The animal is the only genuine thing in man. – Frank Wedekind
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A woman sits rhythmically rocking by candlelight, her eyes focused on a distant point. Around her a dozen other women fret and shriek and twist as a man you would never expect it of tears up to witness the scene. The place is Reading Asylum, the woman Annie Crook, and the man is Sherlock Holmes. The year, 1888. Outside, Jack the Ripper is four women into his killing spree, and the reason for Holmes’s interview with this saintly, oracular figure.
How he wound up at this place and time involves a complicated enough series of events, encounters, coincidences, and determinations to make this meeting seem like reaching the center of a labyrinth, and in fact it sits at the virtual midpoint of the movie it takes place in, 1979’s Murder by Decree. A patchwork of fact and fiction (with a healthy dose of speculation to bind them), historical and mythical figures, personal and political turmoil, built around an uncredited source in James Hill and Donald and Derek Ford’s 1965 Holmes pastiche A Study in Terror (itself possibly suggested by the last line in Terence Fisher’s 1961 Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace), Murder, a British-Canadian production directed by American Bob Clark, brought up the tail end of the decade’s vogue for complex conspiratorial drama. Holmes is drawn into the Ripper investigation by a cadre of West End businessmen concerned about the brutal murders’ effect on their trade; his inquiry ladders up from their sordid backstreets to the halls of the House of Lords not only to heighten the contrast in standard of living but to erase the supposed division between their moral lives. The Ripper is a feral convenience and a tool of the aristocracy from its own ranks to keep that equivalence a secret, Annie Crook the pure-of-heart who refuses to yield to their corruption. Holmes still has a way to go after their encounter to prove his case, but by then the core enigma has been resolved.
Clark took his own circuitous route to Murder. From a youth spent mostly in the American South, he came to Canada by way of a couple of low-budget horror films in the early 1970s, after a bewildering debut in the form of a no-budget exploitation take on transgender tolerance, She Man, in 1965. (Someone thought remaking Glen or Glenda a dozen years on a good idea.) The gulf in technical sophistication between that stultifying mess and his bizarre and disquieting 1971 Night of the Living Dead cash-in (and “second first film,” as Godard put it), Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, is hard to cipher, especially in light of the more gradual but assured advances shown in his next two, the family tragedy Deathdream and stalker-boilerplate Black Christmas, his first foray into Canadian financing. One more mid-budget genre picture, the revenge drama Breaking Point, in 1977, and he was ready for his entry into the mainstream with Murder, which has every earmark of the fledgling champing for the big time. What each film shares is a distrust of and disdain for The Man, which he would carry into his next-but-one, the career-making (and reputation-demolishing) teen sex comedy Porky’s, four years later.
Annie Crook pulls both Clark and his investigator-double through their separate mazes as spiritual sister to another Clark oracle, Children’s hippie-New-Age seer with a similar name (though the real one of the actress playing her), Anya. In that earlier comic-horror film, a ragtag troupe of actors seemingly down on their luck follow their director, and Anya’s husband, Alan (also named after his portrayer, and real-life Anya’s real-life husband Alan Ormsby), who’s equal parts führer and messiah and 100% crackpot, onto an island graveyard off the coast of Florida. Alan’s exact purpose is never clear, but it entails performing a rite to raise the dead, which he’s unable to reverse or control once they arrive hungry for human flesh. Scrawny and wild-eyed, as though not entirely bound to time or place, Anya remains exultant, sympathetic, and enthralled till the dead press in on their flimsy cabin and even afterward, as they make off with all but her and Alan in the riotous climax to the picture. (Ormsby was to show notable range in her next role for Clark as guileless hometown girl Cathy Brooks in Deathdream, before all but disappearing from film.)
To hear some of the principals tell it in interviews and the commentary on the VCI Children blu-ray, some of the tumult on-screen was a reflection of vagueness and inconsistencies in Clark’s script, making the entire oddball enterprise an exercise in gestalt. Though apparently nowhere near the authoritarian his movie-Alan was on set, the director is definitely taking the piss out of himself with his alter ego, and the lack of clarity, coupled with the actual actors’ game amateurishness, somehow help make what by all reason shouldn’t work, work.
Even though Alan Ormsby wrote Deathdream (he’s credited on Children, too, but downplays his involvement with that script), the mystic role is transferred from Anya’s character there to her film-mother here, Lyn Carlin, as Chris. Chris’s conviction against all likelihood that son Andy would return from Vietnam intact proves such a psychic connection it alone accounts for his actual return despite confirmation of his death. Anya, as Cathy, is the sole face of reason between her and raging, alcoholic father Charlie (John Marley, reprising his role as Mr. Lyn Carlin from John Cassavetes’s 1968 Faces), mother remaining delusional about her boy even as he begins killing to maintain his unlife right up to the devastating end. Her faith in her offspring contrasts film-Alan’s mocking attitude toward the followers he repeatedly calls his Children, and proves the final and deepest through line to Annie Crook.
