Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman -- RIPPER STREET: British late-Victorian police procedural

Whitechapel is life in all its wild and rotten splendor; 

beside it, the rest of the world seems a tomb. 

The streaming series RIPPER STREET might have escaped me were it not for an accidental meet up with an enthusiastic review, followed by a binge-watch and absorption from the first moment. Set near the time that the ghoulish Jack the Ripper serial-murdered his prostitute victims, the 5–season police drama is particularly energetic, suspenseful, and literate, thanks to prolific writer-creator, Richard Warlow (below).

Real life persons (events, and the Dublin shooting locale) lend historicity, for example Edmund Reid and Fred Abberline, the former played by series lead, Matthew MacFadyen (Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina), and the latter by Clive Russell (Game of Thrones, Outlander); Abberline was Reid’s superior (below).

Reid headed criminal investigation at H Division in Whitechapel where Ripper did his crimes. Although you’d expect so, the series does not directly address the murders. They add dolorous atmosphere, a guilty prod to the police for work unfinished, in that Ripper was never caught. (Episode 1.1, a copy-cat murder, is as close as Div H police get.) In the main, Ripper Street is a deep dive into the late 19th century world of London’s East End and the battles by its protagonists to solve crimes, keep the peace, and have some semblance of private life and love. 

Reid’s particular sidekick is his forensic pathologist, an American with a shady past, Homer Jackson, played by Adam Rothenberg (above, second l). Jackson is a “two-penny sawbones, a snake-oil-pushing clap doctor” whose outside-the-box genius for uncovering crimes in the bones and tissues of victims is invaluable to Reid. Homer has a wife from whom he is estranged, Long Susan (far l) a criminally inclined, heart-of-gold brothel madam played by MyAnna Buring (Twilight Saga, Downton Abbey).

Fellow officer(ctr. r) is Inspector Bennet Drake, the craggy Jerome Flynn (GoT's Bronn) and one more main player, Rose, the prostitute who seeks to better herself, is played by Charlene McKenna (far r). Drake’s gnarly charisma is a helpful offset to MacFadyen’s buttoned-up Inspector Reid — the center spoke around which action turns, “attached to Whitechapel as if by lead weights on a river bed”.

The Dickensian world of Whitechapel comes to life with assorted guest players such as the winsome (Ms) Charlie Murphy (above, l, of Rebellion, The Last Kingdom), and the very appealing Damien Molony (above, r) in an episode that stews together romance, Irish politics, and a battle for adoption of either alternating or direct-current electricity.

Joseph Mawle (shown above, of The Hallow and Clapham Junction) has a recurring role as the evil-doer Inspector Shine, revealing his unshowy acting chops (above). Iain Glen (GoT, Downton Abbey); Jonas Armstrong (Robin Hood); the talented David Dawson (Alfred the Great in The Last Kingdom) as newspaper hound and dandy Fred Best (below); Lydia Wilson, John Heffernan, Josh O’Connor, Amanda Hale, and more familiar faces appear from BBC, PBS and other networks' series.

Whitechapel itself is an affecting character. St Mary’s, a small local chapel dating from the 1300’s, lent its name to the area which became a slum in Victorian times as Irish, Jewish, Indian, and other foreigners crowded in to this and other East End neighborhoods. ‘Elephant man’ Joseph Merrick (below) lived and died in Whitechapel, often on exhibit as a curiosity (one story is his).

By the 1880’s there were reportedly 60 brothels and 1200 prostitutes. Noxious businesses located there, the sounds and smells of tanners, brewers, and metal shops comfortably distant from the affluence of central London. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry headquarters (below), dating from the era of Elizabeth I, cast Westminster Abbey bells, Big Ben, and the Liberty Bell of Philadelphia.

The East End has been in our sights over and again. In the 1590s Shoreditch, East End, Shakespeare plied his trade at the Curtain Theater (Shakespeare in Love).The late 1990’s series Bramwell featured a woman doctor operating on this turf and telling stories of East End poor; Call the Midwife (1950’s-60’s)is a more recent take, and Tom Hardy’s recent Taboo features East End locations. However, Warlow’s Ripper Street is likely the most consistent, visceral, and frenetic portrait of this small piece of real estate. Division H policed a bit over a mile and 67,000 poor, including factories, tenements, brothels, and pubs. Their stories addressed labor conflict like the Match Girls strike and discrimination against Jewish, Chinese, and Indian minorities.

