Jack The Ripper (1979)

He played a lot of villains in his career but Jack The Ripper is probably the closest Klaus Kinski ever came to playing himself on screen.  I mean it’s obvious why he even took on the role.  And no, it’s not because the screenplay is brilliant.

Released in North America in 1979 (it was made in Switzerland three years prior), it is a heavily fictionalized account of the notorious UK murderer.  The identity of the real-life Jack The Ripper, who was never apprehended for his heinous crimes, remains unknown.  While both incarnations had a predilection for assaulting sex workers, only the movie version ends up getting caught.  What’s ridiculous is how long this takes.

For you see, Kinski has a very distinctive look.  He instantly stands out with his blond hair, intense glare and full lips.  Oddly, he resembles Pepe The Frog.  There’s a scene where a witness describes his appearance to a police sketch artist and well, it might not be the most extraordinary drawing ever put to paper but it looks exactly like Kinski.  It can’t be anyone else.

That scene, however, comes at the halfway point of the film after Kinski has already racked up more murders.  Why does this distinguished doctor, highly attentive to his patients during the day and constantly mothered by his very lenient landlord, go out hunting for vulnerable prey at night?

We eventually learn he has mommy issues.  Apparently, she was polyamorous and believe it or not, Kinski has always been jealous of that.  Yep, he’s a real creepo.  While laying in bed tortured by all of this, he hallucinates about her in her youth as she teases him in her slutty can-can outfit urging him to go find her.  Basically, the victims he selects are living substitutes but only one really matches her description.

Because this is an exploitative thriller, the women have their clothes ripped off so we can see all their bits as they get assaulted.  Disturbingly, the movie clearly wants us to be as sexually aroused as the killer.  (I’m not Bill Cosby, assholes.)  But what’s weird about the rapes is that the women are the only naked ones.  Because he keeps his pants on, it looks like he’s dry humping them.  Perhaps we should be thankful this isn’t more realistic.

After assaulting them, he cuts up their parts including their breasts.  Again, it’s probably a relief that the make-up designs are so awful which thankfully deadens the effect.  There’s no hiding that fake-looking dummy.  Nip/Tuck, this isn’t.

With the assistance of a mysteriously loyal woman who has a noticeable scar on the right side of her face (I have so many questions), the discarded parts are placed in a large sack and then dumped in the Thames river.  (Opening it up to discover an eye is curiously not a dealbreaker for her.)  A sliced hand with a ring on it (you sure that’s not from a department store mannequin?) is later discovered by a local fisherman who harasses the woman with the scar.  Kinski is his personal physician.  (There’s an effective shot of the doctor forcefully removing the source of his leg pain without anesthetic.)  When he puts two and two together, he makes an obvious misstep.  Never blackmail a murderer.

The local police inspector starts interviewing witnesses shortly after the first killing.  Besides the sex worker who provides an accurate physical description after additional slayings, the only other helpful one is a blind man with an impeccable sense of smell.  That should immediately lead the police to a local botanical garden that Kinski uses as a hideout for the dismembering of his dead victims or the inside of his apartment building where he see patients at his practice.  But it takes the inspector’s estranged girlfriend (Charlie Chaplin’s flexible daughter, Jacqueline), a singularly focused ballerina who just happens to resemble Kinski’s mom, to finally lead the police right to Jack The Ripper.

Yeah, about that, what is she thinking?  Unarmed and dressed up like one of the professional “tarts” in the music hall at Pike’s Hole (they have to show their bums because the music is forgettable in this crammed place) and affecting a lower-class accent that everyone sees through, having been unwittingly encouraged by her pianist of all people, who notes the city’s growing disappointment in her boyfriend’s incompetence, she walks out alone on a foggy night eventually finding a bar on the verge of closing.

While waiting inside for the kindly barman to have a look over the day’s miniscule totals, in walks Kinski.  After a brief chat, she bolts for the basement to warn him.  But when she comes back upstairs, the killer is gone.  Lingering outside, Kinski easily outsmarts her and forces her back to his place where his mom delusion is fully revealed. The full rationale for his depravity can no longer be contained or denied.

Although the film is set in jolly old England where the cumbersome fog is its own character, the actors in Jack The Ripper actually speak German.  One wonders if the film should’ve been released here with subtitles accompanying that original dialogue.  Instead, everything is dubbed and it’s very distracting.  As a result, some performances, like the judgmental old lady who runs a linen store, are more annoying than others.

