Three Faces of Dr Jekyll (Lucius Henderson, 1912; Herbert Brenon, 1913; Allen Reisner, 1955)

Edinbugger Robert Louis Stevenson was quite a radgie gadgie.  The author of 1883 pirate romp Treasure Island - which begat the legendary Long John Silver - and 1886's Jacobite adventure Kidnapped, in that same latter year he would legendarily be roused from a nightmare by his wife only to tell Fanny (by gaslight, no doubt) that she should not have woken him for he was "dreaming a fine bogey tale".  This night terror induced phantasm of a man changing his face (unconsciously inspired, perhaps, by the previous century bogeyman of his native city Deacon William Brodie, who lived a dual existence: respectable gentleman and cabinet-maker [indeed, Brodie had made the wardrobe that stood in Stevenson's childhood bedroom] who mixed with polite society including poet Robert Burns by day whilst shedding the veneer to be a housebreaker and robber by night) would go on to become one the classics of Victorian Gothic horror.   

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde would be embraced by the emerging medium of the cinematograph, the first public showing which by the freres Lumiere would happen a scant nine years later.  Already a mainstay of the stage from 1887 courtesy of actor Richard Mansfield's barnstorming rendition, creeping the boards as Hyde and achieving the metamorphosis purely through physical performance and lighting changes (an audience-traumatising spectacle that would have the show closed during its 1888 London run after suspicions arose that the man who could so easily and effectively become a monster must be Jack the Ripper himself), the move to the silver screen came in 1908 with not one but two film versions - fitting, given the story's theme  of duality.  The first was produced by 'Colonel' William N. Selig's Polyscope Company and starred Hobart Bosworth in the title roles, and debuted Betty Harte as love interest Alice (a role absent from the novel, a female romantic part debuted in Mansfield's stage version and became a mainstay).  The second, produced by Kalem Films and starring Frank Oakes Rose is, like its predecessor, a lost film with no known extant copies.  Another brace would emerge in 1910: the first version filmed in the U.K., titled The Duality of Man, was directed by Harry Brodribb Irving (son of noted Victorian actor-manager Sir Henry Irving, on whom his employee Bram Stoker would base the physical appearance of Count Dracula); the second was a Danish production by Nordisk Film produced by Ole Olsen (sadly not the same Ole Olsen who starred in 1941's Hellzapoppin' alongside Chic Johnson) helmed by August Blom and starring Alwin Neuss.  This iteration of the tale was marred by the addition of a cheat 'it was all a dream' ending.  Once again, both films are no longer extant.

1912's one-reeler iteration of the tale - titled, as are the vast majority of adaptations, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and directed by Lucius Junius Henderson - begins with our good Henry Jekyll (James Cruze, who as well as an actor was an accomplished director having helmed the landmark 1923 Western The Covered Wagon - widely considered to be the first epic Western and the first U.S. epic to be directed by someone other than D.W Griffith [that film also co-starred Charles Ogle, the first screen Frankenstein Monster]), portrayed book-accurately as an older gentleman (something rarely seen in adaptations: I can think of Paul Massie in Hammer's 1960 The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll and the 1980 BBC television version starring David Hemmings as others which have an older Jekyll becoming a younger and more athletic Hyde off the top of my head.  Oh, and Malkovitch [Malkovitch, Malkovitch] in Mary Reilly), hard at work in his laboratory - or 'cabinet'.  Perusing the text of a tome entitled Graham on Drugs (which of course conjures "This is your Graham; this is your Graham on drugs", which might have livened up televisual excrement Blind Date a bit had the unseen 'Our Graham' been off his mash in an altered state of consciousness) which states that "The taking of certain drugs can separate man into two beings - one representing EVIL the other GOOD" as if 't'were scientific fact.  I do hope that this work was properly peer reviewed.

Undeterred by considerations such as sense, our white-coiffed and distinguished prober into the unknown reaches of science mixes his medicines and tastes the secret sauce of life much to his immediate chagrin; collapsing into a chair immediately after quaffing the draught and transfiguring into a nasty brutish and short snaggle-toothed specimen with dark bedraggled hair (played in certain shots by Harry Benham, eschewing the usual convention of having both Jekyll and Hyde portrayed by the same performer - which is actually quite effective in that we clearly see that Hyde is a more diminutive figure than the patrician Jekyll [as in the original text] as he regards his new form in the wall-mounted mirror, which wouldn't be nearly as effective with Cruze simply hunching over) in a jump cut; no slow lap dissolves or Mamoulian-esque bravura transformations here.  After physically expressing his unalloyed glee at existing (that sounds dirty in my head for some reason) Hyde downs the reflux elixir and melts back into Jekyll, who excitedly scrawls down the results of the experiment.