However coincidentally, with no Anya Ormsby in tow there are no visionaries either in Clark’s next two films; in fact, the level-headed Jess of Black Christmas, unlike Chris and Annie, bears no romantic feeling toward the child she intends to abort. Her film works as a machine of self-inflicted punishment, the phone-calling tormentor issuing scatological threats and non sequiturs including haphazard bits of seeming privileged information (What did you do with the baby?) the externalized brayings of a vestigial conservative conscience. Like Deathdream, Children, and even the later Porky’s, it’s another study of a new generation trying unsuccessfully to shake off the shackles and patterns of the old. Clark’s next, Breaking Point, is so single-mindedly focused on its Walking Tall-type masculine reassertion (its lead played in fact by Tall 2’s replacement-Buford, Bo Svenson) that looking for visionary females is beside the point. Its continuity with other Clarks, Murder in particular, lies in its conspiracy backstory and disdain for elites.
Call it a mystery, but Clark, who died with his son in 2007 at the wheel of a drunk driver, never explained why exactly Sherlock Holmes for his step up to the mainstream. After paying his dues making films in genres he professed no affinity for (Clark is one of the few up-from-the-indies directors to do so, in the company of John Hancock and Alan Rudolph), he must have felt some kinship with the hero of his first personal project. Going by Murder’s mechanics alone, he needed a superior investigator to get to the heart of something, Genevieve Bujold’s luminous Annie the literal center of her film’s narrative and the hospital’s architectural labyrinths both. So what is it about the detective whose fame and popularity had by then shaded into the mythic?
Arthur Conan Doyle’s signature creation was largely based on his University of Edinburgh medical professor Dr. Joseph Bell. Many of Holmes’s techniques mirror Dr. Bell’s diagnostic methods, filtered through the documentary work of Holmes’s amanuensis Dr. John Watson, so there’s something of an illness, malfunction, or pathology in all of his “cases,” which Holmes is the curative agent for. It’s no coincidence Annie is found in a medical institution. Though the detective hewed to a code of pure logic and verifiable observation, Conan Doyle’s late conversion to the spiritism movement pervading late 19th and early 20th century society, on the World War I death of his son, invites speculation that the “supernatural light” his subject sometimes seems touched by (think of the Light in the Other House in Hound of the Baskervilles) might have had something of the clairvoyant about it, linking him psychically to the oracle he spends the bulk of his movie drawing toward in Murder. Let’s take a few minutes to look more closely at the man and his creation, then, and see what other illuminations they bring to Clark’s world and film.
Conan Doyle brought Holmes into being in 1890 with the publication of The Sign of Four. That’s two years after the Ripper cut his path through the West End, so in a sense Murder’s adventure proves something of an origin story for the detective, an archetypal or mythic event. Holmes went on to feature in 60 novels and stories, two of which were related by himself without the offices of his friend and occasional roommate Watson (who shared many biographical details with his author). Fanboys and fangirls – as they were the equivalent in their day – have fixed his birthdate to sometime in 1854, making him 34 at the time of Murder, around the same age as Clark while developing the property. (In a further coincidence, William Baring-Gould, editor of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, cites a scholarly paper on the detective written by a “Mr. Benjamin Clark” – the director’s real name.) Among Holmes’s idiosyncrasies was a crabbed reclusiveness and disdain for society, content to study the physical and phenomenal world from a distance, collecting and collating data from it like the working out of the unconscious mind he had little regard for, containing himself to raw logic and clearly articulable cause and effect. (In interviews and commentary, Clark equally hews to the mechanics and processes of film production and his own technique, showing no awareness of or interest in deeper topics like subtext, thematics, or his own film inspirations.)
I mentioned the “diagnostic” aspect of Holmes’s ratiocinations. It pays to go deeper into his methods, especially since among his panoply of admirers (which included Sigmund Freud – whom Nicholas Meyer compounded with Holmes in his 1974 Seven Percent Solution – as well as Franklin Roosevelt and a peculiar array of upper-class twits with more time and money than the run of us) were prominent linguists and logicians Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, whose collection The Sign of Three brings together various colleagues to speculate on Holmes’s approach.
