The movie is a remake of 20th Century Fox's previous film, Il pensionante (1944), starring Laird Cregar as Slade. It was released under Fox's Panoramic Productions label. Barré Lyndon's screenplay for the earlier film was updated for the remake by Robert Presnell Jr., and Hugo Friedhofer's music score from the earlier film is also reused. The movie was shot on the same sets, and reuses footage from the earlier film of the police pursuing Jack the Ripper through the streets and over the rooftops of London.
The sixth and last victim of the Ripper in the film is Irish immigrant Mary Lenihan, who is killed in her one room flat. Her dying screams alert nearby constables who narrowly miss catching the serial killer. In reality, the last of the Ripper's five, not six, canonical victims was Irish immigrant Mary Kelly, killed and disemboweled in her one room flat, the only one of the victims killed indoors. Kelly's screams, if any, went unheard, and the Ripper mutilated her at his leisure throughout the night. The ghastly sight was not discovered until the morning when a rent collector saw the ghastly scene through her window at 10:45 a.m.
The failure of the original copyright holder to renew the film's copyright resulted in it falling into public domain, meaning that virtually anyone could duplicate and sell a VHS/DVD copy of the film. Therefore, many of the versions of this film available on the market are either severely (and usually badly) edited and/or of extremely poor quality, having been duped from second- or third-generation (or more) copies of the film.
The ULSTER is a Victorian working day overcoat, with a cape and sleeves. The Ulster is differentiated from the Inverness coat by the length of the cape. In the Ulster, the cape reaches just past the elbows, allowing free forearm movement. In the Inverness coat, the cape is as long as the sleeves, and eventually replaced the sleeves in the Inverness cape. It was commonly worn by coachmen who would be seated outdoors in bad weather for long periods, but needed to use their arms to hold reins. Often made of hard-wearing fabrics, such as herringbone tweed, it was not a formal coat. It began to lose its cape in the 1890s, and now rarely has a cape, but continued to be used as a heavy-duty overcoat, often in a double-breasted style.
It is often seen in period productions of Victorian novels, such as those of Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Ulster coat was referred to in Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories. The ulster was Sherlock Holmes' choice of garment. It was mentioned briefly in James Joyce's Dubliners collection of short stories, in the novel, The Lodger, by Marie Belloc Lowndes, in Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, and in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
It is often seen in period productions of Victorian novels, such as those of Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Ulster coat was referred to in Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories. The ulster was Sherlock Holmes' choice of garment. It was mentioned briefly in James Joyce's Dubliners collection of short stories, in the novel, The Lodger, by Marie Belloc Lowndes, in Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, and in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.