Jekyll and Hyde in print, on-screen and in my thoughts

I picked up Donald Glut’s CLASSIC MOVIE MONSTERS: The 9 Classic Movie Monsters from the Wolf Man to Godzilla because it includes a chapter on Jekyll and Hyde. It added a number of items to my list of things to watch but not much insight. I don’t agree with him, for example that Jekyll’s death at the end of the book represents Robert Louis Stevenson giving in to the Calvinism he was raised with (i.e. sinners must be punished) — it could be he thought that ending was more marketable or that Jekyll paying the price for his hypocrisy fit the theme, even without bringing in Calvinism. Glut also gets his facts wrong on the plot of the Richard Mansfield play — it was the rival Charles Bandmann adaptation that gave Jekyll a vicar’s daughter as love interest. Still, I may read the rest of the book eventually.

I never found Stephen King’s thoughts on horror fiction in DANSE MACABRE terribly deep but I checked out what he had to say about Jekyll and Hyde too. He does make one good point, that Jekyll’s lawyer and friend Utterson is kind of the anti-Jekyll (consciously repressing his urges, in contrast to Henry Jekyll letting them out to play as Hyde). I’m not sure I agree with King holding up Hyde as the prototype for all later Monster Within characters, though I’ll have to think about it some more. In fairness, his section is geared to someone who doesn’t know the book as well as I do.

DR. PYCKLE AND MR PRIDE (1925) was a comedy short starring Stan Laurel, pre-Hardy, as a revered scientist who turns himself into Mr. Pride, visually modeled on the John Barrymore Hyde and committing heinous crimes such as stealing a kid’s ice-cream cone in the scene above. I particularly like his version of the scene where Hyde tramples on a child — here Pride whips up an angry mob simply by taking pot-shots at a kid with a pea-shooter. The opening title card also sees the problem so many serious movies don’t, that if you split off people’s evil sides crime will run wild, evil will be free and “even saxophonists will be tolerated!”

I believe that’s the last silent film available to see online or on DVD. Though it will go in my comedy chapter rather than silents, I imagine. Which leads to my thoughts, once again, on how to structure the book to make it as interesting and insightful as possible. Within the various topics (children of Jekyll, comedy films, gender-flipped versions) I can go movie by movie or I can focus on some major films and consign the rest to a shorter section. However “silent films” is not the chapter to make the call, as so many of them are lost films or shorts. Chapters with more variation lie ahead.

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