The Prison of Hyde

I hardly expected the cruellest adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde I've seen thus far to be a 1990 TV movie starring Michael Caine. But it is, simply by going with the premise that Jekyll really is a decent fellow whose life is being ruined by his experiment gone wrong. This is another Jekyll who sees morality as unscientific but unlike the Jekylls in Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll or the 2003 adaptation, the character isn't given this belief so the movie can make a counterargument. Instead, he finds he was right all along but there's no pleasure in being right as the consequences are horrific and sad.

This is underlined by one of the most nightmarish Hydes I've seen. I think Michael Caine is a good actor but not one with a lot of range. Fortunately the makeup here more than makes up for it, his Hyde being this strange trollish creature with an oversized bald head who can barely talk. I really like the transformation sequences, too, where the man's flesh seems to boil from a great internal heat.

We find this Jekyll a widower, his late wife the daughter of his professional rival, Dr. Lanyon (Joss Ackland). Now Lanyon's other daughter, Sarah (Cheryl Ladd), has her heart set on Jekyll, a fact complicated by the fact that she's already married.

She sure doesn't look period accurate, does she? This is the first shot of her--I couldn't restrain a "Wow." The hair immediately launches a powerful salvo of anachronism. I love how every generation seems to have a completely different idea of what's fair to put into the Victorian aesthetic.

It's Dr. Lanyon in this one who's obsessed with appearances and reputation, an aspect of the plot fleshed out with several supporting society characters giving the story something like the feel of an Oscar Wilde play. There's also a substantial amount of time spent with a tabloid reporter, desperate to catch every hint of sexual scandal so he can blow it up in his paper. In contrast, Jekyll and Sarah embarking on an affair seems a great breath of fresh air. It's more remarkable because it happens after Hyde brutally rapes Sarah and Jekyll confesses to her his secret.

Some more time could have been spent conveying her trauma from the incident--though Ladd's performance can also be interpreted as admirable fortitude--but it is clear that this is a Jekyll with no similarity to Hyde. So her willingness to become his partner as he tries to cure himself of Hyde makes sense.

His initial goals are a little more vague than usual--something about curing madness. When he starts to gain some insight into a possible future in genetic manipulation he becomes disgusted with his own work.

He also has a room at a brothel for Hyde, who, incredibly enough, seems to have behaved himself well enough until a prostitute named Lucy (Kim Thomson) gets the scratches on her back that Miriam Hopkins and Ingrid Bergman got before her in the same role.

The colour scheme for prostitutes in this film is a bold red and white. I love the bug eyed madam played by Miriam Karlin.

She seems to be the prototype for the character played by Glenn Close in Mary Reilly and there's another similar madam in the 2003 movie.

When Lanyon finds out what his daughter is doing with Jekyll he throws her out in the rain, a fact gleefully reported in the papers, his effort to preserve his reputation earning him no sympathy. But, as in the novella, when Hyde goes to Lanyon and transforms in front of him, it seems to inflict a terrible psychological blow to the older man. In this case, it seems to come from the revelation that the cruelty of his own actions, in the interest of preserving social morality, is useless and pales in comparison to a far crueller reality. When Lanyon tells Jekyll only God can help him now, he can only weep when Jekyll replies, "Then why doesn't He?"

Bringing Tea and Sandwiches to Jekyll and Hyde

A well off guy like Henry Jekyll should have lots of servants but the only one we get to know in the novella and most adaptations is his butler, Poole. 1996's Mary Reilly approaches the story from the perspective of one the household's typically anonymous maids for a film that, while certainly flawed, is nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests.

The flaws are easy to list: Julia Roberts' uneven Irish accent, John Malkovich's lack of an English accent, and the insufficient differences between Jekyll and Hyde. Someone with more talent as a chameleon in the role would have been nice, having a different actor for each persona would've been ideal. Failing that, maybe the inclusion of a character like Muggsy from The Lady Eve to pop up now and then and say, "It's positively the same guy!" for reverse psychology's sake. As it is, it doesn't make sense than none of the servants catch on that the doctor and his "assistant" are one and the same.

But there's also quite a lot to like in this movie--the grim and fantastic production design and supporting performances from Glenn Close, Michael Gambon, and George Cole as Poole. I particularly would've liked to have seen more of him in the movie. But, in spite of the accent, I'd also say Julia Roberts gives a decent performance, certainly much better than critics have said. I think perhaps viewers used to enjoying her as more relaxed, easy going characters were put off by the more tightly-wound Mary. Much like Kim Novak in Vertigo, I think she's been criticised for something that was a deliberate and very sensible choice.