Of the three canonical forms of reasoning – deduction, abduction, and induction – it’s the middle one that lines up most with Holmes. As Sebeok describes it (writing with Jean Umiker-Sebeok), “Abduction makes its start in the facts, without, at the outset, having any particular theory in view. . . . In abduction the consideration of the facts suggest the hypothesis” (“‘You Know My Method’: A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes,” p. 25; in Holmes’s own words in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data”). Baring-Gould makes a case for induction, though, in terms of its making “brilliant inferences from minute details” (p. 7). Holmes himself suggests the importance of analytical reasoning – reading backwards from a set of events, as he insisted in Scarlet – otherwise known as deduction (or, in Peirce’s terminology, retro-duction). It may be reasonable to say that, at various times and under various circumstances, he employs all such methods, seeing, as he would, the constrictiveness of cleaving to one doctrine over another.
One thing each may agree on is an attention to detail, a focus Holmes shared with Freud. Holmes’s method derives from the idea that there’s nothing new under the sun and that familiarization with past crimes and basic forensic observation will reveal their similarities, posing these precedents as a kind of archetype, each case playing out an eternal, because innate, pattern or drama. It’s easy to read the signs semiotician Peirce fixes such meaning to as clues and to fit the concept into Holmes’s lexicon.
It’s not details alone that make the difference, though, it’s the outré ones in particular, the ones that don’t fit the patterns, as original detective writer Edgar Allan Poe put it, and as Holmes concurred, for “what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance” (Scarlet). The reader or viewer of this type of fiction is invited to share in their avidity for minutia; expected, maybe even required, to take a more active role in their shared experience; possibly even to see themselves in the work, as Holmes enthused in “The Retired Colourman”: “You’ll get results . . . by always putting yourself in the other fellow’s place.” (In the case of Murder by Decree, I’m like the protagonist of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, drawn by an image, a sense-impression, that one outré detail, of Annie in her chamber, empathizing almost to the point of becoming Julio Cortázar’s axolotl, gazing out from that screen trying to see what she must be seeing, that something that allows her to keep herself together amidst the chaos.)
Holmes’s record on women wasn’t so great. “Now, Watson, the fair sex is your department,” he confessed in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor,” one of his more generous remarks. “Women are never to be entirely trusted – not the best of them,” he asserted in Scarlet, to which Watson – who married at least once in the saga, possibly as a way of unqueering the duo – assures us, “I did not pause to argue over this atrocious sentiment.” In the detective’s life there was only one woman who had any measured impact on him – possibly, again, to keep him that fine step removed from the world – and it was in no traditional sense a romantic involvement. Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia” is the one person ever to best him intellectually, and as such to vex him eternally. How that might’ve happened may have been a matter of sublimation, the man of reason channeling other, more romantic inclinations. His frustration with Adler may have been the kind of slippage that belied all his He-Man-Womanhater’s-Club posturing. But for the purposes of Murder, were we to elevate it to the canon, was it Annie Crook’s outcome, as well as one other unfortunate’s, that put him in such a disposition instead?
In virtually every adventure, when there’s a Holmes and a Watson, it’s the mystery that binds the two gentlemen, arising into their Baker Street flat like a problem entering the mind. Holmes himself is presented as an enigma to Watson on their meeting in Scarlet, as though the mystery of the world were opening itself up to him, and he’s drawn to the detective as to his next evolution. That inaugural entry’s first paragraph describes Watson’s war wound and enteric fever, making Holmes in many ways the cure for what ails him. His weakened status enables the emergence of a new way of seeing from some previously obscured part of his personality. On finding each other, they become roommates: they share the same mental space.
In addition to his flatmate, Holmes had a brother, Mycroft, and a famous arch-enemy, Professor James Moriarty, who in turn had his own right-hand man, Colonel Sebastian Moran. (The system of doubling can be seen even in the similarities in the latter two’s last names.) This “Napoleon of crime” and “organizer of half that is evil and all that is undetected in this great city” (“Adventure of the Final Problem”), the “controlling brain of the underworld” (Valley of Fear), went down the Reichenbach Falls with Holmes in what was to be the last episode, the “Final Problem.” He was the detective’s evil other and the embodiment of all he fought against, the doppelganger he grappled with to both their ends. The ir-rational. In Murder he’s transfigured into the form of the Ripper, a doctor like Watson but without consciousness or humanity.
About this Ripper, then. This is what we know: He operated between August 31st and November 9, 1888, in the Whitechapel district of London, slaughtering his victims with what many characterized as surgical precision. The five women murdered were: Mary Ann “Polly” Nicholls, 42 years old and the mother of five (throat cut and further knife wounds to the lower body); Annie Chapman ten days later, already a widow at 24 and like Polly a drinker and prostitute (throat slashed and part of the uterus and bladder removed); Elizabeth “Long Liz” Stride, 45 and another sex worker (violence only to the throat, possibly the result of the assault being interrupted); Cathleen “Kate Kelly” Eddowes, 43, found the same night as Liz Stride (throat cut, face disfigured, disemboweled); and Mary Jane Kelly, 24, the most gruesome of all (extensive evisceration, disfigurement, and double mastectomy).