The closest to a legitimately sexy scene involves a very cute sex worker picking up the wandering Kinski for a romp back at the whorehouse.  Once there, she’s out of her clothes in two seconds and it’s go time.  Sadly, it’s all ruined because the guy gets off on hurting women.

The real Kinski was a monster, a loose cannon on set and off who rarely got along with directors.  One of his daughters later accused him of sexual abuse.  The director of Crawlspace actually included a featurette on the Blu-ray revealing how much of a tempermental pain in the ass he was.  He even included clips of him acting like a petulant jerk-off.

With the exception of one brief outburst, that volcanic rage isn’t on full display in Jack The Ripper which ultimately doesn’t matter because we never hear his actual voice anyway.  The horror scenes are weak and the constant ripping off of sex worker clothing a cheap gimmick and excuse to get bare breasts on screen.  Rape scenes, even badly executed ones, are not fun to watch.  This movie thinks they’re arousing. Based on his ugly history, you can understand why he took this part.

The police inspector is too skeptical about the blind man’s invaluable testimony and therefore, Kinski is free to continue to torment innocent women without any worry about being caught, at least until the final act.  Once the inspector’s foolish girlfriend takes matters into her own hands and ends up getting needlessly assaulted, she is spared further torture when they belatedly arrive.

Now in custody, as he’s taken out by Scotland Yard, a defiant Kinski proclaims, “You’ll never prove it.”  Should’ve killed off the blind man, dumbass.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, February 10, 2021
2:19 a.m.

Phantom Of The Paradise

They say if you fool me once, it’s shame on you.  And if you fool me twice, it’s shame on me.

Winslow Leach (the late William Finley), the doomed hero of Phantom Of The Paradise, gets fooled, by my count, four times.  An aspiring singer/songwriter, he catches the attention of Swan (a seriously miscast Paul Williams), a mysterious Svengali who revels in bad taste and loathes having his picture taken for a very good reason. 

Swan’s strangely adaptable band The Juicy Fruits (who later perform as The Beach Bums and The Undeads) covers one of Winslow’s songs as a 50s greaser anthem (the fast parts are better than the slowed down narrative breaks), much to his unbridled fury.   But when Philbin (an all too convincing, mutton-chopped George Memmoli), one of Swan’s goons, comes calling making him a seemingly sweet offer, that rage quickly dissipates and he stupidly hands over all his sheet music for his latest opus.  You’d think the guy would make back-up copies.

Then, after not hearing anything back for a month, Winslow makes an impromptu visit to Swan’s business headquarters to find out why he’s not following through on recording his first album as promised.  He’s promptly thrown out of the building.

He tries one last time to get answers.  A whole slew of beauties are auditioning for his epic, hijacked cantata, Faust, or so they think.  Instead, many of them get attacked or turned into sex slaves at Swanage, this movie’s PG-version of The Playboy Mansion. 

Rebuffed twice more, beaten, and then framed by two Black cops for drug possession, poor Winslow ends up in Sing Sing where all his teeth are removed and replaced with metal imitations for dubious reasons.  Upon learning on the radio that his deliberately misappropriated Faust will be premiered at Swan’s brand new Paradise Theatre, he finally snaps and somehow manages to escape by hiding in a box transported by truck.

Fueled by fury, he rushes back to the Death Records building, blowing past the secretary who rejected him. Swan is so loaded he has his own record plant. And Winslow is stunned and angered to discover he’s already recorded Faust.  Boxed copies are everywhere awaiting release.

How he manages to acquire dynamite so quickly is never addressed but it doesn’t really matter.  Spotted by a security guard, who shoots him off-camera, he somehow gets his head temporarily stuck inside the red hot plant conveniently burning the right side of his face.  Bleeding and deflated, he manages to flee by diving into a nearby river.

Buried in an issue of Variety at the bottom of the cover page, he’s presumed dead, his permanently soiled reputation reduced to a paragraph.  Meanwhile, announced more prominently at the top, Swan moves forward with rehearsals for Faust.

Let’s back up a bit. At Swanage, just before his banishment and wrongful imprisonment, amongst a long line of tuneless warblers Winslow encounters Phoenix (the angelically intense Jessica Harper in a star making debut).  Undeniably charismatic, she has a warm, controlled vocal.  It’s love at first sight albeit the one-sided variety.  She’s shocked that he knows the song she’s practicing.

Sneaking into the Paradise’s back entrance, following the record plant incident, a now mute Winslow heads to the costume storage room undetected to put together his alter-ego costume.  With a dearth of good choices, he settles on a traditional cape and an odd bird helmet with the right eye strategically covered.  Now suddenly sporting black lipstick and guyliner (where did he find the time to shop?), he can only growl and breathe heavy.

