What Mind Breaks Away

Just how split can a personality really be? 1945's Hangover Square is a film noir about a man in a Jekyll and Hyde dilemma. Most of the time he's a respectable, prominent composer but sometimes he's a serial strangler, though he retains no memories of his crimes. This is an exceptionally good example of the fine point to which noir sharpened questions of free will and fate.

Laird Cregar plays George Harvey Bone, an excellent name for a noir protagonist and Cregar is perfectly cast. An enormous man with big facial features, he usually played villains. Here he was finally able to tackle something more morally complicated. His threatening physical presence adds weight (pardon the pun) to questions about his innocence. It was his final role before his death from a heart attack at just 31 years old.

We meet him staggering home after one of his lapses of memory during which we see him murdering a shop owner. He goes home to his fiancee, Barbara (Faye Marlowe), who knows about his memory lapses and commiserates with him, eager to help him solve the problem. She's beautiful and rich, too. Packaged with her extraordinary depth of sympathy, there's no reason in world Bone would take interest in another woman. And yet . . .

An exquisitely sleazy Linda Darnell walks into his life playing a small time musical hall singer called Netta. She sees Bone as her chance for the big time and starts buttering him up. George doesn't seem to have the will to resist her. He starts blowing off Barbara so he can spend time being played for a chump by Netta.

But he doesn't just blow Barbara off. When he tells Barbara he can't go with her to see a performance by the philharmonic, he goes to Netta and asks her if she'd go with him to that same philharmonic performance. He knows Barbara will be there with her father. Why would he set himself up this way? We don't find out because Netta blows him off.

All through this he behaves with an air of perfect sincerity, like he really believes he's an innocent man with blameless intentions. Which isn't so different from Dr. Jekyll, really. Anyone reading Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is likely to notice that Jekyll isn't the good man, he's the restrained man.

But Hangover Square takes another interesting turn when it really becomes about Bone's passion as a composer. This is especially effective because the film has an especially effective score from Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann composed the concerto that Bone finds himself obsessively needing to perform in the film's climax.

This is a really good choice because the music is a lot more interesting than Barbara. Instead of Bone being torn between a desire for Netta and Barbara, he's really torn between his muse and his lust. For those of us who know real artistic achievement requires discipline as well as passion, this is a pretty good story.

George Sanders has a small role as a Scotland Yard psychiatrist trying to help Bone and he's really good, turning what might have been a pretty dry "expert" role into something more interesting. And there's a really good use of Guy Fawkes Day as Bone encounters some kids in hodgepodge masks that are nothing like the uniform V for Vendetta masks most of the world knows to-day.

Of course the visual is another small piece of the film's rumination on persona and the amount of responsibility Bone has for his actions. Joseph LaShelle works up some marvellously gloomy, ghoulish cinematography, too. This is a great one.

Hangover Square is available on The Criterion Channel.

Jekyll's New Sedative

So you'd like to see a Jekyll and Hyde movie but you wish it didn't have to be so darned exciting. Maybe you've wondered, what's with all the running around and shouting? Bah! Well, 2017's Madame Hyde just might be the Jekyll and Hyde for you. A French film, it was released this year in English speaking countries as Mrs. Hyde I guess because "Madame" sounds too foreign. An anaemic and directionless film, even the daring Isabelle Huppert in the lead roles is abnormally dull. It's streaming on Amazon Prime if you want a free sleep aid.

France is one of the countries that has already had a distinguished history of adapting Robert Louis Stevenson's original story--the best French version being Jean Renoir's Le Testament du docteur Cordelier but 1981's Docteur Jekyll et les femmes is also well worth seeing. Maybe it's the shadow cast by these films that prevented Madame Hyde's writer/director, Serge Bozon, from finding his own point of view on the tale. It kind of seems like he realised he had nothing to say halfway through production and then just went through the motions of making a movie.

Huppert plays Marie Gequil, a meek physics teacher, one of those people who rises to every troll's bait, to the delight of her unruly teenage students. She helplessly yells at them to stop harassing her and their fellow students at every provocation and seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There's an interesting moment where she overhears the students talking about Spider-Man and she mocks them for thinking you can become powerful quickly thanks to some magic potion. It seemed like this was going to be an ironic set-up for her ultimate transformation into Hyde but then the transformation ends up being an accident caused by an electrical discharge in her lab.

I thought maybe the film was going to be something like We Need to Talk about Kevin when she starts to get closer to one of the more disruptive students but this doesn't happen either. For some reason, the students stop being disruptive and become cooperative and they work on a group project together, assembling a Faraday cage. Were the kids changed by Gequil? Were they affected by her imperceptible transformation? Are we meant to be seeing some air of authority or assertiveness that wasn't there before? I don't know. If any of these things happened I missed the very subtle cues that indicated them.

Hyde's form manifests at night when Gequil gets out of bed, solemnly walks outside, and starts glowing. Instead of Mr. Hyde cavorting about town, casting off all moral inhibitions, Madame Hyde just walks around and any people or animals who get too close might be burned to a crisp, though surprisingly a lot of people don't seem to notice the glowing woman wandering about. At one point she comes upon a number of delinquents having a peculiarly well rehearsed and choreographed rap battle in a bad part of town. Is this meant to be a movie-ish musical number? I had the impression Bozon thinks this is how problem kids really act when they're on their own.