Fewer than half the murders overall in Whitechapel at the time were ever solved. The district was home to more than 62 brothels and more than 2,000 assaults on Metro Police. A fifth of children’s illnesses were due to inherited syphilis. Until a few years earlier, it was said, you could buy a 12-year-old virgin there for ₤20. (All this from The Ripper File by Elwyn Jones and John Lloyd, a key source for Murder by Decree.) The bureaucratic infrastructure was in disarray, too. The week after Nicholls, and only a few hours after Chapman, the assistant commissioner to the Home Secretary took a month’s vacation to Switzerland, returning the night of Stride and Eddowes. His solution was to round up all the streetwalking women after midnight; it’s not known what he thought to do with the likely perpetrator, one of the men. At the other end of the ordeal, autocratic and militaristic police commissioner Sir Charles Warren resigned the night before Mary Kelly after quarreling with the Home Secretary over an article he’d written on how he’d run a police force.
Among the suspects were two Portuguese sailors (accounting for the gaps between atrocities), one Polish Jew (Severin Klosowski, whose possible continued murders temporarily relocated to New Jersey, returning to London in 1893 to poison a succession of wives), and a Russian named Podachenko (identified by Rasputin!); add to these Oxford scholar Montague John Druitt, who committed suicide on the date the next murder was projected to take place, out of fear of going mad like his mother or outed as queer; a certain Dr. Howard, whom the Chicago Sunday Times Herald termed “an ardent vivisectionist”; and Sir William Gull, a royal physician, in concert with his driver John Netley, who supposedly committed the murders while Gull performed the surgery afterwards. The case is, of course, unsolved to this day.
It may have been inevitable that Holmes and the Ripper were paired. Both have their scholars and both have a certain mythomania built around them – in the case of the detective, to the extent that many chroniclers approach him as if they’d forgotten he wasn’t a real being, and with the Ripper, conversely, regarding him as an almost fictional entity. So little is known about his actual person. The impulse to bring the greatest sleuth who never lived to bear on this enigma bespeaks the weight of his presence on our minds, like he was more than a man and a murderer but a present and looming problem of our time. For that part of the mystery, we turn to another master detective, Holmes’s admirer Freud, particularly his “Civilization and Its Discontents.”
Published in 1930, Freud’s paper asserts that the civilization we’d built for ourselves as a protection against a nature that once seemed nurturing had become itself a trap. (Picture the labyrinthine West End in Murder with its many dead ends, as depicted in Harry Pottle’s production design.) He starts by outlining the process of socialization, which he sees as mirroring the development of consciousness, beginning in utero and later as infants with a sense of oneness with the mother (as we had with nature; think John Dryden’s noble savage). There we develop a sense of inside as nurturing and safe and outside as a home of discontent. Separation from that embrace and learning to control our instincts, both necessary to our sense of ourselves as civilized adult individuals, creates a dissociative disorder, and the further we get from nature, as Mother, whether in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution in Holmes’s day or our own technological advancement, the more potent these tensions become. The more violent our reactions. (Think Holmes’s contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.) That black-eyed look in Murder’s Ripper signals the loss of a sense of self – of separation of inside from out – which Holmes is called on to recover by finding and identifying him.
What could be more explicit an example of this breach than the Ripper’s graphic disembowelments? An image this vivid, though carefully only suggested in Clark’s film, resonates not only because we’re trained to look away from such sights but because it signifies; it means. The monster at the heart of the atrocity is trying to demonstrate something: that a boundary has been corrupted; we’ve discovered we’re bad inside and our insides are coming out. (See the alarming resolution to Clark’s 1974 production, Deranged, the Ed Gein story.) The difference between the world and self – as well as, it’s discovered, between the classes – has been blown out, resulting in an obliteration of the line between civil and primitive society.
The Ripper, in Clark’s visualization, is a high-functioning imbecile whose eyes reflect the abyss inside while also recalling the blinders on the coach horse that drives him. He’s the natural next step from Children’s supernatural corpses, on through Deathdream’s personalized, familial revenant, to the real world though the mysterious, unidentified Black Christmas killer; and finally, Breaking Point’s all-too-human vengeance seeker. No matter how allusive and otherworldly a force he may seem, though, he is, as Harry Stack Sullivan has said of all psychotics, “simply human.” Holmes, created in, and an extrusion of, a rational age, is human, too, the triumph of reason and science over nature, his antithesis the Ripper a demonstration that the animal is still alive and in fact built into humanity.
