A Study in Terror (1965)

 "Mr Holmes is usually right..."

This is quite the obvious concept- Sherlock Holmes does Jack the Ripper- and one which, I suppose, succeeds or fails on the realisation.

There is, of course, something uneasy about the use of Jack the Ripper- of the brutal and sexualised murder of women- as entertainment, particularly in a film where men (and one woman, presented as the one "whore" not driven to the work by poverty). The male gaze, the Bechdel test, the sheer unthinking misogyny of it all- it can't go unacknowledged, much as we accept that such reactions were not common currency in 1965.

That said, though, this is a frustrating film. The script is, I think, first class- a superbly constructed whodunit, albeit cheating just a little with the final reveal of the killer not being earned, despite the neat cleverness of the other complex yet clear threads; good characterisation; a great deal of wit; lots of Sherlockian allusions in the script with frequent uses of Conan Doyle's dialogue. It's also a nice touch that the character of Dr Murray is a likely nod either to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself- a charitable man- or his mentor Dr Bell, or both.

And yet this excellent script is quite poorly realised. John Neville and Donald Houston are a pedestrian, superficial Holmes and Watson, failing to play their parts as actual characters rather than cyphers, wasting the nuanced lines they are given. The direction may be interesting in places- we get a rather odd shot of the final murder from the Ripper's POV, a disturbing riff on the male gaze- but the costuming (all the prostitutes wear symbolic red!) and sets are a little disappointing.

It's a shame that we end up with a film that's merely quite good; the script is better than that.