Ally Ryder asked about the evolving themes in Ripper cinema. It’s a great question, and one that I don’t think I answered adequately. So here’s to a more in-depth explanation…
Early Ripper Films (1917-1954)
Early Ripper movies tended to use literary antecedents: Wedekind’s Lulu saga (3 plays condensed into a single film) and The Lodger. Between 1917 and 1954—a period of nearly 40 years—there are three movies based on Lulu and five based on The Lodger (if you count Room to Let, which I do). Waxworks is the odd man out.
The first Ripper film to feature Jack the Ripper as a central character doesn’t come until 1944—about 30 years into Ripper cinema. In the Lulu story, the Ripper (when he appears—which he doesn’t in the 1917 version) only appears in cameo. In The Lodger, the killer is supposed to be a central character, but in the two Novello versions, the lodger is actually an innocent “wrong man.” The actual killer is offscreen for all of the Hitchcock film and for all but a few moments of the 1932 film.
So in early cinema, the Ripper story is dominated by two strands—one telling the story of a fictional Ripper victim and the other telling the story of an innocent family unknowingly housing the Ripper under their roof. But the early Lodger movies are squeamish about putting the monster in the house. Once this threat had been fully realized in the 1944 Lodger, though, later adaptations followed suit.
The early English-speaking productions are equally squeamish about making the women prostitutes. I don’t know the cause of this squeamishness for the British films, but for the American movies it’s largely a result of Production Code restrictions and the censors.
Transitional Ripper Cinema and Television (1958-1968)
Television becomes a major force in this period, and new themes emerge. We routinely begin to see supernatural or other fantastical elements (at least in television)—first, a psychic; then an occult ritual used to maintain life across the ages; then waxworks possibly coming to life; and finally, a formless entity who kills so it might feed on the fear of its victims.
In the films, we see police procedural (including the first Sherlock Holmes confrontation) and yet more Lulu. (The Lulu story doesn’t die out until 1980).
One thing about all of these instances… none of them is terribly violent. True, the 1959 Jack the Ripper has that blood-red final scene in the elevator (the film had been in black and white). But on-screen violence was not yet commonplace in the Ripper cinema.
Someone asked why I thought that the Ripper case had been so sanitized. Largely censors, I think. The sanitization in this period, though, stopped applying to the issue of prostitution. In A Study in Terror, the victims are not only prostitutes, but they are given their real names on screen for the first time. This never does become an actual trend. Most Ripper television and cinema continues to create entirely fictitious victims. Notable exceptions include: Murder by Decree, Jack the Ripper (1988) and From Hell.
The Violent Era (1971-Present)
In the late 1960s, the US film industry abandoned the old Production Code and relaxed censorship standards. I’m not sure about the actual impact on world cinema (the Italians had been producing proto-slasher giallo films since 1965!). But from this time forward, Ripper cinema becomes increasingly violent, or at least the Ripper’s eviscerations are discussed if not shown.
I’m not going to provide a complete litany of violent movies. But the actual modus operandi of the Ripper killings finally gets on the table during this period. It’s discussed in the Michael Caine Jack the Ripper. It’s shown, to some extent, in From Hell. And it’s graphically (though boringly) displayed in the Tom Savini Ripper (1985). (No way did Tom create those utterly lame gore effects!).
The larger trend, though, has been just to exploit violence for shock value, regardless of the Ripper’s modus operandi—a trend started by Hammer Films in 1971 with the release of the mildly gory films Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (in which the killer does take female internal organs, though not onscreen) and Hands of the Ripper.
Thematically, pretty much anything is now fair game—from strict police procedurals to the most outrageous supernatural, science fiction and sheer shock plotlines.
Well, I hope that answered Ally’s question a little better! And sorry this is taking so long (the podcast is now two weeks old!). I’m just having to do a lot of shuffling these days. And I hope I didn’t bore everybody with all the detail!
wargames 25th anniversary event
It was the coolest movie trailer in the summer of 1983. A robotic synthetic voice asked “SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?” as the words themselves spooled out across a computer screen. And a nearly unknown Matthew Broderick (character name: David Lightman) answered back: “How about ‘GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR’?”… unleashing a phantom Soviet missile attack and chaos inside of NORAD.
OMG!!! IT WAS AWESOME!!
