Murder by Decree
This is not the clear soup the English prefer, it brews up quite
a fog in Whitechapel, and that is by way of being the
point, if you please.
Quite a mysterium,
whores in alleyways preyed upon like a butcher’s yard. Sir Charles Warren
warns off Holmes on behalf of the police, a citizens
committee of radicals aping tradesmen hire the sleuth.
The strange silence around the case is palpable.
Vivid flashes of
delicately-conveyed acting enliven this, great filming on or about Clink Wharf,
etc.
Severely
degraded and fearful witnesses to a birth of high degree.
Holmes
between two stools, right up against it.
“Thus was
born the myth of Jack the Ripper.”
From
the author of The Offence (dir.
Sidney Lumet), among other things.
“The
resolution to any Holmes case has never been as important as the chase itself,”
thought Vincent Canby of the New York
Times, who found this “a good deal of uncomplicated fun.”
“Not
entirely successful” (Time Out Film
Guide).
For what it’s
worth, the Catholic News Service Media Review Office has “this handsome,
expensively mounted period piece... preposterous and incredibly untidy plot...
harmless”.
Halliwell’s Film Guide chucks it out as “interminably long and
unpardonably muddled”.
A boom that
loots the poor, a nonexistent prosperity, a blight on
the land, real poverty.
The title means
“number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
Arthur
Miller, for Amblin Television.
In port, the Queen Mary takes on prostitutes.
FDR, WPA.
“What can you expect from a country that puts a Frankfurter on the
Supreme Court?” Communist marchers. The greatness of New York.
One who saw it
go to wrack and ruin having left the market in time.
“What
saved the United States” (cp. Christmas
Lilies of the Field, dir. Ralph Nelson).
“A touch
scattered,” said Walter Goodman of the New York Times, “and it never does make a stimulating
connection between America today and in the 1930s”.
Variety thought
differently, thought of Terkel and Dos Passos, and said so.