Another through line in early Clark is the theme of self-disgust: a hatred of the body that frustrates with its instincts, its demands and desires. In Children and Deathdream, it’s the dead body specifically, implying these drives as so powerful they transcend individual life itself; in Black Christmas it’s the growing life within. Even the befuddling She-Man is about gender dysphoria. There’s a tension in Porky’s between the lusted-after female body and the corpulent title villain who keeps the boys from satisfying their hormonal drives with his stable of strippers when they want to go slumming like Murder’s heir apparent, who’s fathered a child with a working woman. Porky is, of course, a projection of the boys’ adolescent need to harness their instincts, the once-nurturing mother who now rebuffs their desires. (The film takes place in the buttoned-up 1950s, as Murder’s Victorian era.) The character may put viewers in mind of Clark’s own girth, which is obsessively ridiculed in Children’s portly Paul and the caller’s “Piggy” taunts in Christmas. Self-disgust is central too to Deathdream in its subject’s ultimate decision to retreat to the womb of the grave, abetted by his enabling mom after 90 minutes of righteous vindictiveness over his self-preserving killing spree.
In interview and commentary, Clark comes across as intelligent and humane, as evidenced in his references to his “background actors” rather than the more common and dismissive “extras.” In constructing his first big picture, he may have sensed a need to preserve that humanity by placing Annie Crook at its heart and walling her in as he prepared to venture into the corrupt world of cinematic aristocracy. As unintriguing as his later mainstream output tended to be, including such earnest though disposable achievements as Loose Cannons, Rhinestone, and two Baby Geniuses movies, he knew what he was doing and was able to maintain his pure heart after all.
He reports getting the idea for Murder from an 1888 newspaper article and purports not to be aware of Study in Terror, the Herman Cohen Holmes-Ripper pastiche from 1965, despite his use of Frank Finlay and Anthony Quayle from that film’s cast. He calls his version a work of passion for everyone involved despite its inadequate $4 million budget – four times greater than his previous film’s – and for these economic reasons favored long takes, quick shoots and camera and actor movements over cutting, and working from self-drawn cards rather than storyboards in order to keep a tight schedule. This is visible in the result, which plays like a fan’s dream of a major production, with its fine British cast including James Mason, David Hemmings, and Sir John Gielgud delighted to play Merrie Olde England for the Yankee initiate alongside the requisite Canadians (Christopher Plummer as Holmes, Donald Sutherland as clairvoyant Robert Lees, and Bujold again as Crook). The enterprise capped off a decade of revisiting and revisionist Holmes films from Billy Wilder’s 1970 Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (no relation to Vincent Starrett’s trailblazing volume of Holmesiana of the same name) and Gene (no relation to Billy) Wilder’s Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother, to Herbert Ross’s Meyer adaptation The Seven Percent Solution and the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Hound of the Baskervilles in 1978.
Figuring in the mix, and coming the same year as Murder (and by the same author as Solution), was Meyer’s Time After Time, featuring Jack the Ripper this time squaring off against fellow real person H. G. Wells. There, the famous author is compelled to make good on his fiction when the Ripper appropriates his time machine to escape into present-day America, a fair demonstration that the conditions that engendered him then were still in play at the time Clark brought his work to the screen (and David Berkowitz was terrorizing New York). The introduction in Meyer’s film of a love interest in Wells’s life suggests a solution to the problem of rampant male violence in an Eros unafforded by Murder, which begins in foggy metropolis and ends with the image of a girlchild at play in sunny nature, indicating Clark’s project as freeing that feminine energy from the walls of civilization; the classic Gothic setup.
Freud claimed that the first fictional detective was Oedipus and that all since pursue an oedipal project. This aligns with the Gothic, too, in its desire to overcome the inimical masculine property and unite with the nurturing feminine. Serial-killer-with-a-method plots are epistemological essays on life and God, trying to reassure ourselves that there’s a meaning and order to the carnage on earth; that is to say, living and dying. The mystique of Sherlock Holmes rests in a similar trust in a rational and perceivable order. Clark had already put this conundrum to rest with Children, where it’s not clear whose incantation, if either’s, brought the dead back – Alan’s, or his heckling underling’s Yiddishe parody – as with the son’s inexplicable return in Deathdream and Black Christmas’s stream of lunatic non sequiturs from its phone-calling killer. There is no reason, only instinct. The irony in Holmes is that this order is put there by the author, the reader’s revelations mostly toward his craftsmanship and careful plotting. It’s not Holmes’s powers of observation that people wonder at, but Conan Doyle’s powers of placement. His is a constructed universe.