Okay, so ordinary people didn’t scream Internet (or even mundane) slang in all-caps back then. Actually, nobody I knew had ever even been online… except maybe those guys who kept round-the-clock vigil inside the university computer lab and spoke amongst themselves in Elvish. But for the rest of us, David Lightman’s hack in to the ARPANET was our first entry into the world of hacking, personal computers, dial-up connections and extremely large floppy disks.
Young America packed the theaters, Roger Ebert gave the film a rousing thumbs-up, and computer science majors must have tripled that Fall after the summer movie Geekathon! Even a decade later, I got a special WarGames rush when I opened the back of a new PC, installed a 14.4 Kbps dial-up modem, and then dialed my first number, heard the handshake and logged in.
The movie rocked my world. So what did I think when I heard there would be a special 25th Anniversary big screen presentation? I was: 1)Thrilled. 2)Worried.
Worried? Yes. What if it didn’t hold up after all these years? I really hadn’t seen the film since Matthew Broderick (like us) was still a fresh-faced kid. And the technology involved could—you know—be called a little… old. I mean, the first Mac didn’t even come out until a year later. And now? In a single day, I can confront two unique virus threats to my work PC, conduct business by email with prospective magazine contributors located anywhere inside the English-speaking world, send an article typed from a prone position on my laptop to an online magazine that could be housed literally anywhere in close enough proximity to Earth, and practice lightsaber technique, Backgammon and advanced Sudoku on my iPhone. If you’re reading this, you are already online and can add your own litany of everyday computer marvels.
So how did this seminal and award-winning film hold up after all these years? Astoundingly well—and definitely worth a shout-out on its Silver Anniversary.
To celebrate the landmark, MGM Studios teamed up with Fathom Events to create a satellite broadcast airing Thursday, July 24 at 7:30 pm local time in select theaters nationwide. The theater selection, though, was fairly broad—at least in major markets. Virtually all of the multiplexes on the Virginia side of the Washington DC Metro Area offered tickets, including my local theater, where I had just seen this summer’s blockbuster, Dark Knight, a few days before.
The short feature preceding the main event contained standard made-for-DVD feature fare (film footage, on-the-set stills, interviews with major cast and crew) plus a look inside the real NORAD (the military command center featured in the film).
Did you ever see that Star Trek documentary in which LeVar Burton got folks at NASA and the scientific community to talk about the aspirational impact Star Trek had on their professional lives? That’s what the interviews with NORAD personnel were like. The interviewees adored WarGames, but were quick to point out the fantasy elements of the film in light of NORAD realities. For example, they didn’t even have full-color displays back in 1983. WarGames gave the folks at NORAD technology they could aspire to—though not (and never!) technology that could go around crucial human decision making.
After the short documentary (which I will just bet is on the 25th Anniversary DVD!), they rolled out the trailer for War Games: The Dead Code, set for straight-to-DVD release on Tuesday, July 29. The new movie does not continue the adventures of David Lightman (though the character list does include a “Dr. Stephen Falken,” the scientist who programmed the WOPR computer that wanted Lightman to play a game). Rather, the film is a cyberterror update, featuring a new fresh face wanting to play games with a seemingly benign piece of particularly pernicious code.
The warm-up over, WarGames itself finally hit the big screen for one special show. It was kind of like catching up with an old friend from 20 years ago. I couldn’t always see what was coming, but I remembered it when I saw it. Among the pleasant semi-surprises:
Instead:
Yes, of course, the movie also has elements that appear incredibly silly today. Network security is almost non-existent. A world-class computer scientist has a backdoor password into NORAD’s WOPR war-strategy computer that anybody who’s read his bio could hack. It’s easy today to laugh at such nonsense, but as far as I can tell present-day network security (and password) standards resulted from hacker exploits. It didn’t precede them.
One other point of amusement: all those great shifting lights on the WOPR computer? Those were controlled by a guy sitting inside the box, hooked up to the interface with an Apple II (that’s pre-Mac, for you young folks!).
All in all, the WarGames 25th Anniversary Event was well-executed and a great deal of fun. Too bad it wasn’t better advertised.
And just remember the next time you see some cinematic hacker unleash a bit of cyber-havoc… David Lightman may not have been the first-ever hacker on screen, but WarGames‘ breakout success did make “the hacker” a standard movie character type.