The ever-present thread of women seeking to control their own lives and bodies is revealed in Long Susan’s career, for which she pays and pays more. New technology arrives — the telephone and micro-reader, blood typing, finger printing, and the invention of film become lynchpins for murder.

Rose, the prostitute, is manipulated into being photographed by a pornographer who strangles his subjects in front of the camera; we are introduced to the amazing invention of moving images, sure to become cash cows for future pornographers. A gang of child criminals is led by an adult man who directs the boys to capture girls for sale to groups of men; Reid traces the source of the Plague to a “Molly House” (gay/transgender brothel); a train robbery results in the deaths of 55 people; Long Susan finances a hospital and is convinced to treat victims of back-alley abortions when an affiliated male doctor is discovered using poor women for experimentation and sterilization; the stockholders of a shipping company are dismayed to find that a woman is the inventor of a new engine that could save the company; a work house administrator is found to have murdered sickly children in his care.

Four seasons serve up a steady diet of these social-justice-themed police procedurals, each complex and tightly wound, but season five resolves the relationships of the main characters while bringing to justice a poor fellow who having seen his mother eaten by wolves, bites his victims to death: “homo homini lupus est — man is wolf to man” (that's Jonas Armstong, above, as Nathaniel).

Curiosity if not hope, is satisfied because these tales of Whitechapel do not end with a warm glow like episodes of Call the Midwife. Rather, life and loss go on: “We are doomed to the ragged purgatory of these streets...Lady Justice holds us...to her righteous tit.” (Inspector Shine). And, as creator Warlow writes, there are diamonds to be mined from pain.

Ripper Street streams now via Netflix.

The above post was written by our 

monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman

EFFIE GRAY: Emma Thompson/Richard Laxton's quiet, careful look at Victorian mores and morals

The question "What's a young girl to do?" has seldom taken on a more haunting, depressive scenario than the one observed in EFFIE GRAY, the new film written by Emma Thompson (who also has a plum role here) and directed by Richard Laxton. The poster at right looks all sunny and bucolic. Don't be fooled: This is one dank, dark film with only an occasional bit of brightness to help us weather Effie's personal and continuing storm. Extremely feminist in its quiet, close-to-the-vest manner, the movie should have you, like poor Effie, eventually ready to climb the walls.

The movie is based on real-life characters and real-life events that have, as we learn while the end credits roll, been tweaked quite a bit to fit the scenario created by Ms Thompson that shows us the life that might have happened to young Effie (played with a pretty good accent and a fine dose of repressed feeling by Dakota Fanning), above and on poster, top left) after she married the prominent art critic, artist, "thinker," and philanthropist John Ruskin when she was around 18 years of age. It ain't pretty. Or kindly. Or in any manner just.

Yet, given the Victorian times in which this tale takes place, believability is not the problem. Nor is the character of the man -- played in equally repressed fashion, which then turns to shock and finally anger, by Greg Wise (at right) -- who took Effie as his wife. Ruskin, as portrayed here, is one of the supreme, if initially unintentional male chauvinist villains of all time -- moviewise, at least. Why could he not, would he not, consum-mate his marriage? Of course, we first imagine perhaps he was homo-sexual. But the movie does not give us much evidence of this.

Instead, Ruskin, as seen here, was indeed a "mamma's boy," and with a mama like the one played by a rip-roaring (but of course in Victorian subdued fashion) Julie Walters, above left (along with David Suchet, center, as Ruskin's dad), we quickly note this man's utter inability to get out from under his controlling parents.

Enter (eventually) a young artist named Everett Millais (the properly anguished Tom Sturridge, above), who becomes a kind of quiet champion of Effie, as well as her friend and -- we hope, in time -- something more. But all this takes place in an era in which women were kept down by convention and not least by their very own Queen Victoria, a champion of the "morality" of the time -- or so that is what the world knew of her via public reputation.

Screenwriter Thompson and director Laxton (shown at left) keep all this at just a simmer throughout, with the bubbles slowly growing larger until that boiling point is reached. Whether or not audiences -- even the arthouse crowd -- will have the patience to take this journey of very slow under-standing and growth is problematic. The film held my interest throughout, due to some excellent acting and occasional respites from the doom and gloom. A couple of these are provided by Ms Thompson (below, left) and James Fox (below, center) playing a long- married pair, Elizabeth and Charles Eastlake, who, as shown here at least, came to have an effect of young Effie.