The path to Annie begins with the overclass, including Holmes and Watson, enjoying their opera – Lucretia Borgia, about murder among the gentry – in the well-lit and verdant East End, while a carriage prowls the close, dark and stony West looking for not its first victim. It’s unrevealed to the viewer at this point that the carriage contains a traveler between realms, or that connected to him is evidence this breach has happened before and already borne fruit. As we meet the featured duo, Watson is gaining favor among the cognoscenti by issuing a rallying “God save His Royal Highness” in response to jeers greeting the late arrival of the Prince of Wales, who seems to be carrying on some intrigue behind the scenes; the ensuing drama will be an object lesson to the good doctor in class inequality and a particularly upper-class injustice. (Though he’s not the traditional narrator of events here or in most filmed Holmes, it still plays out in his interest.)
Throughout Murder there’s a play of higher and lower, analogous to the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, as outer and inner. When newsboys reach the departing theatergoers with headlines about the third murder, it’s the introduction into the body politic of an awareness that things aren’t right and the first disturbance of Watson’s sense of propriety, both the effects of upper-class malfeasance. It’s the crisis of modern life reaching those who both advance and profit from it most, the heinousness of the crimes the severity of the breach. It comes closer to home when Holmes invites the harried businessmen – under the guise of a “citizens’ committee” – up to their Baker Street flat. As if to reinforce the feeling of a universal opening-out, Clark wastes no time moving on to the next assassination, as signaled by the opening of a cab door, as before, first to let the victim in then to dump her remains onto the street, doing explicitly what the aristocracy is doing metaphorically. Holmes wakes Watson to investigate on receipt of an anonymous telegram, another traditional signal from the unconscious.
At the crime scene, Holmes finds a grape stem. It’s a neat visualization of the sequence of connections and revelations he’ll follow on up the social hierarchy, as well as a lead to the involvement of a branch of elites with their own supposed influence over life and politics, the Freemasons. A third proposed cabal is introduced when a constable locates some hastily chalked graffito, actually found not far from Eddowes’s body the night of her murder, reading The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing, a mental tongue twister belched up from a confused unconscious. (Compare this motif with Clark’s graffiti-artist-as-rebel picture, Turk 182.) Holmes later separates its “Juwes” from the Semitic race when associating the properly spelled term with figures from Masonic lore. Backgrounding all this is a radical group (another Study in Terror carryover) operating at that moment and aligned by Holmes to the “three ruffians” of the Juwes – Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum – and whose leader turns out to be one of the investigating authorities. Their unrest is another manifestation of the turbulence underlying the nobles’ complacency.
Also at the scene is Police Commissioner Warren, who orchestrated the quelling of the Bloody Sunday uprising shortly before and continues as censor in this case, stifling reporting of the Juwes to avoid anti-Semitic violence. He’s the mental faculty protecting the ego from recognition of the discontent within, and is no match for the superior intellect, thus psychic imperative, of Holmes. The final figure – barring series mascot Inspector Lestrade, there for little other than name recognition amongst the faithful – is a female presence kept to the background and soon to gain greater prominence as the mystery unfolds, future victim Mary Kelly. In Holmes’s later pursuit, she’s like Maya Deren’s robed “Meshes of the Afternoon” enigma or Cat People’s similar mystery woman, a siren and a guidepost, an intuition of the ultimate figure Holmes is searching for. All things branch from this sequence, like the stem he finds at its location.
Let’s follow these associations down, then, starting with Mary. Holmes caught sight of her at the crime scene as if she were a symptom of the dis-ease suddenly brought to awareness, describing her “singularly haunting quality, like some wild creature cornered.” As an avatar for the truly cornered – incarcerated – Annie Crook, she proves an intuition of something, a clue to deeper connectivity, a sign. (Clark’s instinct toward whimsy results in an unfortunate resonance when he has Holmes, in a scene he says he wrote to entice Mason into the Watson part, squash an elusive pea on his plate and declare it, too, “cornered.”) His use of the term “wild creature” betrays an enchantment and a personal affinity for a nature long lost to the ratiocinating gentleman. The Ripper’s violence has awakened him to a further violence – to a quality within, a sense of trauma as yet unacknowledged on a wider scale. For Watson, a physician who can’t bring himself to view Eddowes’s carcass, Holmes is a psychic investigator into the body politic (“whose disease,” according to Carlo Ginsburg, “is crime”) who’ll uncover the malaise the right gentleman is loathe to acknowledge.
Freud’s equation of Inside with pleasure and Outside with discontent introduces the subject of the Other into the mix, particularly around the topic of the Juwes, or Jews. Since our egos won’t abide unpleasurable things residing inside, including awareness of our own errors, faults, or shortcomings, in order to keep an even keel the human system relieves itself through the instruments of guilt and the conscience, by either confessing and atoning or through expiation: turning these negative qualities outward in the creation of a scapegoat to vent our frustration on. In Murder by Decree, the Crown, or upper-class society, has cast its lowly drives onto the underclass. Warren inadvertently abets the discovery of their true scapegoat by denying expiation through the Jewish community, forcing the identification of its real source, Annie Crook.
