THE LIMEHOUSE GOLEM: WRONG TURN ON RIPPER STREET

NOTE: This review contains some spoilers, but that shouldn't matter because the film offers its own spoilers early on.

It's the East End of London, before the Ripper murders, but the Limehouse Golem is a serial killer who has already killed a prostitute, a Jewish scholar, and a family in the rag trade. The police have no clue, but the public and press are clamoring for results so Scotland Yard hands the investigation to Inspector Kildare, a detective who has gone nowhere in the Yard because he is 'not the marrying kind', and thus will be gladly sacrificed to the public as the murders multiply.

But as Kildare joins the case, he is presented with a domestic poisoning, of playwright John Cree by his wife Lizzie, a former music hall star in the female impersonator Dan Leno's shows. And the two cases turn out to be connected, as Kildare discovers in the reading room of the British Museum, where Thomas DeQuincey's infamous essay on the art of murder has been annotated by the Golem himself. Which limits the list of suspects to Cree, Leno, Karl Marx and George Gissing.

Does this not sound like the skeleton of a tremendous film? It is taken from Peter Ackroyd's novel Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem, and the possibilities are endless. A conflation of the Ratcliff Highway murders about which DeQuincey wrote, and the story of James Maybrick, the Ripper suspect poisoned by his wife, Ackroyd's book was a rich mining of the nuances of Victorian sexuality, as well as a turn about performance, creation and fame. Screenwriter Jane Goldman said it was a long-time dream of hers to adapt the book for the screen. But that long-time does not appear to have been used in considering what would be the best way to do that.

The biggest problem is that the story's big twist, the identity of the killer, is made obvious a third of the way through the film, and that leaves the viewer hoping that some more exotic twist may be in the offing—a bit of stagecraft magic from Leno, perhaps, or a demented Kildare turning out to be the killer. The latter would make great sense, not just because Bill Nighy sleepwalks his way through the role, perhaps thinking he's already played a Peter Cushing role at least once. His eventual awakening would be welcome,  because Kildare's closeted sexuality could have spurred exactly the sense of murderous rage the killer shows. Though of course how it would apply to the victims chosen would still be problematic. It's interesting that Alan Rickman was originally cast in the role, but had to bow out as he grew ill.

Oddly enough, the movie is content to leave most of those questions of sexuality lurking in the background. Leno is a female impersonator; Lizzie starts her career playing men. Kildare's assistant turns out to be sympathetic to his sexuality, though nothing is made of this. Uncle, the theatre manager played by Eddie Marsan, turns out to be a sado-masochist not above blackmailing Lizzie into servicing his needs. The acrobat Aveline (played with bitchy menace by Maria Valverde), who loses Cree to Lizzie, then joins the household, taking the pain of wifely duties away from Lizzie. This is a rich broth of sexuality in conflict, but most of it goes nowhere. Perhaps they were worried about revealing the twist too son were they to reveal too much, but because they point you so obviously in the direction of the real killer that's no excuse.

The story is told through imaginings by Kildare of the various suspects carrying out the killings, and through Lizzie's own story, told to Kildare as she awaits first trial and then the noose for poisoning her husband. Kildare's protective attraction to Lizzie is hard to figure, except that it's necessary for the plot, but we see Lizzie abused sexually as a young girl and then punished brutally by her mother for having been abused. Orphaned at 14, she makes her way into the theatre, and with the unfortunate death of Leno's midget foil takes over that place in his act and becomes a star.

So as Lizzie directs Kildare's Inspector Knacker, we lose further opportunities. Karl Marx is played by Henry Goodman in a fake nose wig and beard as if he were a music hall character, he adds nothing to the film; nor does Morgan Watkins' George Gissing, though he is shown in an opium den and explains he's married a fallen woman to try to save her.When you consider the way director Juan Carlos Medina sets the scene, half Hammer horror and half Ripper Street, to show us all the degradations of the East End, you might expect to get more than a knowing nod to where each of those characters came from.

But in the end, it is Lizzie's film, and Olivia Cooke rises to the challenge by channeling her inner Kate Winslet, almost to the point of parody. The directors' and her real interest seems to be the music hall and the backstage world; obviously that is where Lizzie has come alive, but it turns out to be a thing much deeper than that and we're never really convinced of that. And when the denouement comes, a lot of heavy mascara is no substitute for character. You might have expected a bit more of Dan Leno, who is played well enough by Douglas Booth, though as with Marx or Gissing, the film always backs off giving him more character to explore. Even in the film's final scene, in which Aveline dies in an accident, playing Lizzie in the noose, you wonder if there's something you missed—though the film immediately tells you you haven't, by going to a celebratory shot of Lizzie, though you obviously have.

It's that kind of movie. Gratuitously violent at times, well-set up at others, it in the end goes around in circles, to no point because the audience knows too well where it is going to end up. It would have been easy to have made the journey more worthwhile.

THEIR FINEST (TWO) HOURS, (OR ERAS?)

WARNING NOTE! This review contains spoilers. If you do not want to hear about melodramatic twists before you see the film, which is reasonable enough as it is good enough to go see, then don't read the following until after you've been to the cinema. If you do read it, then don't blame me.

