93% Solution

By Stefan Kanfer

MURDER BY DECREE Directed by Bob Clark Screenplay by John Hopkins

Grimesby Roylott tried it with a snake, Colonel Sebastian Moran with an air gun, Professor James Moriarty with evil genius and brute strength. Sherlock Holmes foiled them all. He conquered cocaine, the supercriminals and the erosions of time, and he defeats the makers of Murder by Decree. But, by thunder, it is a near thing.

For Director Bob Clark uses a powerful new weapon: incoherence. In this Victorian melodrama, the world's first consulting detective is pitted against Jack the Ripper, slayer of London harlots. An intriguing idea, but hardly unique. In A Study in Terror, Ellery Queen postulated that the fiend of 1888 was a deranged duke. Holmes' official biographer, William Baring-Gould, identified Jack as a Scotland Yard inspector. In the recent The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, Mystery. Writer Michael Dibdin put forth the heretical notion that the Ripper and the detective were aspects of the same character. Now Clark offers his own 7% solution: part authentic atmosphere and 93% balderdash.

Holmes and Watson are hired to find the Ripper by a group of merchants whose businesses suffer because shoppers fear to walk the Whitechapel streets. But as the sleuth reveals a vast coverup, he shows that nothing is as it seems. The shopkeepers are a group of radical anarchists, Jack is not a sex-crazed mutilator but a hired killer, and the master plotters are part of a conspiracy to expunge all those who know the identity of Queen Victoria's il legitimate grandchild.

Down every cobblestone street lie irrelevancies and distortions. The radicals are never identified: Holmes, who traditionally loathes the occult, wastes precious minutes .with a psychic (Donald Sutherland), and the conspirators are finally un masked as a pack of sanguinary Freemasons whose connections with power turn out to be a royal pain.

Throughout all this, Blake produces more fog than film. Nevertheless, there are two reasons to view Murder by Decree: Christopher Plummer and James Mason. As the detective, Plummer grows from insufferable know-all to a man of sympathy and dimension. As the good doctor, Mason shuttles cannily from pawky humor to utter bewilderment. He steals the picture, and if Holmes has any sense, he will remain blind to the theft. This delightful pair should be employed again in a more credible adventure than Murder by Decree. Conan Doyle suggests one in The Problem of Thor Bridge: "That of Isadora Persano, the well-known journalist and duellist, who was found stark staring mad with a matchbox in front of him which contained a remarkable worm said to be un known to science ..."

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