Here’s how this guilt ladders between social planes.
As Holmes discovers, artists’ model and shopgirl Annie (in the film, a maid) has had a baby by the presumptive heir to the throne, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, Earl of Athlone, grandson of Queen Victoria and eldest son of Edward, Prince of Wales, His Grace Albert Victor Christian Edward (the mouthful of honoraria suggesting the comprehensive upper-class-slash-male identity, its litany in the film a counterpoint to the modern exhortation, Say Her Name), whose care has been entrusted to friend Mary. By care, we mean hiding, since the Royal Family harbors a keen interest in keeping the liaison hush-hush and might resort to any means necessary to accomplish this, including eliminating every prostitute in the West End till it finds the one in charge of young Master. The prince’s tardiness causing the delay in their opera in the beginning is a pause allowing the polity to recognize something is amiss about him, while Annie herself has been squirreled away to Reading Hospital in the aim of keeping her quiet. Not wanting to get its own hands dirtied, the royals have outsourced the killings to court physician Sir Thomas Spivey, who also sanctioned Annie’s commitment and attempted driving to insanity. Spivey’s postmortem surgical methods follow Masonic ritual – an allegation Clark has since disavowed, in a possibly revisionist post-70s-paranoia gaining of perspective. This leaves Annie as the stem all others branch from, each of the factions – radicals, police, gentry, and the monarchy – using Holmes, the conscience of his era, to track her down like Guy Van Stratten in Orson Welles’s Confidential Report.
When Holmes bails out Watson after an adventure he set up for the doctor at a public house to find information on and among the city’s prostitutes, the detective first peers at his friend through a peephole to his cell. It recalls the microscope he studied the grape stem through in the preceding shot, suggesting part of his investigation as into Watson’s – all men’s – family-tree DNA. (It’s also an uncomfortable precursor to the notorious peephole sequence in Porky’s. Fit that into your oeuvre if you can.) This is amplified in the next scene, where he maps out the district and its dramatis personae, recalling the stem again, the camera zooming at scene’s close on the name of Mary Kelly, followed by a question mark. Women are an enigma to these confirmed bachelors, as they are again in Porky’s and as is acted out in the next sequence.
Through a meeting with Mary Kelly, Holmes establishes contact with Annie. He finds Mary at Eddowes’s funeral, in the background again, like a nagging thought, as she was in the tavern scene with Watson, and follows her to a Clink Wharf back alley. It’s another labyrinth, like the one another sex worker lured Watson to in that earlier sequence – here, as there, associating it with femininity. Kelly is played by critic’s favorite Susan Clark, who’d go on to play the legendary prostitute in Porky’s, the last theatrical role for the 40 year-old Canadian. She’s Deep Throat to Holmes and Watson’s Woodward and Bernstein, hiding behind bars and a broken window because she “can’t trust no one” and in her frightened state speaking in riddles like Children’s oracle Anya. In her linking to Annie, Mary is an emanation of the anima, whose purpose for men is to lead them to their spirit-selves. She tells Holmes about the baby and Annie’s most recent whereabouts before being abducted while Holmes inconveniently blacks out. When he recovers he bears Annie’s far-off gaze, and will very soon meet the woman herself.
The incriminating stem, it turns out, belongs to an exclusive variety of grape Holmes tracks to one of the doctors on Watson’s list, which leads them to Reading and Annie. When he realizes how he’s been used by the same people they’ve been trying to uncover in order to track down Mary, it’s his “the call is coming from inside the house” moment like in Black Christmas. His role in the drama has been the self-expiation of the upper class, which he crazily (but functionally) facilitates in the film’s long descending-action tribunal.
The communal bedchamber the pair are led their winding way to is a feminine domain, like Black Christmas’s sorority house and, vexatiously, the Porky’s shower room. (Most labyrinths contain a Minotaur, this one the Anima.) It’s populated by fretful figures locked away so long they’re afraid of the light, and centered by beatific Annie, rocking like Deathdream’s Andy and Christmas’s asphyxiated Claire; like them, she’s for all intents and purposes dead, her room a mausoleum she never gets to leave and their subsequent interview a séance. Annie hasn’t spoken in six months and hardly knows they’re there, the insular and complete-unto-herself soul Holmes’s mind and Watson’s physician have been seeking for completion. Holmes is able to remove them both further from the physical world by having the head doctor lead Watson away to review her records (another patient is led away for having touched him), and he manages to get her to open up to him by writing EDDY, the name of her suitor and possible husband, on a matchbox. It’s also the moment the ultimate and never-seen dreamer of the film identifies himself, the child reunited with the mother in its benighted womb.