Gequil doesn't seem to have a philosophy or motivation beyond teaching her students physics. In this reality, art classes are valued above science classes for some reason and the dean is an obnoxious yuppie who dismisses physics as being too alien to the artistic temperament for the two ever to meet. Gequil never actually proves him wrong but he does start to kind of respect her. I think. There's a lot of shots of people just kind of standing around and looking at things. It's really hard to say what Bozon thought he was doing.

Dr. Same and Mr. Similar

Once again, I've had occasion to marvel that many people consider Steven Moffat to be misogynist. This time it's because I watched his six episode 2007 series Jekyll, intended as a sequel of sorts to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I can understand why someone would come away from this thinking Moffat has a slightly embarrassing attitude about women but not that he harbours hatred for women. This is a story about a guy whose whole existence is defined by women. As a Jekyll and Hyde adaptation, this is one that casts its lot with the interpretation of Hyde as id, avoiding any explicit contemplations of morality. It's fun at times, more of a superhero story than a horror film, and has the same pattern as most of Moffat's Doctor Who seasons and Sherlock--the earlier, more grounded episodes are better, the later ones that give way to untethered emotive fantasy tend to have reaches that exceed their grasps.

James Nesbitt plays Doctor Jackman, this series' version of Doctor Jekyll--his Hyde, also played by James Nesbitt, is still called Hyde. In this reality, Robert Louis Stevenson's novella exists but is secretly based on a true story. One of the ongoing mysteries throughout the series is how Jackman can be related to Jekyll if Jekyll had no children. There're a lot of bait and switch clues that lead to an amusingly mundane explanation.

As far as Jackman knows, he was abandoned as a baby at a railway station in Belfast--thus explaining Jackman being Northern Irish. Nesbitt's good in the role, maybe a bit too zany as Hyde for my taste. He's certainly the nicest Hyde I've seen--this is a Hyde who's never killed anyone and although a scene in the first episode had what I thought was a prelude to a rape I think we're meant to believe he's never raped anyone. Everyone seems to think he's dangerous, though, which is why Jackman has himself strapped in and monitored by the first of the show's series of mother figures, a psychiatric nurse named Katherine (Michelle Ryan).

This show is filled with beautiful women that want to help Jackman take care of his rampant id, in one way or another. In addition to Katherine there's Jackman's wife, Claire (Gina Bellman), who seems to become a more prominent custodian of Jackman as the series progresses than she was intended to be at first; there's a lesbian couple who are detectives who are at first hired by Claire to follow Jackman but then want to help him pro bono; and then Jackman's possibly actual mother shows up. I guess if you consider turning all women into mother figures misogynistic then you might consider this misogynistic too. I think it's boring to think of all women as primarily mothers but not necessarily hateful unless you resent women who don't act like mothers. But just because this show is crammed with mother figures one shouldn't assume that that's how Moffat sees women in real life, especially since this might be part of a conscious statement on the nature of Hyde.

This seems to me another case of someone adapting Jekyll and Hyde to argue against the fundamental argument of the original novella. Jekyll in the novel is this repressed Victorian who's sold himself on the idea of a totally abstract morality and his Hyde is a result, the really real that's spoiling to come out around the edges of what society wants to be real. Moffat's point, which he has several characters explicitly state, is that Hyde is really a child who assumes the whole world revolves around him. The point of all the mother figures could have been to intentionally highlight the childish nature of Hyde, to emphasis the dynamic of this big kid who always has to be picked up after. Though Moffat kind of shoots himself in the foot by making the whole series revolve around Jackman/Hyde. Just like his Doctor Who or Sherlock, the story always seems to eventually focus on its protagonist. Here, it might have been nice to focus more on the people who were negatively affected by Hyde, which would complicate the final episodes where Hyde essentially becomes an unambiguous hero figure.

No, not an antihero. There's a term that gets misused a lot nowadays. Venom is not an antihero. Alex DeLarge is an antihero. The protagonist of Kind Hearts and Coronets is an antihero. Hyde in Jekyll, by contrast, becomes downright altruistic. Partly because the show gives him fewer and fewer opportunities to genuinely be an egregious miscreant. Instances where he does commit acts of extreme violence are always mitigated by the fact that his victims had been established as two dimensional assholes who had hurt or had tried to hurt Jackman/Hyde or someone innocent.

It turns out there's a standard issue, shadowy, super wealthy organisation that wants to get its hands on Hyde for medical research. They're much more ruthless than Hyde, believing the ends eventually will justify the means, which might have been this series' version of Victorian morality but so little time is spent on their motives. They mostly boil down to people in suits striding through fluorescent corridors discussing strategy on how to capture Hyde. In flashbacks to Jackman's first dates with Claire, he seems a bit shy, as though there was some thought of going the Nutty Professor route, but the show doesn't go very far with it. Jackman disapproves of Hyde smoking and drinking but there's no sense of a repression that's really had a detrimental influence on his life.

In the end, what exactly the show wants to do with Jackman and Hyde is left pretty vague, which may be the reason it was never picked up for a second season. Incredibly, by the end of the series Moffat had actually removed the conflict between the two to the point where they seem more of one mind than Oscar and Felix from The Odd Couple.