Review of A Study in Terror

I am both a fan of Sherlock Holmes and an interested observer of the case of Jack the Ripper. This film, with excellent show-saving performances by John Neville, Anthony Quayle, Robert Morley and the whole cast, was clearly written by a Sherlockian rather than a Ripperologist. A lot of Holmes's lines are lifted from stories in the original cannon. The fictional story here (where Holmes encounters Jack the Ripper) is good and basic, and I prefer the simplicity of its solution to the complexity of that in "Murder by Decree", the other Holmes-Ripper film, made in 1979. The research, however, on the Jack the Ripper crimes was clearly lousy, if not non-existent: From the first five seconds of the film, with Mary-Anne Nichols (nicknamed "Polly", but would The Times call her that?) having a knife stuck through her neck and seconds later a fat woman discovering her, when in reality, Nichols had her throat cut and her uterus torn out, two hours before she was discovered by two men. The "dear boss" letter is anything but complete here, there is no mention of the other letters or reasonable explanation for why the Ripper sent it. The writing on the wall for murder three is absent. Still, if you don't mind historical inaccuracies, this film is definitely worth watching. It has my approval.