We are then treated to the intertitle informing us that Jekyll has become the accepted suitor of the minister's daughter; surely everyone's true burning ambition.  That sarcastically said, I definitely would have swooned at the chance to suit one of the Haworth minister's daughters what with being a fully paid-up Brontesaurus and everything.  Jekyll and his fiancee (Florence Le Badie) - who goes unnamed as women couldn't afford names in the olden days - take a lovely walk whilst sporting splendid hats and the good doctor shakes his prospective father in law (actor uncredited) warmly by the hand, before another intertitle informs us that it is now months later and the transformation has begun to happen without the aid of the elixir.  After suddenly taking a turn, the bestial Hyde dons his jaunty titfer and tears up his good self's notes before going outside on a spree of kicking small girls (Marie Eline) and then retreating to his laboratory sanctuary and changing back to his more respectable form.  Later, whilst on a romantic stroll with his sweetheart, the change comes again and Hyde attempts a forcible romantic interlude on the unwilling lady and when her pastoral pater intervenes bashes him senseless with his stick - the vicar here being a clear analogue for the novel's Sir Danvers Carew.

Pursued by a passing policeman ('Ello, 'ello, 'ello), Hyde races back to Jekyll's home and makes a hurried intrusion via the rear entrance (ouch) - by the time the officer of the law makes a more conventional and vanilla entrance to the abode via the front door he is met by a bewildered and apologetic Jekyll.  Realising that his supply of the drug is rapidly diminishing and that soon he will be forced to exist as Hyde permanently, he decides to tell his lady friend that he is going away.  After going through the ultimate metamorphosis and being faced with and axe-wielding worried butler, the policeman, and a small crowd of onlookers breaking down the laboratory door Hyde ends it all by drinking poison.  No post-death transition back to Jekyll, Hyde is found self-deaded and presumably presumed to have done away with the doc.  At a brisk twelve minutes, this is certainly an interesting curio that concertinas the tale down to its barest essentials.  As the earliest surviving Jekyll and Hyde film, though, 'tis a treasure.

1913 saw the next retelling in the form of Herbert Brenon's two-reel production for Carl Laemmle's fledgling Independent Moving Pictures (IMP), soon to become Universal Pictures.  Starring the cinema's first star leading man King Baggot as the dual leads (in point of fact the opening title proclaims "Starring King Baggot in a Dual Role"), the film begins with Jekyll asking the father of Alice, Jekyll's fiancee, played by Matt B. Snyder - who I assume is no relation to Matt Snider a.k.a. DJ Schnootz as he shows zero proclivity towards acid trance or techno music (presumably preferring a nice string quartet) - for the hand of his daughter (Jane Gail, who had made a brief and uncredited appearance as an extra in the 1912 film), who has the same moniker as Jekyll's fiancee from the earliest Hobart Bosworth production.  

We have here the cinematic debuts of the characters of Dr Lanyon (Howard Crampton) and the lawyer Mr Utterson (William Sorrel) - referred to as 'Lawyer Utterson' as though it's his given name - who confide and chide - it's like wining and dining with more upbraiding - the diffident Jekyll for his "unheard of" experiments.  After a hard days' charity work tending unpaid to the sickly poor, Jekyll decides "in the dead of night" to carry out his experimental self-abuse - presumably no longer necessary after the wedding - and unleash and indulge his primal side that his ego can override.  Locking himself into his laboratory, he necks the potion and transforms via a slow dissolve into a Hyde form curiously similar to the Cruze/Benham version, with mop out tangled black hair, crooked protruding teeth (were the Americans mocking British dentistry from the dawn of the 20th century?) and stooped posture; Baggot's Hyde walking with a crouched gait reminiscent of Torgo from Manos: The Hands of Fate.