In addition to her career as a servant which would require her to adopt a quiet and unobtrusive demeanour, a key part of the film is Mary's background as a victim of domestic abuse. Her father, seen in flashbacks played by Michael Gambon, regularly subjected her to physical and psychological abuse. As she tells Jekyll about this, she talks about how he seemed a different man when he was drunk than when he was sober, the parallel to the story of Jekyll and Hyde explicitly drawn. Jekyll suggests to her that her father found drunkenness "liberating".

There's no mention of a motive to separate people into purely good and evil halves, Jekyll's motive again going back to the idea of being liberated from codes of conduct. As Mary's life is defined by duty and repression, one can see how liberation might be just the thing she needs and it's no wonder Jekyll seems to take a liking to her. Some mention is made of the other side of the argument--that other people pay the price of Jekyll's liberation, but we never get to know his victims well enough to give weight to this argument. We do see it in how Mary's father made her bear the cost of his liberation but the fact that she's unwilling to reconcile with him but seems to warm to Hyde deprives the question of due attention. I suspect the makers of Mary Reilly would disagree with the moralising behind The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll--I would too but, while I don't think a movie is obliged to provide an opposite argument to its own, Mary Reilly introduces enough of one to feel incomplete.

Maybe they didn't want to retread familiar ground. The film re-teams director Stephen Frears, screenwriter Christopher Hampton, and stars John Malkovitch and Glenn Glose, all of whom had previously collaborated on a famous film adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons. That film is perfectly comfortable delighting in a tale of amorality and towards the ending of Mary Reilly it seems as though the filmmakers are sliding into that kind of story like a familiar coat, not quite having the novelty of that earlier film. But there is a pleasing romantic quality to Mary Reilly, almost like a crossover between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Jane Eyre.

Doctor Cordelier and Mister Opale

However thin the line may be between tragedy and comedy, blurring the line is a tricky feat only the best artists may successfully accomplish. Such an artist was Jean Renoir whose 1959 adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde, Le Testament du docteur Cordelier, is among the most experimental and yet faithful ever made. As he did with Rules of the Game, Renoir uses the language of cinematic comedy to make a bold and disturbingly insightful statement on human nature.

Renoir casts Jean-Louis Barrault, an actor as well as a mime, as his Jekyll/Hyde, here called Cordelier/Opale. Opale is a remarkable take on the character--he does all of the horrible things Hyde does in the story, including trampling a child and murdering a man in the street, but Renoir takes one point of description in the novella to an interesting comedic conclusion--Hyde is much smaller than Jekyll so his clothes don't fit him properly. So Opale, sauntering down the street twirling his cane, presents an oddly cute, Chaplin-esque figure.

This is augmented further by a xylophone in the score hitting a melody with high notes. The mayhem he causes really seems to be the product of a mean little boy let loose.

As in I, Monster, this film makes explicit the connexions with psychotherapy. The austere and cadaverous Cordelier is a psychotherapist--Barrault's portrayal of him is every bit as effective in its stiffness as his portrayal of Opale is in its looseness and silliness. The film has an Utterson character named Joly (Teddy Bilis) whose role is mainly significant in his function as Cordelier's lawyer as the title draws attention to Cordelier's will. As in the novella, Joly/Utterson is concerned about Cordelier/Jekyll leaving everything to the strange and sinister Hyde/Opale. But in terms of providing a contrary perspective to Cordelier's desire to purify himself the film establishes this more in its version of Lanyon, here another psychotherapist named Severin (Michel Vitold).

In contrast to Cordelier's meticulous appearance, Severin always has a loosened tie and seems generally dishevelled, though not nearly as messy as Opale. Severin freely flirts with his secretary while Cordelier rigorously condemns himself for being being tempted by his own secretary, Lise (Claudie Bourlon), when she flirts with him. In one of the film's most fascinating scenes, Cordelier talks about female patients who tried to flirt with him, something he would never give into, but he eventually rapes one such patient when she's unconscious. Even though she clearly wanted a relationship with him, he's worried that she would gossip, so therefore molesting her without her knowledge is preferable to him. This, in a nutshell, perfectly captures the character of Jekyll and how he was interpreted by both John Barrymore and Christopher Lee but Barrault makes the doctor even more disgustingly pathetic. Jekyll falsely interprets the dichotomy between Jekyll and Hyde as good and evil. The reality is a distinction between the image of respectability and the licence of anonymity. Cordelier is just as ready to take advantage of an unconscious woman as Opale is ready to abuse his anonymity.