The other night I took my 13 year old son to see Their Finest, an enjoyable enough romantic film about making movies in Britain during World War II. Movies about movie-making tend to be fun; everyone enjoys playing with the business, and playing versions of themselves which audiences are quick to recognise. Actors adore the period costumes, and cherish the ability to chain smoke with impunity on camera. There's nothing particularly new about it, apart from the fact that the story centres on a young woman who is forced into screenwriting, as it were, and then being turned slowly into a movie pro, but that is, in itself an fascinating take.

What's most interesting about the film is the way in which, despite the modern theme, and the implicit ironic distance the film-makers enjoy, how closely their effort mirrors the movie being made about Dunkirk. It's almost like a compulsion.

For example, early on we see the interference of the government in the film that's being made. The bureaucrats have their contradictory demands, and the film has to be twisted to fit those, even to the point of inserting an American character, to be played by an actual American airman flying the RAF (which makes an interesting factual/fiction ambiguity) who's a walking hunk but can't act. Sort of a prototype Arnold.

But Their Finest was produced in part by the Welsh government, which is why Welsh locations stand in for the Devon coast, but also why Catlin Cole (Gemma Arterton) is Welsh. It's no problem, except that Arterton's Welsh accent comes and goes, but obviously that's exactly the kind of decision that the movie faced.

We don't get many looks into the actual process of movie fakery, though a lovely moment with a matte shot turning the beach into Dunkirk is wonderful, reminiscent of one of the great movie-movies, The Stunt Man. What we do get, however, is a film whose basic structure mirrors, as if unconsciously, the film-within-a-film that's being made in the Forties. We know, for example, before she does that Catlin's marriage to her artist husband is doomed, because not only doesn't he paint her, but they have none of the passionate moments we expect from love interests. This was easy to read Hollywood code from the Thirties onwards; think of Leslie Howard in Gone With The Wind.  If you recognise it, it takes some of the energy from the eventual reveals, but it didn't for my son, who was amazed I could predict the inevitable moment of betrayal. It's also interesting that, to get him out of the war, they give her husband a war injury from fighting in Spain; I would have thought that his fighting there would make him suspicious to the war ministry, and that such suspicion might be enough to keep Catlin from getting a job.

It's also very much a vehicle for Arterton, who, accent apart, dominates almost every scene she's in and is very very good.. The best parts are the easy ones, for Bill Nighy hamming it up as a ham actor, for Eddie Marsan and Helen McCrory as his agents, and Rachel Stirling who's very good in a classic wise-cracking 'pal' role, though it's given a slight update. Cameos by Richard E Grant and Jeremy Irons work because they play Forties so well, more because their sorts of characters haven't changed that much since then anyways. What is strange is that none of the younger actors seem able to match her, not either of her love interests nor any of the people playing the younger actors and crew.  It's very much old fashioned in that way, though in the Forties you might see more character from the character actors.

The major throwback of the film, however, is it's melodrama. The Blitz is a time for that, and after the film I was talking to Nate about the English people I'd known who'd lived through the Blitz, and how, as Stirling's character tells Arterton, they felt like life was more intense and they needed to live for the moment. Paradoxically, given the horror, it was really the best time of their lives. Hence we expect some shocking deaths, like Marsan's, which occurs offstage. But we aren't really prepared when Arterton's true love, the screenwriter played by Sam Claflin, dies in a Blitz-caused accident on set.

At that point I had just been thinking how stereotypically Hollywood this all was. Girl meets Boy, Girl Loses Boy, Girl Gets Boy. But I was watching as they finally embraced, and it took place in front of a prop train (third class, no less) and I thought immediately of Brief Encounter, and had already jumped ahead in my mind to his enlisting and going off to war in a tearful farewell. That might have been more in keeping with the Forties tone.

Instead, he's killed by the equivalent of Girl Gets Boy, Boy Gets Hit By A Bus moment. 'What is this', I said, 'Truly Madly Deeply: The Prequel'? It was AN easy way to get some tears and sympathy, when quite honestly, the tears in much of the rest of the movie flow more organically. But then, in the very next scene, Claflin comes back as a ghost and speaks to Arterton. As a ghost! It WAS Truly Madly Deeply, but I suspect the producers assume that film is as obscure as those of the Forties to their audience.

I waited for my own little emotional touches. I felt sure she'd be surprised by a credit at the end of the movie, or maybe by a tribute to her dead writer partner. Perhaps I am too sentimental. Instead, the movie ends with her finding her determination to go into the movies, much like Rose's freeing her boat's propeller in the Dunkirk film, because Erroll Flynn could do it.

This shouldn't take away from the fact that it's an enjoyable film, moves well, features a fine star turn, and left the less critical audience in my town (and my 13 year old, by far the youngest person there) happy. I would have liked the original book title better though. Their Finest Hour And A Half. It's better for the play on Churchill's words (which might pass most of the younger audience by) but maybe because the film itself is two hours long they felt it would be false advertising.