Handing his startled butler a note from Jekyll stating "the bearer Mr Hyde is my best friend, treat him as myself", the unbridled Hyde'll not be questioned by the household staff and dashes out into the night for an evening's carousal.  No, I don't mean a merry-go-round, that's a carousel.  After picking a fight in a pub, Hyde decides to a take a room at a disreputable lodging house - though honestly I've stayed in worse Airbnbs.  This one looks less like it smells of sex and desperation and would get a better Tripadvisor or Trustpilot review than some of the dens of iniquity I've had to crash in.  Hyde then goes out on a nocturnal spree, including assaulting a disabled child (a boy here, rather than a young girl as in the original text.  I can't believe that the 1913 internet [made of a kettle and some string] didn't go into meltdown over this gender switching of in important character) by knocking away his crutch and giving a few whacks with his cane.  When an outraged crowd (no, not the aforementioned outraged internetters: there's nobody blaming Kathleen Kennedy for everything) quickly assembles, Hyde has to agree to pay for the child's injuries.  Leading the throng to the back door of the laboratory and paying them of with a bag of coinage he is spotted by a passing and perturbed Utterson, absorbing some of the plot points of is literary kinsman Mr Enfield.  Changing back to his courtly self, Jekyll vows never to repeat his mistakes but as he sits and thinks of Alice - to whom we intercut in a nice shot that puts me in mind of the Hutter/Ellen interaction from a distance in Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu - he undergoes an unwanted and unsolicited Hyde-ing. 

Calling in Utterson and Lanyon, Jekyll makes out his last will and testament with the codicil that in the event of his sudden disappearance all his possessions should pass to My Hyde.  Then a visit from Alice makes our repressed gent come over all funny, taking a turn for the worse and snarling at Alice, Lanyon and Utterson through the window.  After Hyde has, once again, clubbed Alice's father with his walking stick, the desperate monster engages a messenger boy to convey to his scientific peer Dr Lanyon a note from Jekyll begging him to retrieve the boxes of chemicals from his (Jekyll's) laboratory - "My liberty, my life, my honor [sic] and my soul depend on you.  My messenger will call at midnight".  The famous scene then plays out with the misshapen Hyde calling at the witching hour and decrying the befuddled Lanyon as "unbelieving" as he mixes and downs the mixture and changes before his very eyes back to Jekyll in one sustained and unbroken take - no cuts or dissolves.  Admittedly it's a tad less impressive than that sounds, as the scene starts with Hyde facing away from the camera, masking the fact that Baggot isn't in full make-up, and when he'd doubled over in the agony of the metamorphosis he removes the wig unseen.  Still a feat for the time though, I suppose, and a memorable screen first; as is the film itself for managing to convey all the novella's main story beats into less than half a hour - the film ends as the story does with a desperate Hyde, out of antidote and out of luck, trapped in the laboratory and ending his life by poison. 

Herbert Brenon would that same year direct Baggot in a feature-length (a whopping 48 minutes in four reels!) adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, one of the earliest Hollywood pictures to mount an overseas location shoot filming around Chepstow Castle in Monmouthshire, Wales, Ingerland. As the U.S. crew may have thought of it (no, seriously, it was trumpeted as "the biggest venture of its kind attempted in England"!).

In 1955, the anthology television show Climax! (that's not an order despite the imperative exclamation mark; I am not commanding you to 'arrive') - which had also given the world the live action debut of Ian Fleming's agent 007 James (well, 'Jimmy') Bond the previous year: see here for review - decided to give Stevenson's schizophrenic saga a go as the thirty-fourth episode of its premier season, directed by series regular Allen Reisner from a script by Gore Vidal.  In the lead role(s) was British star of Robert Wise's 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still Michael Rennie, the six foot four Bradford born and bred actor becoming one of the first U.K. performers to essay the role on screen since Irving (perhaps beaten only by Dulwich's own Boris Karloff in 1953's Abbott and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). 

Opening as per usual with the Climax! Mystery Theater [sic] introductory spiel - "live from television city in Hollywood" and sponsored by the Chrysler automobile corporation - from regular host Bill Lundigan (who pronounces Jekyll correctly as "Jeekill" but oddly pronounces co-star Cedric Hardwicke's name as "Seedrick"), we begin the tale with Dr Jekyll's faithful manservant Poole (recognisable to Star Trek fans as John Hoyt, the starship Enterprise's first C.M.O. Dr Boyce, making a good go of an English accent) anxiously visiting legal eagle Mr George Utterson, Esq. (Hardwicke, second son of a Baron Frankenstein and father of a Dr Watson) to tell of the good doctor's prolonged absence, and how he and the household staff have spent two weeks preparing meals and leaving them at the laboratory door for unseen collection and consumption by the occupant: either Jekyll or, as Poole nervously states, "the other".

