Simply Ripping

A Study in Terror. "Hmph, my dear Watson," hmphs Sherlock Holmes, shooting his cuffs gracefully as he performs yet another criminological miracle. "It's well known that I am indestructible."

He incontestably is. Bonds may come and Maigrets may go, but Holmes goes on forever. In the 80 years since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet, the incomparable Brain of Baker Street has inspired 21 stage plays (including a Broadway musical), more than 100 movies, and radio and television dramas innumerable. And in A Study in Terror, the first in a new series of Homespun horrors financed by the Doyle estate, the original private eye is granted a timely new mortgage on immortality.

Terror is a sly and stylish send-up of costume chillers as well as of that silly ass with the deerstalker and the magnifying glass. Scriptwriters Derek and Donald Ford develop a delightfully nasty notion: why,not pit the most famous Victorian detective against the most notorious Victorian criminal--lack the Ripper. The confrontation contains some bloody-awful picture possibilities, and Director James Hill (Born Free) has the wit to explode them as he exploits them. The bloodiest, of course, are presented by those scenes in which the Ripper, swathed in the sort of corpse-grey fog the last century called a "London particular," glides up to a luckless trollop, and with a knife at least as big as the minute hand on Big Ben opens the poor girl from 'ere to 'ere. At such moments Hill hoses the screen with such a preposterous torrent of catchup that gross horror becomes Grand Guignol, and even the squeamish should concede that his sense of humor is simply ripping.

Hill can needle too, and he does it with an admirably straight face. Under his wry direction, John Neville and Donald Houston play Holmes and Watson with a quaint and slightly stilted charm that defines them as exactly what they are: impressive pieces of Victorian bric-a-brac. Houston gustily presents the doctor as a tintype of the ruddy regimental; Neville dryly displays the detective as a standard Victorian eccentric, an intellectual who beneath a mask of pedantry conceals a sad little secret: he is really just a middle-class boy who never quite made Eton and never quite got over it.

Between the two passes a variety of dialogue that, if the moviegoer squints a little, can be seen to issue from their lips on little cross-stitched samplers, which just sort of hang there on the screen and give off a faint scent of sachet. Holmes: "I wish to see the owner of this doubtful establishment." Watson: "Nothing like a piece of cold steel, eh, Holmes?" Holmes: "Brisk work, Watson!" Brisk work indeed.

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