Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline | The Play House / 1921

the narcissi

by Douglas Messerli

 

Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline (screenwriters and directors) The Play House / 1921

 

I have to admit, alas, that over all the great Buster Keaton’s 1921 silent two-reeler, The Play House is basically a bore of sight gags and well-timed tumbles with its longest segment devoted to the impossibly comic situation of a team of mostly freshly hired Zoaves (the French, mostly volunteer light infantry regiments who fought, primarily in Algeria, from 1830 to 1962) who clumsily perform marching and strongman acrobatic acts. Theater scenery goes falling at regular intervals as Keaton performs, in remarkable makeup, as a monkey whose acrobatic feats are something to be admired, but whose human equivalent does entirely succeed in entertaining. And the first sequence is centered around a minstrel show that fortunately never gets underway sufficiently to actually demonstrate its racist subtext.

     The real motif in the film, of far more interest that any of its sketches, is the “double,” as I’ve repeatedly argued, a common theme in queer cinema. Keaton and co-director and writer Edward F. Cline don’t actually explore the deeper implications of their subject, but they do superficially play with the issue in a way that is often fun and, perhaps more importantly in the history of film, cinematically complex through his use of amazing camera tricks, which he readily revealed to his cinema-making peers.

       In the first portion of the film Keaton presents a theatre of a surreal and hallucinatory version of the Narcissus, as all the orchestra performers, minstrel players, dancers, and audience members from dowager old women to a nasty sucker-sucking kid are performed by Keaton himself, partially in mockery of film director Thomas Ince who often appeared in several roles in his own movies. As a theater-box viewer Keaton turns to the image of himself playing his wife to comment, after perusing the program, “This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show."

      Keaton plays at least three of his roles in drag, but he is just as funny performing as the enthusiastic, back-itching conductor, the bass, clarinet, and trombone players, and the drummer. As a duo of dancers Keaton is totally in sync with his other. And the entire row of banjo strumming jokesters, some in blackface makes for a lovely vision of the 8 performers and the one interlocuter, given that in 1921 Keaton was certainly one of the most handsome actors in the business.

     Later in discussion with film critic Kevin Brownlow, Keaton recalled that he attributed the direction to Cline primarily because he did not want to be seen as being too much like Ince: “Having kidded things like that, I hesitated to put my own name on as a director and writer.”

      According to sources such as Eleanor Keaton’s book Buster Keaton Remembered and Rudi Blesh in Keaton, the camera lens required a matte box attached to its front, which had nine precisely-machined metal strips that could be moved vertically independently of one another. The cinematographer Elgin Lessley first shot the far-left Keatons with shutter up, leaving the others down. Rewinding the film, he opened the second segment of shutters and re-filmed Keaton, repeating the action seven times. Since the camera had to be hand-wound, it required a steady hand from Lessley in order to avoid any variation of speed. Keaton apparently synchronized his dancing performances of the music to a banjo player with the help of a metronome.

        If one might have wished that Keaton played all the roles for the rest of the movie, the director felt, as I suspected, that eventually the joke would end as his audience grew bored of the device. As it is, Keaton awakens in bed having experienced the awful dream we have just witnessed, only to find out that the bed itself is on stage, and that Keaton works as a theater assistant, extending the role of doubling to onstage/offstage, and soon after, when he is told to go out and hire more Zoaves, outside/inside. The act of twin sisters (both played by Virginia Fox) continues the doubling motif, the unknowing Keaton giving them separate dressing rooms, only to find what appears the same girl going into one and coming out the other. Later, his confusion is quadrupled as the twins both appear in mirrors. 

       Keaton falls in love with one of them, while the other clearly can’t abide him, making for further confusion as the stage assistant keeps kissing and even attempts to marry the wrong twin.

      Even his performance as a chimpanzee hints at the mirroring images of man and his nearest ancestor: is the man really a chimp, or the chimp a small, bent over man like Keaton himself? It’s too bad Keaton couldn’t take these important issues into deeper territory. But his, like most houses of mirrors, is created as a kind of funhouse not to be used as it was later by Orson Welles, as a house of horrors and murder.

 

Los Angeles, February 21, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).

David Wickes | Jekyll and Hyde / 1990

hyde’s son

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Wickes (screenwriter and director, derived from the story by Robert Louis Stevenson) Jekyll and Hyde / 1990

 

David Wickes’ production was televised by Patricia Carr for King-Phoenix features along with London Weekend Television, broadcast on ABC in 1990. Although by this time the writer/director had strayed far from Stevenson’s original—suggested in his credits wherein they describe the teleplay as “derived” from the original—you have to give it to this production, starring Michael Caine as Jekyll/Hyde, for its attempt to take on several of the numerous strands of the other versions.

      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.

    If in the other films, the fathers of the various of Jekylls’ loved ones were ultra-conservative, recalcitrant about their views, and resistant to their daughter’s marriage, in this version Lanyon is a mad opponent to all aspects of Jekyll’s existence, convinced that his chemical experiments on his daughter ended her life, not the pneumonia with which she was stricken; terrified that his remaining daughter is having an affair with her former brother-in-law; and furious for Jekyll’s attacks on him in the classroom about his attitudes toward medical science.

 

   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 before unleashed; we never witness his early motivations and reactions. And in refusing to explore those issues, the film loses its entire meaning. Everything else going on around Jekyll’s original motivation is simply the aftermath of what his actions have wrought, like so many broken vials and tromped upon human beings and social values simply to be cleaned up by either the imagined figures who do so in Wickes’ fiction or by the filmmakers themselves. As Gertrude Stein might have said of this film: “There is no there there.” In some respects, this monster takes us back to the “child run amok” figure of the 1912 version. Is it any wonder that, tired of such a being housed in his own body, the struggling Jekyll doesn’t even chance it with another poisonous drug, but points a gun to its head, shooting thrice.

      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).