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Hill's A Study in Terror is the precedent, Hitchcock is summarily evoked with a vision of The Lodger adjusted to Frenzy. The Black Christmas wide-angle prowl is at hand to give the distorted POV of one Jack the Ripper, Bob Clark cuts from a demonic London apparition (Stygian horse carriage in foggy slow-motion) to a parallel Britannia of royal pomp where news of slaughtered prostitutes are shrugged off. "On the contrary, I prefer bad manners in the theater to active violence in the streets." With smoking pipe, fiddle and bent syringe needle, Christopher Plummer is the Sherlock Holmes that Conan Doyle wrote about; James Mason as Dr. Watson extends an endearing tribute to Albert Bassermann, with a dash of Humbert Humbert as he finds his finger caught between the teeth of a back-alley trollop. Many hands carve the corpse, complicit orders and subterranean connections form the intricate structure "perhaps all the way to the throne." Clark centers his compositions on his performers, with the imperial officiousness of Anthony Quayle and John Gielgud and David Hemmings' closet radicalism ("We can bring this decadent monarchy to its knees!") as the opposite poles. (In between them there's the neurasthenic torment of Donald Sutherland's psychic and the tremulousness of Geneviève Bujold's catacomb waif, who dissolves the great detective's armor of rationalism into tears.) Period handsomeness and visceral dread like the concentrated mind and "the dark intention," the proper Hammer approach. The climactic j'accuse, in which Holmes switches his investigative expertise from individual crime to systemic corruption, points up the Seventies inquiry tearing through Victorian gentility. The death of Mary Kelly (Susan Clark) and the hero's everlasting regret, much magnified, go into De Palma's Blow Out. With Frank Finlay, Peter Jonfield, Tedde Moore, and Catherine Kessler.
--- Fernando F. Croce |