JIGSAW (1962)

JIGSAW (1962). Produced, directed, and written by Val Guest. 

A young woman (Moira Redmond) makes the mistake of telling her unseen lover that she is two months pregnant, and perhaps now would be a good time for him to break from his wife. Unfortunately, this gent has a different idea on his mind. Some time later part of the lady's corpse is found in the garage of a rented house. Detective Fellows (Jack Warner of Dear Murderer) and Detective Wilks (Ronald Lewis) are part of a team assigned to not only find out who killed the woman but who she was. Doing dogged police work (although it seems to take forever for them to bring in someone to work with an identikit) leads to mistaken identities and bum steers. Finally they discover the killer has been hiding in plain sight for quite some time. 

Jigsaw is a very absorbing British police procedural with Warner playing an amiable, highly professional detective. Lewis is also good, but he's always more interesting as a bad guy, such as in Stop Me Before I Kill! Yolande Donlan -- who was married to director Val Guest --  really makes an impression as another woman who dallies with the killer, and there's notable work from Redmond, Michael Goodliffe [The Gorgon], John Barron, John Le Mesurier [Jack the Ripper] and others. This is not another British copy of Psycho and focuses much more on the solving of the crime than it does on the crime itself. Guest also directed The Day the Earth Caught Fire. 

Verdict: Suspenseful British mystery. ***.  

JACK THE RIPPER (1959)

Out of his element: Lee Patterson 

JACK THE RIPPER (1959). Directors: Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman.

London. 1888. Jack the Ripper is stalking the west end, asking women if she is "Mary Clarke," and then bloodily dispatching them a moment later. Scotland Yard's Inspector O'Neill (Eddie Byrne) is on the case, but he welcomes the help of an old friend and American policeman named Sam Lowry (Lee Patterson). Lowry begins romancing Anne Ford (Betty McDowall), the ward of the surgeon Dr. Tranter (John Le Mesurier). Other characters include Dr. Urquhart (Garard Green); Sir David Rogers (Ewen Solon), the governor of the hospital; Louie (Endre Muller), a scarred mute who works at the hospital; Kitty (Barbara Burke), a former prostitute whose fiance killed himself when he learned of her past; and Hazel (Jane Taylor) a dance hall girl who doesn't realize that she's expected to fulfill certain other duties. Jack the Ripper has an excellent script by Jimmy Sangster, and while heavily fictionalized, it emerges as one of the better movies about the Ripper. Lee Patterson as the American cop acts as jauntily as if he just stepped out of an episode of Surfside 6, and is almost completely out of place in the film. The others are more on the mark, with especially nice work from Solon [The Hound of the Baskervilles] and Burke. The movie seems to have cheap TV production values for the most part, with much fog filling up the sound stage, but it nevertheless has atmosphere, as well as a suspenseful finale with an effectively gruesome coda (which briefly goes to color in some prints).

Verdict: Doesn't quite have the polish or production values of a Hammer film, but not bad at all. ***.