After setting off a bomb, presumably the same stack of dynamite that wasn’t set off before, during a Beach Boys-inspired rehearsal, the paranoid Swan, who maintains a secret video room filled with surveillance footage, manages to easily outsmart a vengeful Winslow yet again by convincing him to end his terror campaign and instead work with him on Faust.  “Trust me,” the little man with the long hair urges.  Twice.  I wonder if this is where Jake Roberts acquired his catchphrase.

Swan offers him the chance to have his music played live at The Paradise, which was already happening anyway, and even have Phoenix cast as his star.  But Winslow, now known as The Phantom, must be locked up in his studio in order to completely focus on rewriting the entirety of his opus.  Fueled with a constant diet of pills and nothing else, his deadline is in a week.  He must work round the clock to get it all finished on time.

The only good thing Swan does for him is restore his voice through a voice modulator.  He can even sing again (but for some reason he sounds more like Williams than Finley).  But then, out comes a contract the size of War And Peace.  It’s loaded with questionable edicts and incomprehensible legalese, a lot of it contradictory.  There’s literally no time to digest it all.  Realizing he’s making a deal with the devil, but desperate to get his music voiced by his muse, Winslow signs it in blood.  “I have no use for ink,” Swan ominously declares.

Having not been able to audition at Swanage, where she gets attacked by Philbin, a stubbornly determined Phoenix shows up at the Paradise confronting her unpunished assailant who claims his boss is looking for “screamers”, not singers, a curious phrasing.  Undeterred, she nails her audition, except for the needless twirling at the end.

But then Swan decides not to make her the star of his show.  Absurdly, he relegates her to back-up duties.  His reasoning for this is total bullshit.  She’s “too perfect” and he “abhors perfection” in others.  Oh, for Christ sake.  So, who does he replace her with?  A swish named Beef (Gerrit Graham) who can’t sing for shit.  Oh, he can scream alright, just not very tunefully.  Robert Plant is heavy, this guy sucks.

After finishing the rewrite, The Phantom realizes he’s been had yet again.  Swan has literally bricked him into the studio.  But anger is an energy and no wall, no matter how solid, can ever withstand the full force of a thoroughly pissed off, seriously wronged writer.  Suicide, however, is not an option.

Phantom Of The Paradise was written and directed by Brian De Palma two years before he made Carrie.  (Sissy Spacek, who played the title role in that first Stephen King theatrical, is credited here as a crew member in the end credits.  She painted the sets.)  A musical, a showbiz satire, a Greek tragedy and supposedly, a horror film, too, it is disappointingly overstuffed with half-hearted ideas and uneven execution.

I say supposedly because although there are stabbings here and there, along with the usual facial grotesqueries, it’s not particularly scary, not that I think that was the intention anyway.  Although I did laugh a few times, it’s not especially cutting, either, unless you find gay stereotypes and attempted rapes uproariously funny.

As for the tragedy of what happens to Winslow, he’s such a fucking dummy I had next to no sympathy for him.  He repeatedly aligns himself with Swan, knowing the whole time the guy’s a schemer and a shyster, only to be fucked over again and again and again.  He never learns a goddamn thing.  Surprised his last name isn’t Costanza.

Swan isn’t exactly a genius, either.  During the opening night of Faust at the Paradise (the show is so long it’s divided into two separate performances), his new lead stinks up the stage with his very forced butch delivery. A panicked Beef, caught fleeing by a peeved Philbin beforehand, is ordered to go out there only to have his own paranoia justified when The Phantom follows through on his unveiled threat conveyed in a deliberate homage to the shower scene in Psycho. It’s neither amusing nor frightening.

With the crowd loving the mayhem, Swan ultimately decides that they should go further and plan their own live murder, on network TV no less, for night two, a supremely idiotic idea.  (Bumping off your stars isn’t good business!)  But that can only happen by actually doing what The Phantom wanted him to do in the first place.  And what is that exactly?  It’s allowing Phoenix to finally sing at least one of his songs in the show.  (How in the hell did she get all that make-up off so quick?)

She nails it, of course, as the damaged writer secretly shines the spotlight on her all the while feeling vindicated by his gut instincts.  (He’s a far better talent scout than Swan.)  Despite singing a ballad, Phoenix gets over huge with this unruly crowd and is now just as vulnerable and beholden to the man in the shadows. She doesn’t really need to snort that cocaine.  Audience adulation is what really drives her insatiability.

