Murder by Decree (1979)

 "I prefer bad manners in the theatre to violence in the streets..."

This film is an odd and intriguing beast. It's very well directed indeed, with the scenes involving the Ripper particularly well-realised. It has a superb cast. It's a very well made film. And yet...

Firstly, the script is somewhat plodding, slow, oddly paced and not quite worthy of the excellent way it's been realised. While James Mason gives us a first rate Watson, Christopher Plummer's generally impressive performance as Holmes suffers from the fact that the script doesn't really get the character- this Holmes is too openly emotional, too "normal".

This isn't the first time that cinema has put Holmes and Watson into the context of the Jack the Ripper murders but... well, SPOILERS, but this film adopts wholesale the then-fashionable theories advanced by Stephen Knight in his unfortunately titled Jack the Ripper:  The Final Solution, theories that woukd later form the basis of both the graphic novel and the film of From Hell..

And this is a problem. Not because such theories have fallen out of fashion (Personally, I don't buy the freemasonry nonsense- it's a very silly organisation but, except in the context discriminating against non-freemasons in their careers, harmless nonsense. I'd suggest borrowing a razor off that nice Mr Occam. The Ripper was probably Charles Lechmere.), but simply because adopting this narrative wholesale means that Holmes and Watson are by definition unable to have much agency or influence over events. 

Still, this is an interesting little curiosity nonetheless.