Grimerlana Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Griff Lees Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

trimbolicelia Great mid-60's Sherlock Holmes mystery. This time Holmes takes on Jack the Ripper. John Neville is fine as Holmes and Donald Houston is great as Watson. In real life the unfortunate prostitutes murdered by The Ripper were plain as planks and probably malnourished and in ill-health. In this film they are all beautiful, buxom, and the epitome of robust health. That's moviemaking. The best parts are in a pub. The saloon singer is wonderful. The Mill Creek Entertainment DVD and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment DVD-R are both equally excellent in quality and the color is great. Highly recommended.

TLAyres I'm a fan of these iconic mysteries, and this production takes a stab at both Sherlock Holmes and Jack The Ripper but in the long run is not really successful on either front in my view, and not for lack of trying.John Neville was an excellent Holmes, one of the best performances of the brilliant detective. And Donald Houston played Watson somewhere between the original humorous Nigel Bruce and the more solid athlete as perceived by Robert Duvall in Seven Percent Solution. He seems like a younger, stronger James Mason in Murder by Decree. At first I did not recognize Judi Dench, a lovely young blonde in a smaller role.Dialogue as read by the actors at times felt forced, like they had to push through it in quick fashion to move things along. I do think elements of the JTR mystery as they appear here are a bit ahead of their time, but the finale felt unsatisfying and rushed.I thought the best elements were the settings - excellent street scenes and a pub filled with rowdy characters. The prostitutes unfortunately were looking very Hollywood though in their bright expensive dresses and perfect hair like they had just come from a salon, and the film generally lacked grit. There is a lot of teasing about the oldest profession that goes nowhere, and things in general are kept fairly tame, cutting away before anything becomes too appropriately sordid.I'm a big fan of John Scott but his music here sounded too much like a 60's spy television show (the director James Hill worked on The Saint and The Avengers).As noted in the trivia section, it is interesting that two actors in Study In Terror (1965) would appear later in the other Holmes vs Ripper movie Murder By Decree (1979; Anthony Quayle and Frank Finley (who would reprise his Doyle created role of Inspector Lestrade). There are other similarities between the films as well- suspicion of those in places of power, and the same shots of Holmes and Watson having similarly styled conversations riding in carriages together. It made me feel that Decree was more of a remake of Study, with the 1970s infamous Royal Conspiracy Theory solidifying the Ripper plot.Overall, A Study In Terror feels like a Hammer production with less sex and gore, and not nearly as mysterious or atmospheric as other JTR movies like versions of The Lodger and Murder By Decree. Not quite mysterious enough for a Holmes story, and not nearly dark enough for JTR, lost in the mid 60s somewhere in between.

Spikeopath A Study in Terror is directed by James Hill and written by Derek and Donald Ford. Based on characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle, it stars John Neville, Donald Houston, John Fraser, Anthony Quale, Frank Finlay and Adrienne Corri. Music is by John Scott and cinematography by Desmond Dickinson. Out of Compton Films it's an Eastman Color production. Plot pitches intrepid sleuth Sherlock Holmes (Neville) against notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper.On paper it's a filmic match made in heaven, two characters as well known as they are invariably different. One a great work of fiction, the other infamously true and dastardly. Yet the story is flat, not that it doesn't lack for quality in execution, it just lacks any suspense or dramatic verve to fully make it worthy of further visits. Cast are mostly very good, especially Neville, who makes for a lithe and autocratic Holmes, while Alex Vetchinsky's sets are period supreme. The Eastman Color, also, is a plus point, British horror always tended to have a better sheen to it in the Eastman Color lenses, so it be here for the dark deeds played out in Whitechapel, London, 1888. But ultimately, and in spite of it being an intelligent spin on the Ripper legend, story doesn't play out well enough to make it a classic of either the Ripper or Holmes cinema adaptations. 6/10

Robert J. Maxwell I rather enjoyed this tale of mayhem and detection in Victorian London, although it owes nothing to Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle except the identity and temperament of the two lead characters.John Neville makes an acceptable Sherlock Holmes and Donald Houston fills in the role of his sidekick, Doctor Watson, with dignity and compassion.The story pits Holmes and Watson against, not the cerebral machinations of Professor Moriarty, but the very real predations of Jack the Ripper, probably the most famous serial killer in history. Some fans have wondered why Conan-Doyle himself never tackled the job. After all, it was contemporaneous with the popularity of his creation, Holmes, since the murders took place in 1888.Some of the characters in the film correspond roughly to historical figures -- the rabble-rouser who inflames the crowds demanding justice. Most are made out of whole cloth. Aberline, the detective in charge, appears nowhere.The plot of the movie throws a couple of likely suspects at us -- Anthony Quayle as a police mortician and community organizer who wants to rid Whitechapel of prostitution and debauchery, the missing medical-school drop out who is the son of a Duke. But in fact the movie presents the real crazed murderer as a nice guy with a complex of improbable motives.Neville lacks the confident stride and crisp diction of Basil Rathbone. He looks properly hawk-like but should probably be taller and a bit haughty, which he is not. He has one supremely good moment when that mask of dispassion is dropped. Inspector Lestrade has just come out of the drab flat of Mary Kelly, last of the five victims, who has been not just disemboweled but cut to pieces, with her intestines draped over the furniture. Lestrade looks stricken. Holmes stops short and asks with concern, "Lestrade, my dear fellow, are you not well?" It's only a moment but in that moment we can all realize how horrifying these events really are. Previously, Jack's encounters with the whores have been shown but there's been a minimum of blood. Now we have a better grasp, through Holmes' reaction to Lestrade's state, what went on after the girls were dead.Whitechapel at the time was considerably worse than what we see on the screen. The saloon where the whores pick up fares and get drunk looks hardly worse than some of the bars I've visited on Third Avenue in New York. The girls themselves are decently dressed and the streets we see are properly spooky. The problem is that the production designer may not have known what conditions were like in Whitechapel in 1888, or else it was thought they were too repulsive to be shown on screen.The fact is, there was no safety net for the poor. If you were a wife and mother and your husband was killed or disabled on the job, you became a street walker wearing a signature white apron. Your clothes turned to rags, you worked and lived for a drink of gin, and you were liable to sleep in a flop house with lice-ridden chairs instead of beds, although there was a rope strung across the ranks of chairs so customers could have something to rest their torsos on. Your teeth went to hell. You didn't look sexy and beautiful like Jack's victims on the screen. And the streets were a murky mixture of garbage and the detritus from chamber pots and horse manure. The neighborhood reeked. Most of this unpleasantness isn't suggested in the movie, which presents us with a more decorous model of Victorian poverty.Still, the central plot is kind of interesting as we follow Holmes and Watson through both the upper and lower levels of London society. And Anthony Quayle's performance is worth catching for itself. The character, as written, is full of ambiguity, as real characters tend to be, and Quayle, with his Australopithecine features, is just fine in the role.