Utterson dismisses the suggestion, saying that Mr Hyde vanished a year ago and wouldn't dare return to town with the police after him.  Poole however insists that he has come back and possibly done some harm to the doctor.  Taking the precaution of arming himself with a pistol, Utterson accompanies Poole to the lab; within stirs an agitated figure, face unseen (Rennie), who prowls like a caged panther whilst ransacking the room.  When the solicitor and servant join forces to force the locked door, the stranger crouches before pouncing and receives a fatal bullet.  Judging the dead man to indeed be the fugitive Hyde, Utterson sends Poole to fetch the police.  Looking over the wrecked laboratory, he comes across Jekyll's notebook which bears a note addressed to Utterson stating that the book should be read in the case of Henry Jekyll's death or disappearance.  As he peruses the tome we dissolve to a flashback (presumably either a rare pre-recorded section of the scene played in, or Rennie made his way off set and onto the other out of camera view, given the live nature of the broadcast) to two years previously, when Utterson arrived at Jekyll's house to find the urbane scientist quarreling with their mutual friend Dr Lanyon (Lowell Gilmore, no stranger to dramatisations of Victorian gothic fiction having played Basil Hallward in The Picture of Dorian Gray ten years previously) over Jekyll's 'fantastic' (in the unbelievable, rather than the Eccleston sense of the word) theory about dissecting the soul to bring out both the angel and the monster that dwell within.  And I always thought it took gamma rays to unleash the raging beast that dwells within.

Turns out it actually takes a liquid suspension of certain salts with an added secret ingredient - not the Colonel's secret sauce as it's a powder delivered by the dutiful Poole - as we see Jekyll's self-inflicted experimentation one night in the lab.  Draining the draught he collapses in a fit of spasms and we get a subjective trick camera shot of the room whirling (really, there must be a few pre-records in here, what with the transformations and all - there's no way they could have had the make-up on and off several times during a live one hour show) before he sees his nasty and brutish - but unlike life in Hobbes' Leviathan not short given Rennie's stature - new face: Rennie's savage mono-browed Hyde make-up is curiously similar to Lon Chaney Sr., as the mute ape-man creation of Dr Lamb (also portrayed by Chaney) in 1922's A Blind Bargain, Wallace Worsley's adaptation of Barry Pain's The Octave of Claudius.

Realising that he has freed not the inner angel but "the monster from its pit", he adapts quickly to his new double life and identity and cruises the darkness on the edge of town frequenting low establishments and getting into scraps with the local toughs, taking names and taking their ladies (possibly of ill repute).  Threatening "gentleman friends" with a good glassing - he'd really fit in down the Bigg Market on a Friday night, this lad - he manages to pull (unwillingly and problematically) a nice young lady played by Mary Sinclair, who struggles gamely with the accent despite the hindrance of not even being given a character name.  One would almost think that Gore Vidal wasn't all that interested in women or something  We get the standard story played out, with a regretful Jekyll tossing the ingredients into a furnace and then finding himself unwillingly transforming without the aid of the potion (with an odd focus on the mole on Hyde's cheek appearing and disappearing; honestly, I've never seen such focus on a mole outside of Bloodbath at the House of Death or Austin Powers).  Eventually, obviously, we loop round to the beginning to witness the good doctor's and bad man's impending ending.  It's... interesting, certainly.

In another instalment of Climax! titled 'Strange Sanctuary', Michael Rennie played a character referred to throughout as 'Mr O' Connor' - despite the name of the character inexplicably being given in the closing credits as 'Irish Sean Dillon'.  'Mr O' Connor', of course, was the moniker of the Hyde form of Conrad Veidt's Jekyllish Dr Warren in F.W. Murnau's copyright infringing 1920 Der Januskopf: obviously the gateway drug to the hard stuff of 1922's Nosferatu and Max Schreck's Count Dra... erm, Orloff!

It's a funny old world, whatever name you're using or face you're wearing.