When he first steps out as Opale and has his first encounter with another human being--as it happens, an innocuous conversation with a mailman--Cordelier remarks in voice over how it's here that Opale comes into existence as an independent being. His existence is defined in being seen by others and this is entirely Cordelier's conception of existence.

Monstrous things are simultaneously ridiculous. As people gather later in Cordelier's home and panic increases at the knowledge that Opale is on the loose, one young woman, without thinking, won't even open the door for Joly, even though she knows its him. This and other scenes are performed with the energy of a screwball comedy but somehow it doesn't trivialise the issues it's dealing with. Rather, it serves to show how ridiculous human beings can be even when they're committing terrible crimes.

Incredibly, this film was made for television, but you wouldn't know it from Renoir's compositions, the high energy in the comedic scenes, and the level of thought that clearly went into the screenplay.

The Naivete of Mr. Hyde

Working from a philosophical perspective directly opposite to the source novella's, Hammer's 1960 film The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll drastically reworks the premise of the original story. Instead of a Jekyll seeking to morally purify himself, this film's doctor subscribes to the 19th century intellectual fascination with amorality. His Hyde is just as different--instead of a small, uncouth cretin, we see a cool and refined gentleman who unabashedly exercises the license of his class in the mould of Dorian Gray. The film presents this philosophy of morals in order to ultimately condemn it--it's a stimulating idea though the film doesn't quite manage to support its position. But it has a nice cast in Paul Massie, Dawn Addams, and Christopher Lee and has that lovely lurid cinematography one associates with Hammer.

Instead of a Jekyll frustrated by a long delayed marriage, Paul Massie plays a Jekyll who's been married a long time, and has long ceased to care. He lives essentially alone in his laboratory without family or even servants (the film is set in 1874 for some reason, more than a decade before the original novella was published). His neglected wife, Kitty--yes, Kitty--played by the beautiful Dawn Addams lives alone in their lavish manor. The two hardly talk except when Kitty comes over to borrow money for Jekyll's old friend, Paul Allen--Christopher Lee in yet another role that shows his underrated versatility.

A scoundrel who leans on the distracted Jekyll to pay his gambling debts, Paul is also sleeping with Kitty, something Hyde soon discovers, much to his amusement. It's hard to say how much Jekyll even cares about it--in his first scene, Jekyll lays out his philosophy for his friend and colleague, Dr. Littauer (David Kossoff).

JEKYLL: "Good","evil". This moral quibbling is useless. Man as he is comprises two beings. One whom I call "man as he could be". It is perfection. This inner man is beyond good and evil.

LITTAUER: And the other man?

JEKYLL: He too is beyond good and evil. "Man as he would be". Free of all the restrictions society imposes upon us. Subject only to his own will.

LITTAUER: A very dangerous man, my friend. For what civilises us other than these moral restrictions of which you make so little?

And of course the rest of the movie goes about proving Littauer right--it sounds fun to say people should have the right to follow their every impulse but in practice it eventually ends up a mess for everyone. Sooner or later assertions of absolute liberty mean infringing on the rights of others. But director Terence Fisher and screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz have their sights set on something bigger than saying civilisation is a good idea.

Beyond Good and Evil is the title of a famous work by Friedrich Nietzsche and in this work Nietzsche demonstrates how he is very much in tune with the ideal of the Romanticists concerning people who surpass the boundaries of conventional morality--Nietzsche was a great admirer of Lord Byron's Manfred. But to say that Nietzsche was advocating a society where the weak are preyed upon by the strong is a typical misunderstanding of his ideas. Nietzsche was criticising morality as an intellectual shortcut that allowed people to justify things on abstract concepts of good and evil--as such, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is very much in harmony with Nietzsche in that it is Jekyll's belief in an erroneous idea of moral purity that leads to the creation of Hyde and Jekyll's destruction.

In Fisher's film, Jekyll is an intellectual stuck in his lab, cut off in his reality, and his comeuppance comes when his ideas of amorality, attractive and fascinating in private, become ridiculously impractical and dangerous when put into practice by Hyde. Hyde might decide he's going to take advantage of a seemingly naive young woman, but in the universe without morality there's nothing stopping this young woman from being part of a gang of thieves who have just as much right knock Hyde over the head and take his wallet as he has to abuse the trust of a young woman. Yes, this is a Jekyll and Hyde where Hyde gets mugged.

