago.
Film-makers, however, have generally ignored most of these hundred-odd suspects and have concentrated upon a now-discredited theory first advanced by the writer Stephen Knight. "From Hell", like "Murder by Decree" from 1978 and the eighties TV serial "Jack the Ripper", assumes that the murders were connected to Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Albert Victor, who, but for his own early death, would have become King Albert I on the death of his father Edward VII. This does not mean that they accuse the Prince of carrying out the murders himself. (Some theorists have indeed done this, generally ignorant of the fact that, for most of the killings, Albert Victor had alibis nearly as cast-iron as Cream's). The theory put forward here (and in "Murder by Decree") is that the Prince had secretly married a prostitute named Annie Crook and the murdered women, all prostitutes themselves and friends of Crook, had been present at the wedding. The murders are carried out on the Queen's orders by her personal physician Sir William Gull to prevent news of the marriage from becoming public, a task in which he has the assistance of a sinister brotherhood of Freemasons.
A main character here is Police Inspector Frederick Abberline, the officer investigating the murders. Although the real Abberline was one of Scotland Yard's most brilliant detectives, he was unable to solve the Ripper case; in the film he eventually uncovers the truth, but is prevented from speaking out by his superior Sir Charles Warren, who is party to the conspiracy, and by fears for his own safety. He is played by Johnny Depp with a Cockney accent which has been criticised by some. I myself found it quite convincing, even though the real Abberline was not actually a Cockney but a native of Dorset who would have spoken with a West Country burr. I will not, however, claim this as a goof because the Depp and the film-makers were clearly not aiming at a portrayal of a real historical individual. I doubt if the real Abberline, unlike the character portrayed here, was an absinth-drinking, opium-addicted dandy who relied on the visions he saw in drug-induced trances to solve crimes. (Not a method of detection recommended in the police manual).
The other main character is Mary Kelly, the prostitute who in reality was the Ripper's final victim. As played by Heather Graham, Mary is a stunningly beautiful redhead who looks more like a princess from a Pre-Raphaelite painting than a streetwalker in a London slum. (The "Jack the Ripper" TV series also made Mary, there played by Lysette Anthony, unfeasibly glamorous). But then, her function in the film is not as a victim- in this unhistorical version she survives when Gull kills another prostitute he has mistaken for her- but as Abberline's love-interest, and it is an unwritten law of Hollywood that a handsome leading man like Depp can never fall for an unattractive girl.
Graham never struck me as remotely convincing, and Ian Holm as Gull never seems clear whether he is playing a cold, calculating hit-man or a homicidal maniac. (Gull was originally to have been played by Nigel Hawthorne, but he had to withdraw of health reasons). I quite liked Depp, however, and there are good supporting performances from Ian Richardson as Warren and Robbie Coltrane as Sergeant Peter Godley, the Watson to Abberline's Holmes. (The real Abberline did indeed have an assistant named Godley, but his Christian name was George, not Peter).
As is often the case with films based on graphic novels, the visual style is very lurid and hectic, not really to my taste although some might think it appropriate to a film about this particular subject. What I most disliked about the film, however, was the assumptions upon which it was based. Although we do not know the Ripper's identity, there can be no doubt that these crimes were the work of a deranged lone psychopath "From Hell" is the sort of film which will appeal to anyone who refuses to admit this, believing that every great crime must be the work of some ruthless group of conspirators, prepared to orchestrate any sort of mayhem if it suits their mysterious but sinister purposes. Freemasons, of course, along with Jews, have been frequent targets of this sort of conspiracy theory, and Stephen Knight had a particular obsession with Freemasonry. This is a film which, because it targets the Royal Family, tries to pass itself off as free-thinking, radical and anti-Establishment, but which in reality helps to create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion and panders to prejudice and paranoia. 5/10