Initially repulsed by his operation, there she is getting busy with him at Swanage basking in the afterglow of her deserved triumph while a crestfallen Phantom watches from high up above.  The funny thing is I didn’t believe she likes either guy.

Released in 1974, I wonder if the film would’ve played better for me if Paul Williams had played the Winslow part and David Bowie, riding high on the success of Ziggy Stardust, had been Swan.  Bowie had effortless charm and as he later proved with The Thin White Duke, an oily edge, something Williams sorely lacks.  (He also looks like a munchkin hippie.)  And Williams easily related much more to Winslow anyway.  Despite releasing a bunch of his own albums in the early 70s, it was his songwriting interpreted by other acts like The Carpenters, Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and Bowie himself that assured him gold and platinum successes.  (Williams actually looks like Bowie in that short wig.)

I will say that the movie gets it right about Swan’s obsessive need for control (shades of Roger Ailes and Phil Spector) and his unaccountable system of abuse (which predicted future creeper Peter Nygard but is considerably watered down).  It just doesn’t know how to make fun of him.  As for Williams, I just didn’t hate his Swan all that much despite his questionable decision making and unscrupulous power plays.  He’s too stoic with his reactions.  There’s just no heat when he appears.

This uncomfortable blending of genres and a depressing reluctance to cut deeper is its ultimate undoing.  Paradoxically, it feels both crammed and undernourished.  Some ingredients are more properly cooked than others.

Since the love triangle doesn’t pay off, it’s left to the music itself to provide some kind of emotional heft.  Much of that is delivered by Harper who gets two showcase pieces:  a catchy up-tempo rocker for her audition and that lovely ballad during the Faust concert replayed during her love scene with Williams.  She has a beguiling Linda Ronstadt quality but with a lot more restraint.  Unfortunately, I didn’t really buy her change of heart about Swan.  He’s no irresistible force.

In the original cut of Phantom Of The Paradise, there was a recurring motif involving Swan being such a ubiquitous presence around town you couldn’t escape him.  His swan logo prevalent on street signs, camera equipment, buildings, reel-to-reel machines, housecoats, theatre marquees and videotape cases, to offer just a small sample.  But because the words “Swan Song” appeared in a lot of these scenes and by sheer coincidence it also happened to be the name of Led Zeppelin’s new boutique label, the more visible references were cut or awkwardly matted out due to an understandable lawsuit by the band’s manager Peter Grant.

As a result, the idea that Swan is so inescapable the only way to find success in the music business is to sign with him is considerably dialed down, at least visually.  (You’re telling me he has no competition whatsoever?) Regardless, I still find it hard to believe that Phoenix, another easily snowed innocent, would undergo such a dramatic transformation in a short period of time even before she gets hooked through her breakthrough opportunity.  She shouldn’t have been so easily corruptible. I would’ve liked to have seen her put up more of a fight.  Frankly, as Winslow immediately recognizes, she doesn’t even need Swan to become a star.  Why doesn’t she realize that herself?  And why does it take so long for her to recognize The Phantom?

Although some songs are flawed (for instance, I’m not too fond of a fast cut being slowed down by witless spoken word interludes), there are real standouts that have aged particularly well and that’s all thanks to Williams who earned an Oscar nomination for writing a song score that for the most part demonstrated his dextrous versatility. 

Once The Undeads take the stage during the first night of Faust, Williams’ own real-life band, who back up all their earlier incarnations and the auditioners, they kick out a jam with a raw power that captures the zeitgeist of glam rock’s heyday.  With everyone wearing make-up that surely inspired Kiss, regardless of the Frankenstein gimmick that ultimately results in Beef’s unwelcome disruption into a new song, it’s the most contemporary cut of the whole lot.

But the best musical moment is ironically reserved for the end titles.  The instrumental jam in the final leg of The Hell Of It features the exceptionally self-assured honky-tonk piano tinklings of Williams himself as his backing band drive a relentlessly repetitive beat that feels a bit like the opening jam of Station To Station in a higher key after several snorts.  It feels like an unseen freewheeling concert set in a futuristic saloon.

De Palma claims he wanted to make a film about how pure artistry gets diluted by commercial cynicism to the point where it literally dies on stage.  It’s a great concept that remains timely.  But he doesn’t come remotely close to pulling it off.  Critics were mixed in 1974 and they still are today despite a growing cult following that counts Daft Punk and Guillermo Del Toro as devoted members.  I would still like to know why it has always played so well in Winnipeg.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
7:14 p.m.