I’m not sure how I stumbled across JEKYLL AND HYDE ADAPTED: Dramatizations of Cultural Anxiety by Brian A. Rose but my initial thought was AAAAAAH! My searches before I signed the McFarland contract for Jekyll and Hyde led me to conclude nobody had done a survey of Jekyll and Hyde films before me; my editorial contact concluded the same.
Fortunately Rose and I are not playing in the same ballpark. Rather than discussing all the movies, his interest is how the different adaptations express different fears in different times. Thus, Jekyll acquiring a fiancee in the Victorian stage adaptations positions not just Hyde but Jekyll’s scientific research as a threat to the domestic values Victorians prized. The 1932 Fredric March version, showing Hyde as a neanderthal, distances evil — it’s not us, it’s our awful ancestral instincts — whereas the films showing Hyde as more or less human acknowledge evil as part of us.
I find most of Rose’s conclusions unconvincing — I don’t buy Paul Massie looking human in Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll is meant as a statement about the nature of evil, for instance. And he’s completely wrong to argue George Carew in the 1920 Barrymore version is a hypocrite — Carew is not at all hiding that he’s a libertine, he’s quite proud of it.
Another problem is that the book is written in heavy academese (“This is a postmodern reinscription of the traditionalist values and perspectives that ordered earlier melodramatic versions, but one that eschews earlier eschatological answers.”) which makes it hard for me to focus on Rose’s points. And some of them are good, such as noting Spencer Tracy’s version probably influenced filmmakers more than March’s superior production (small wonder — to avoid competition with the Tracy, MGM hid the March take away for 30 years). March is the last version for decades to show Jekyll doing charity medical work and up until the 1990 Michael Caine film, the Jekylls looked human rather than March’s ape-man (Tracy is also the first Jekyll to have his test animals acting strange, something repeated in several later films). This book wasn’t worth the $90 I paid for a used copy but it does have its uses.
As I mentioned last week, Tubi’s search function introduced me to a series I’d never heard of before, a 1969 Italian four-episode show called simply Jekyll. It’s another plodding attempt to adapt Stevenson faithfully and another adaptation where I see the seed of what might have been an interesting idea.
Lanyon here is a brilliant surgeon and Jekyll’s mentor before Jekyll went into research. Lanyon grumbles that Jekyll’s been seduced by the grant money available for cool research proposals and the media attention — good surgery doesn’t get your name on TV but if you announce a research breakthrough it might, even if it proves smoke-and-mirrors later. Exploring that aspect of science would have been interesting but nope, they do nothing with it.
JEKYLL: Jekyll gives Utterson his revolver just in case Hyde gets grumpy! In flashback, Hyde pressures a woman to drown her dog but she drowns herself instead! In the aftermath of this tragedy Jekyll’s friends lament his decision to tamper with god’s domain! I wondered how they’d squeeze one more episode out of it and they did it by extending Jekyll’s backstory to excruciatingly slow length. “Man created by man is the holy grail of molecular biology.”
Rewatching SCOOBY-DOO: Mask of the Blue Falcon (2013) right after seeing early episodes of the series was a little jarring: I was conscious some of the voice actors were different from the originals, which didn’t hit me when I first saw the film. That said, this is a fun adventure as the attempt to reboot the Blue Falcon TV show (in this version a live-action show) as a grim-and-gritty vigilante not only pushes the original star to the breaking point, it brings down the wrath of the hero’s arch-nemesis, Mr. Hyde. Whom I’ll note is dressed in the usual Fredric March-style Victorian outfits and top hat. This is the largest role Hyde’s gotten in any Scooby story, though it’ll still end up in the appendix I suspect.“Mr. Hyde is the monster that taught us to be afraid of monsters.”
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