MURDER BY DECREE: 4K UHD/Blu-ray (CFDC/Avco-Embassy, 1979) Kino Lorber
Christopher Plummer and James Mason co-star as super sleuth, Sherlock Holmes and sidekick, Dr. Watson in director, Bob Clark’s Murder by Decree (1979), a handsomely mounted, though oddly dull, and tragically episodic, ‘would be’ thriller that attempts to inveigle Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved literary wit and master of deduction in the Jack the Ripper murder lore. An Anglo/Canadian co-production, with Harry Pottle’s atmospheric production design, and, Reginald H. Morris’ moodily lit cinematography to recommend it, Murder by Decree – very loosely based on The Ripper File by Elwyn Jones and John Lloyd – and rather slavishly influenced by Stephen Knight’s 1976 book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (Knight’s presumption about the Ripper killings being motivated by a sinister Masonic subplot, since to have found its way into subsequent movies about the eponymous Jack), further muddles ‘history’ by using analogues for two characters culled from real-life suspects, Sir William Gull...