Annie’s assertion that she doesn’t belong in this place is an assertion too of her rightful status among the higher powers she knows see her as a threat, a petition of sorts for the same denouement that befell Psyche at the end of her romance with Amor, when beleaguered Zeus elevated her to the Pantheon. The privileged conversation with Holmes suggests a recognition in the detective’s mind of the validity of the feminine within himself as well as greater society, a reincorporation of the scapegoat that’d redeem them both. If she never makes it out of there, it may be due to her naïve belief that Eddy loves her and doesn’t know where she is, which is to say that men in general are either ignorant or innocent to what they’ve done to her and can’t free her till they’re made aware – why the repetition of the word “tell” throughout the sequence. Holmes’s pleas for her to identify the “they” she also repeatedly refers to, in the context of her fraught chorus of fellow inmates, makes it clear that all of society needs to be brought to consciousness, because we’re all being driven crazy by the division. When Holmes goes for the throat of the censorious returning head doctor, Ripper-like, in protest of her restraint, the hysterics of the other women are an eruption of affect like the rebellion Commissioner Warren just quelled, making Holmes the film’s third traverser of class boundaries.
Clark’s care with this scene speaks volumes. His control of atmosphere, direction of his “background actors” (one of whom could be himself, in drag), and selection of the otherworldly Bujold as Annie, as well as the concentrated long take that balances the mood on a razor’s edge of mystery and horror, all suggest how his background in nightmare movies could project him into a new and broader realm of storytelling. How regrettable, then, that he chose to invert and travesty the scene in the “tallywacker” sequence of Porky’s, where the stereotypical masculinized girls’ gym teacher (again fat-shamed like the film’s other nemesis) and lone female in the room, Miss Balbricker, debates the proper term for the male organ presented to her in the girls’ shower room while the other coaches bust up laughing, providing the hysterical chorus in that film’s similarly longest take. It’s as if the encounter with the oracle dredged up more sensitive material than Clark could handle, and is one of the saddest dichotomies in the director’s frustrating filmography. Sadder still is Hollywood’s rewarding him for it by giving him the career he’d worked so compellingly to attain before. And to what end.
Having reached the center of his mystery, the rest of the film details Holmes’s arduous movement back to consciousness and the world outside. He recognizes he can’t do anything to rescue Annie, the forces of structural authority are too ingrained, but does commit himself to saving Mary; a challenge he also isn’t up to. Clark’s camera, tracking through a back alley from the Black Horse Tavern where Watson met the ladies (complete now with actual black horse outside, rendering it death’s waiting room) to where Mary sleeps, reiterates Black Christmas’s point-of-view stalking, assuring us that history will play out that night. The insurrectionist Inspector Foxborough waylays Holmes while she’s being made a meal of by the Ripper to reveal his agenda to expose the aristocracy – making him the film’s second Deep Throat – again demonstrating how bureaucratic squabbles were busy sidelining women’s fates. (The subplot may make you think of the Punk revolt against the monarchy already past its shelf date by the time of Murder’s production.) Holmes’s confrontation with the prime minister at the tribunal is performance rebellion at best, having failed to save either woman and leaving the Crown’s plot unrevealed to the implicated public.
The scene nonetheless brings the film’s subtext to the seat of British royalty, in the notable absence of its two beneficiaries, Watson (“God save His Royal Highness”) and Eddy. Here Holmes runs through the list of culprits, starting at the bottom with coach-driver Slade, whom he characterizes as what might seem today like a MAGA type misguided by his loyalty to the Royal Family (match this with Annie’s allegiance to her own self-serving exploiter, silent Eddy another faithless God), then Spivey, the vacant-eyed imbecilic knighted hand of the monarchy whose ruthlessness belied their ceremonious civility and whose hospital drove Annie mad, the way institutions do. The news here of Annie’s suicide the night after their meeting surprisingly comes as no surprise to the detective, leaving the impression that in the end she was only part of the plot to him, too, more useful for what she meant than who she was.
Holmes’s lone consolation is the girlchild Clark closes his film on, seen playing in verdant sunshine. This is what held Annie’s gaze too, the tiny hope of a motherless future, one without the baggage of history, one that the upper class has no choice but to nurture to maturity. The encounter with Annie didn’t turn Holmes cynical toward women; the silencing by the Lords drove it down to a place where it could wait and learn and incubate. The feminine in himself was resolved in her; the hope now is for the feminine without. No matter his motives, Eddy has opened a portal, one passing time would continue to expand. Upper has met lower and inside has met outside, and the regenerated mother figure freed into the world. Holmes now shares the long view with Annie, and it’s what keeps us rocking when all around is madness.
This, also, is decreed.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