There is a surprisingly feminist reading one could have of this film. Why shouldn't Kitty be sleeping with Paul? She has a right to be happy and she's obviously not getting any from Jekyll. Hyde's fury when he can't divert her affections from Paul just because Hyde wants to take advantage of her is another demonstration of the limits of Hyde's supposed freedom. Hyde and Kitty have some dialogue where they directly talk about conventional morality. Fisher and Mankowitz might have thought they were showing how it's important to have the institution of marriage to keep women from straying but the effect of the film is to show that, really, Kitty ought to ignore the institution and get as far from Jekyll as possible, though maybe Paul Allen isn't the best alternative.

It took me a minute to remember where I'd heard the name "Paul Allen" before--finally I realised it's the name of Jared Leto's character in Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner's film adaptation of American Psycho. The character's name is Paul Owen in the book--I wonder if they changed his name to Paul Allen as a reference to The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. It's probably just a coincidence but the blonde, wealthy, attractive, and slightly stupid Hyde in the Hammer film is really not so unlike Patrick Bateman.

It's entertaining watching Christopher Lee as the degenerate Paul Allen, not managing to come up to Hyde's level of shallowness.

The effects in the film aren't especially amazing--it's Jekyll who gets the makeup in this version, though it amounts basically to some really fake looking facial hair, but it's enough to make me believe people don't recognise Jekyll and Hyde as the same person. There's also an enjoyable dance sequence in the film where a woman (Norma Marla) puts a snake's head in her mouth. You don't need to be Freud to interpret that.

A Well Hidden Hyde

Incoherence is what's brought to the table by the 1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, essentially a remake of the 1931 version but hampered by the enforcement of the Hays Code after 1934. The loss of explicit references to or portrayals of Hyde's worst antics isn't made up for by any effective suggestions. This would have been bad enough but on top of this is Spencer Tracy, a fine actor, completely miscast in the role of Jekyll/Hyde. The film's not without its virtues, most of which can be found in the extraordinary beauty of Lana Turner and Ingrid Bergman and in the fascinatingly bizarre hallucination sequences that accompany Jekyll's transformations into Hyde. But for the most part this movie never gets up on its feet.

A strong transformation sequence is essential, too, since the Hyde makeup in this version is so minimal I thought the first time Jekyll drank the potion and looked in the mirror his experiment had failed. I thought maybe he was going to go through a few false starts before finally hitting on the right formula but then I realised his hair was a bit darker and his eyebrows more prominent.

On the one hand, it's nice that the film goes back to the source novella's idea that Hyde looks human, but it does so without also adhering to the novella's idea that Hyde looks like a completely different person. It's ridiculous when people who encounter Hyde fail to recognise Dr. Jekyll.

Tracy comes off as a real jerk as Hyde--he trips people with his cane and he starts fights in the music hall--but there's no trampling of children. Ingrid Bergman takes on the role originated by Miriam Hopkins, Ivy, but it's only based on knowledge of that earlier film that you might think she works as a prostitute. At least she never has fainting spells like Hopkins but her being captive to Hyde's whims is even less explicable, especially when it becomes clear it's not because he's financially supporting her. Bergman does a great job, giving a performance of someone caught in a destructive relationship, but it's a performance not really supported by the dialogue. Hyde is definitely abusive to her but it's not really clear why she's with him since she seems to be repulsed by him from the beginning.

As Dr. Jekyll, Tracy seems affable and good natured but he's not devastatingly handsome like Fredric March or John Barrymore so when Ivy instantly falls for him at the sight of his face it's really not clear why. Maybe she's into pock marks.

Tracy seems to have some better chemistry with Lana Turner who plays his fiancee. She's so sweet and comes off as so in love with him I felt bad for her in a way I didn't feel for the same character in previous versions. Donald Crisp plays her father in this one, nowhere near as stern as his 1931 counterpart, and Jekyll is more gracious about the older man's insistence the marriage be held off a couple months. This seems more credible, maybe, but it also removes any sense of selfishness or impatience on Jekyll's part. There's no sense in this one that Jekyll and Hyde are related to each other at all in spite of the lacklustre makeup.

But, jeez, those transition scenes, particularly one that seems to show Jekyll whipping Bergman and Turner, the two women nude and harnessed like horses. I don't know how the hell the filmmakers got away with that. It's the only thing that suggests Jekyll is repressing scandalous urges but the hallucinations feel so disconnected from everything else they sadly never bring the movie up to where it needs to be.