Fantastic Metropolis

The underclass exist only as victims. The film is more sentimental than Moore’s graphic novel, which is darkly realist; fiercely drawn, crosshatched, by Eddie Campbell. The Hughes’ cinematographer, Peter Deming, recreates several of Campbell’s frames—but the colour, the opera of movement and costume design, the wrap-around orchestration, subverts the bleak nightscape of the original strip. Because of the nature of a page divided into variable combinations of frame, Moore’s novel keeps its distance from the hot narrative. There is always the sense of looking, at one time, through a dozen windows. Narrative is fragmented. The graphic novel is always silent: Hitchcock’s 1926 Ripper film, The Lodger, and not his London return of the Sixties, Frenzy.

The Ripper is a blank-faced monster, revised from generation to generation, but the victims don’t change. We know who they are, the nature of their wounds, the cemeteries in which they are buried. Moore dedicates his From Hell scripts to the dead prostitutes—with a characteristic echo of Eliot. ‘Goodnight, ladies.’ The Hughes brothers’ film takes the hint and builds dramatic tension through the conflict between the sisterhood of the streets and the vengeful hierarchies of the state. Everything hinges on a single challenge: confront the karma, appease the pain, take the taint from surviving geography of Whitechapel.

What does survive? The Prague model of Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields, is more available than the cleaned and scoured, Portland stone dagger on the edge of the City of London. The true church is an island protected by steel-grey railings—as if obeying Hawksmoor’s instruction ‘to keep off filth Nastiness & Brutes’. BE-AWARE / THE AREA IN FRONT OF THESE / RAILINGS IS / PRIVATE PROPERTY. No nonsense about access for all, serving a community.

The Gents lavatory, the last gasp of Victorian charity, a benevolent reconstruction that followed in the wake of the Ripper murders, is now a subterranean wine bar. The male and female entrances to Jack London’s night shelter for down-and-outs have been blocked off by a yellow fence: MANHATTAN LOFT CORPORATION. Georgian façades are retained, like cosmetic masks, to dress the latest land-grab piracy. The arch from Aldgate priory, close to where the body of Kate Eddowes was found in Mitre Square, is preserved—as a conversation piece, inside the offices of the Swiss Reinsurance Co. The arch belonged to one of the 10 side-chapels where masses were sung for the dead. Memories of the Augustinian priory, of a gateway built from the ruins of property demolished when the Jews were expelled from England, are prompted by summaries on boards. Royal genealogies alongside yellow press graphic strips, precursors of Eddie Campbell, with Ripper cartoons and caricatures of Jewish slaughtermen.

The Ten Bells pub, where the movie prostitutes meet and drink, offers ‘Hot Toddies’ and leaflets for Ripper tours. Bloody Marys all round. Pinned to the door, a couple of months back, was an advance flyer for From Hell, starring Johnny Depp. The names and dates of the victims, once engraved in the glass of the pub window, have long since disappeared.

Depp is in the wrong film. He has nothing to do with the historic Inspector Abberline, and demonstrates few traces of Moore’s dour West Countryman. He essays a kind of low-key Mockney, tranquillised by Jamie Oliver. ‘Dorsett (sic) sounds too bizarre to use,’ said the dialogue coach. (So much for the Thomas Hardy franchise.) Depp is a fin-de-siècle dandy, out of Oscar Wilde or Stevenson; a melancholy Dorian Gray. An opium-smoking, absinthe-tippling Shoreditch dude who dreams the crimes. Dreams London. From Hell is Depp’s posthumous reverie. Which explains the unreal geography, the bloodshot panoramic skies (last seen in Carol Reed’s unicorn-in-Petticoat Lane fantasy, A Kid for Two Farthings.)

So a film which is delivered with considerable panache, with painstaking reconstructions, with moments of psychotic chill from Ian Holm as Sir William Gull, fails in the only way that matters: it robs the worst of the murders—the slaughter of Mary Kelly in Miller’s Court—of its place in time. Sentiment (box office) demands that Kelly escapes, goes free, lives on in a white-washed John Ford cottage in the West of Ireland. History is trashed. Hurt is demeaned. The small set, hung with a woman’s entrails, is no more than a literal cutting room, film for flesh. Where Alan Moore can float Kelly’s escape as a wistful potentiality, Hollywood needs a clear finish. An up-beat resolution. From Hell returns to source, as a penny-dreadful, a shocker; a distortion of place and time. An industrial product crafted to stand alongside the wave of predatory development that maligns history and treats the past as the final colony in the American world empire.