hyde’s son
by Douglas Messerli
David Wickes (screenwriter and director,
derived from the story by Robert Louis Stevenson) Jekyll and Hyde / 1990
Indeed, as several commentators have suggested, this version is unafraid
to explore all sorts of different genres in one grand mix-and-match movie.
Overall, one might describe this work as the first real attempt at turning
Stevenson’s all-male story into a romantic heterosexual love tale, albeit a
strange one. In this case Dr. Jekyll’s former wife, whom he dearly loved, has
died before the picture begins of pneumonia, leaving behind Jekyll, his bitter
father-in-law Dr. Lanyon (Joss Ackland)—a repurposed figure from other
Jekyll/Hyde films—and his younger daughter Sara (Cheryl Ladd), who in love with
Jekyll, married another man for recompense, safely out-of-sight in Singapore
throughout this film.
It
is Sara, visited by Utterson, the name of the original narrator who this time
is simply the executor of Jekyll’s will, who becomes Wickes’ Utterson,
retelling the terrible tale.
In
this movie Jekyll is not just an occasional lecturer, as he was in Rouben
Mamoulian’s 1931 version, but a full-time teacher in the hospital who weekly
challenges all of Lanyon’s conservative attitudes. This Jekyll is a firebrand,
attempting to convince his often skeptical students (one who reminds me very
much of the whining contrarian early in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein)
that the mind controls the body and that chemicals inform the mind. Today it’s
still a very current theory by many doctors in the field, who virtually do away
with all things psychological by insisting that all actions and motives can be
comprehended by the chemical make-up and stimulation of the mind.
Is
it any wonder that a Victorian moralist such as Lanyon would perceive someone
who insists “Evil is not a scientific term” to be the devil himself and might
wish to forbid his beloved daughter from even seeing the creature?
Of
course, having cleared out his film of all psychological perspectives, David
Wickes simply cannot be bothered in the post-Stonewall era-picture he is
creating to imagine that the beast that lives within Jekyll’s body—completely
chemically-induced as it is—might represent a dangerously evil queer, from the
Victorian perspective, trying to come out. Nor evidently is Hyde even a macho,
misogynistic heterosexual monster. When not on the Hyde-producing drug, Jekyll
is a gentle man very much in love with Sara once he finds out her feelings are
mutual and her father, convinced she is already having an affair, kicks her out
of his house. The couple go shopping, redecorate the mansion, attend musical
concerts, and even dine, upon invitation, with the Prince of Wales—all while
shocking the Victorian world around them for brazenly demonstrating their deep
love in public. This film might have been a first-rate rip-off of something
that Henry James or Edith Wharton could have written—it certainly has beautiful
Merchant-Ivory-like sets—were it not the fact that it also wishes to be a real
horror film.
With no real motive to his madness, the Hyde of this film goes stomping about the city throwing men and even little girls out of his way while mindlessly and meaninglessly raping and scratching all the women he can get his hands on, including Sara. In a clever switch of transformations, this director sees Hyde’s victims as yet another opportunity to demonstrate Jekyll’s remarkable sense of decency and talent as he operates on the young child he has almost killed in his nightly forays and nurses his dear Sara back to health. You might say it allows our “hero” to get his victims “coming and going.”
But even actor Michael Caine, who’s quite wonderful as Jekyll, doesn’t quite comprehend what his Mr. Hyde is after. And sensing that he has no motivation—you’ll recall it’s just a chemical reaction—the film’s creators spent the rest of their budget on appliances and makeup in order to show the horrific transformations of Jekyll’s handsome body as he suddenly develops boils and pustules as his face, arms, and hands that pulse and pound in their mutation into the ugly monster made up of elements of several human diseases such as porphyria, epidermodysplasia verruciformis, proteus syndrome, and leprosy. Not a pretty picture.
The police stalking the easily describable but forever vanishing monster
are disgusted by what they discover in this rented room. This Jekyll and Hyde
story also wishes to be a kind of detective story complete with clever-quipping
cops and a sleazy journalist as we watch both spend several hours stalking and
lying in wait for their quarry. As Sergeant Horby, Snape the journalist, and
the wacky purveyor of the brothel wherein Hyde keeps a room, Mrs. Hackett,
Kevin McNally, David Schofield, and Miriam Karlin are all quite memorable.
And there’s that important figure who links nearly all the Jekyll and
Hyde manifestations, Jekyll’s trusted butler Poole, here played by Frank
Barrie.
Caine’s monster is so purposeless, however, that he even kills his
beloved father (Lionel Jeffries) on a midnight visit to his pater’s wine cellar
for some brandy. Is it any wonder that our new Jekyll does not feel guilt as
much as he does complete disgust for the very existence of the man he has
trapped inside his body increasingly attempting to get out with or without
drugs.
In
a classroom lecture, Jekyll predicts the future—and here’s where the film
attempts to embrace the science-fiction genre as well:
“One day, it will be. Tall, short, strong,
weak, like grafting roses. ...Yes, it
will happen. Science will control our shapes, our intelligence, even create new
breeds of men. Violent men to fight our
wars. Docile men to do our work.”
Yet he finally concludes:
“Hell on Earth, and I, I want no part of it.”
But
obviously he has created it, made it possible. And if there is any real mystery
in this good man and monster myth it is why he has continued to invoke his Hyde
once he has witnessed his pointlessly destructive actions. The Hyde we presented
in this movie is mostly the monster he has long
Finally, having told her empty tale, Sara turns to Utterson to present
that figure with the son she begat during the narrative events she describes, a
young boy who looks every bit like Hyde, not her lover Jekyll. One wonders
whether they weren’t planning a sequel, like The Omen II, III, IV, V.
Los Angeles, December 9, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December
2021).
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