Another source of brightness and pleasure (for awhile, anyway), is the trip to Italy taken by the Ruskins, on which Effie is introduced to an Italian Viscountess (Claudia Cardinale, below, left) and her son (Italian heart-throb Riccardo Scamarcio, below, right) and she and we get to spend some time viewing the wonder and glory of Venice.

Visually, the movie stays true to its theme of repression. Inside or out it is usually dark, dank and gloomy, with the occasional shard of light all the more impressive. The light, in fact, comes to represent some kind of freedom and/or escape.

When and how this arrives is fraught with hope and worry, and provides the film's most suspenseful moments. Even then, at the finale, the bow that our girl must make to Victorian convention remains unsettling and constricting. We know from historical record that the bare outline of events shown here did happen. But what became of Effie Gray? The movie ends in media res, but you can find much of the answer here. And while I sincerely doubt that any sequel is in the works, were one to appear, I'd certainly see it.

The movie -- from Adopt Films and running 108 minutes -- opens this Friday in an unusually wide limited release across much of the country (in 24 of our 50 states). Click here then click on View Theaters and Showtimes to see all scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters listed. 

Streaming fun -- an old-fashioned British boy's adventure and a starry cast highlight THE ADVENTURER: THE CURSE OF THE MIDAS BOX

It's been awhile since TrustMovies had a dose of old-fashioned boy's adventure, British-style, featuring missing parents, kidnapped kids, secret passages, underground caverns, first love, and, of course, last-minute escapes. If this sort of thing appeals to you, or should you want to introduce same to your children or grandkids, then by all means, try the new-to-streaming THE ADVENTURER: THE CURSE OF THE MIDAS BOX. This film was originally to be titled (as you can see from the poster image I've used, rather than the somewhat drab version that the marketing team finally chose), Mariah Mundi and the Midas Box. Maybe those marketers were frightened off by the moniker Mariah, which sounds feminine but is actually the given name of our hero, nicely played by the new British hottie, Aneurin Barnard (shown above and two photos below).

As directed efficiently (but no better than) by Jonathan Newman (shown at left), from a pretty good screenplay by Christian Taylor (of the unforgettable Showboy!) and Lindy Heymann, adapted from the novel by G.P. Taylor, the movie is a throwback in most ways. But it's one that I thoroughly enjoyed, mostly because -- in this age of nonstop special effects coupled to little content -- the experience proved rather like watching a old-fashioned classic come to surprising new life. Set in 1860s London, the tale is fun, silly, enjoyably predictable, and easy-as-pie to sit through.

Much of that ease and fun comes from a surprisingly starry British cast that, by virtue of its utter professionalism, gives an extra goose to everything from the dialog and banter to the pacing and plot. As the villain supreme we have a cold-blooded, highly intelligent performance by Sam Neill (below, left), and as his right-hand-dame (and maybe paramour, though this guy seems incapable of much amour), there's Lena Headey (below, right), at her bitchiest and coolest.

Mariah has a cute younger brother, Felix (Xavier Atkins, below), whom he must protect but is constantly fumbling that job -- never more so than when Felix gets up to his ears (eyes and nose) in a watery tomb.

Above everyone, however, stands the real star of the film, Michael Sheen, below, who plays a fellow named Charity -- who turns out to be the kids' real protector and a kind of jack-of-all-trades (and disguises). Sheen, as always, adds immeasurably to the fun here.

As Mariah and Felix's parents, we have two Brit stalwarts Ioan Gruffudd (below, left) and Keeley Hawes (below, right), who disappear toward the beginning and only appear again -- very oddly indeed -- at film's end (stay for the final credits, please) with a major surprise in store -- which simply demands a sequel.

I am not certain we'll ever see that sequel, though, as this first film, I believe, didn't do so well in recouping its cost. Still, we can hope -- for Mariah, his family, friends and foes make for charming viewing, at least for those of us still into the old-fashioned type of "boy's adventure" genre.

In addition to that good cast, the movie offers some delicious sets and a fine production design. There are times here when you just might imagine that you've stumbled into another, less bizarre and twee version of The Grand Budapest Hotel (a movie -- twee or not -- that I dearly loved, by the way).

You can stream The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box now via Netflix and probably elsewhere.