Purple Noon ([a.k.a. Plein Soleil] Rene Clement, 1960)

It took the discovery that Netflix are mounting a new adaptation of the misadventures of Patricia Highsmith's roguish antihero Tom Ripley - in the form of the prosaically-titled Ripley, starring Andrew Scott of Sherlock and Fleabag and unnervingly high forehead fame (seriously, why haven't Marvel cast him as the Leader?  Just paint the lad green, no CGI enhancements required) - to finally prompt me to get round to sitting down and watching "the original, you might say".  Yes, I typed that in the voice of Richard Hurndall.  This Netflix series apparently premieres (or 'drops',as we say these days about television shows as well as music [I am so down with da yoof]) this April 4th, which - should I make it that far - will be the day after my 45th birthday.  Will it be a wonderful belated present or an unwanted gift?  Time will tell, I suppose.

It always does.

Having read all five of Highsmith's Ripley pentalogy (The Talented Mr Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley Under Water) in the early 2000s in the wake of Anthony Minghella's celebrated Matt Damon-starring 1999 movie of the first in the series - which, much to my chagrin, didn't spawn the requisite sequels I was awaiting unless one counts the unrelated 2002 variation upon Ripley's Game with John Malkovitch (Malkovitch Malkovitch); it does seem somewhat de rigueur to skip the second novel, as Ripley Under Ground was skipped in between the days of Rene Clement's 1960 Purple Noon and Wim Wenders' 1977 The American Friend, and again between 1999 and 2002 although there was a belated 2005 adaptation from Roger Spottiswoode that I always forget about, as seemingly does everyone else) - I have of course been meaning to watch the first cinematic version of Ripley (there had been a televised one hour live performance in January 1956 as an episode of the anthology series Studio One which sadly seems not to have been preserved as a Kinescope recording) for two decades now.  It does sometimes take me a while to get round to things.  

Procrastination's what you need if you want to be a record breaker, as Roy Castle never sang.

Hands up in honesty, though - who amung* us didn't look at the cover art of The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead album when young and want to be Alain Delon when they grew up?  I know I did.

So, briefly for those who don't know the story, the wealthy Boston Greenleafs (Greenleaves?  You do me wrong) hire Tom Ripley (Delon) to fly to the Med to bring back their errant son Philippe (nee Dickie, played by Maurice Ronet) who is living the high life of the idle rich being elegantly wasted around the Italian Riviera.  Quickly becoming quite taken with this louche Ligurian luxury lifestyle, Tom worms his way into the elite existences of Philippe and his girlfriend Marge (Marie Laforet) as well as their occasionally appearing friend Freddy (Billy Kearns) and his entourage of girlfriends - one of whom is an uncredited Romy Schneider of Sissi fame (she was da bomb in Visconti's Ludwig, yo): wouldn't we all like to spend five nights at Freddy's?

After larking about on the town and engaging in such shenanigans as buying a white cane from a blind man (Jess Franco regular Paul Muller), Philippe Marge and Tom embark on a recreational yacht trip so dripping with sexual tension that they should definitely have just organised a thrupple or a threesome or a menage or whatever and just got it over with.  This boat badly needs some bisexual lighting.  Wait - is that the purple that the English language title refers to?  MIND BLOWN.

Anyway, Tom winds up stabbing Philippe in a different way than the tension might lead us to suspect - i.e.: fatal rather than fun - and pitching the body overboard wrapped in a tarpaulin and weighed down with the anchor before taking his inveigling to its ne plus ultra by assuming the late Mr Greenleaf's identity and habits, gaslighting Marge into a relationship along the way, whilst dodging the suspicions of Freddy and the police (didn't they have a hit with 'You Were Made For Me'?).

Expertly directed by Clement (who, hopefully, didn't get too handsy with any of the female talent like he allegedly did with Jane Fonda), who sustains the suspense and tension admirably throughout as Delon's Ripley coasts through on his looks and insuppressible charm, the film is marred only by an ending that can't help but feel like a cop-out as our antagonist/protagonist exits the movie (sadly not pursued by a bear) walking into a police trap - feeling a bit like those Hong Kong movies with a mandatory 'the police must arrest anyone who breaks the law during the film' closing sequence.  An undoubtedly excellent adaptation of both Highsmith's novel and character with a mark deducted for cowardice in the face of the finale.

(*Yes, of course I spelled it like that deliberately.  I can be a silly creature of whim sometimes.  You should know that by now)