Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
My mother referred earlier this evening to the state of my health as farshlimmert, which definitely sounds classier than my saying it's gone down the tubes. On the other hand, I do not apparently have TB, so we can hold off on the consumptive poet jokes a little while longer yet.
As a reworking of Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) is trashtacular even beyond the whipsawing of its trans reading when it mixes the novella's Gothic horrors with historical ones—scrunching about six decades in the penny-dreadful process of folding in not only the Whitechapel murders but Burke and Hare, even without throwing in an allusion to Sweeney Todd or a street singer straight out of Val Lewton—but it dovetailed unexpectedly well with an article sent me by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie about the obtrusiveness of AI-generation in art because it contains an in-camera effect so good that I stopped the film to gush about it to spatch. It's the emergence of the so-called Mrs. Hyde. One-shot, Jekyll wrenched with the effects of his absinthe-green potion buries his face in his hands, slowly straightens to perceive, in the cheval glass where a moment ago he was convulsing, a woman as severely dark-haired, night-pale and shocked as himself, who she is. It's not a trick of double exposures or duplicate sets or dissolves. While the camera tightly pivots behind the hunched protagonist, it looks as though a slight adjustment to the angle of the mirror allows an otherwise offscreen Martine Beswick to reflect beyond the identically dressed shoulder of Ralph Bates, their breath heaving in time, their hands slowly unmasking their shared face. It's very simple and uncannily effective. In some ways I find it more impressive than the red-filter transformation of Fredric March in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because it's all sightlines. He's never out of shot and she's suddenly in it. Especially to an eye distracted from consideration of the sets or the cinematography by the switch of actors in the glass, it looks impossible. And someone had to think of it, or at least translate it from a stage illusion. It has never broken a film for me to see how a practical effect is done, which feels different from the suspicion of how much of an image is AI-slopped.
The almost talking blues whose first two lines I missed tonight on WERS turned out to be Lucinda Williams' "The World's Gone Wrong" (2025).
P.S. And a random thirty seconds of Clive Francis mixed in with the bleak London ultraviolence of Villain (1971), why not?
As a reworking of Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) is trashtacular even beyond the whipsawing of its trans reading when it mixes the novella's Gothic horrors with historical ones—scrunching about six decades in the penny-dreadful process of folding in not only the Whitechapel murders but Burke and Hare, even without throwing in an allusion to Sweeney Todd or a street singer straight out of Val Lewton—but it dovetailed unexpectedly well with an article sent me by
selkie about the obtrusiveness of AI-generation in art because it contains an in-camera effect so good that I stopped the film to gush about it to spatch. It's the emergence of the so-called Mrs. Hyde. One-shot, Jekyll wrenched with the effects of his absinthe-green potion buries his face in his hands, slowly straightens to perceive, in the cheval glass where a moment ago he was convulsing, a woman as severely dark-haired, night-pale and shocked as himself, who she is. It's not a trick of double exposures or duplicate sets or dissolves. While the camera tightly pivots behind the hunched protagonist, it looks as though a slight adjustment to the angle of the mirror allows an otherwise offscreen Martine Beswick to reflect beyond the identically dressed shoulder of Ralph Bates, their breath heaving in time, their hands slowly unmasking their shared face. It's very simple and uncannily effective. In some ways I find it more impressive than the red-filter transformation of Fredric March in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because it's all sightlines. He's never out of shot and she's suddenly in it. Especially to an eye distracted from consideration of the sets or the cinematography by the switch of actors in the glass, it looks impossible. And someone had to think of it, or at least translate it from a stage illusion. It has never broken a film for me to see how a practical effect is done, which feels different from the suspicion of how much of an image is AI-slopped.The almost talking blues whose first two lines I missed tonight on WERS turned out to be Lucinda Williams' "The World's Gone Wrong" (2025).
P.S. And a random thirty seconds of Clive Francis mixed in with the bleak London ultraviolence of Villain (1971), why not?
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Thank you! I was expecting something like a dissolve or just a cutaway which the film does use for later transformations and it riveted me.
Trashy as the film is, I found it fascinating how Mrs. Hyde embraces her sexuality in a way that Jekyll doesn't. (Which, of course, is consistent with male Hydes, but it struck me as daring, for the time the film came out, that Mrs. Hyde is allowed to embrace her sexuality at all.)
Yes! And one of the better points of the film. There's a whole stretch in the second act where it really allows itself to play with the idea of Hyde as liberating as well as monstrous before the conventions of a Jekyll and Hyde story pull it back toward the dualistically tragic ending which is part of what makes trying to decipher the film as a trans narrative like trying to read an accordion (besides which the film has frankly forfeited it by having its Jekyll murder people on his own account: you're just not getting back to Stevenson from there) but which I really enjoyed. It's traditional for adaptations to have one love interest each for Jekyll and Hyde, but not set up like the four-cornered triangle with the Spencer siblings. A freakier film probably could have solved that situation with poly, except for maybe the problem with the murders.
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I feel like most adaptations of the story overlook how morally compromised Stevenson's Jekyll is. His creation of Hyde is quite deliberate. He's not trying to destroy the evil parts of his personality, he is creating a persona out of those parts which can do those things and *not feel guilt*. My read is that Jekyll is fully as capable of direct evil action as Hyde is, he just feels guilty when he does.
I mean, Sister Hyde is miles away from RLS on so many other axes... but I don't think a homicidal Jekyll is inherently disqualifying.
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No argument on that front, but even if Jekyll is morally complicit in every one of Hyde's crimes, whether desired or just irresponsibly unchecked, the whole point is that they are physically not of his committing since Hyde has been materially reconstituted as his own person. (Herewith my rant about adaptations of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, i.e. that no one ever does a Hyde as described in the novella, where he has no visually monstrous characteristics, he's just a weird little dude whose affect creeps everyone out. Mary Reilly (1996) at least avoided the animalistic thing, but then it substituted Gothic hot, which is different. Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde sort of sidesteps the question with the genderswap, partly as if her femininity is itself the monstrosity, but partly because she just looks like an AFAB Jekyll. According to Martine Beswick, she never thought that she bore that close a resemblance to Ralph Bates, but they worked on sharing a body language and expressions and it comes off fantastically even when the blocking isn't using his hand to push back her hair or vice versa.) I do think that something essential about the story collapses when Jekyll has just as much literal blood on his hands as Hyde. And it may collapse interestingly, but then you're on a different track from the Stevenson-style ending which has to treat them as separate persons effectively jockeying for a single existence or it wouldn't matter that Jekyll can no longer control his transformations, that Hyde has started to manifest without chemical assistance as if he rather than Jekyll has become the default state. The film ultimately bends itself back in that direction, but whatever it did to the source material in the meantime, I liked it best—it was most compelling to me—when it seemed to treat its Jekyll and Hyde as alternate faces instead.
I mean, Sister Hyde is miles away from RLS on so many other axes... but I don't think a homicidal Jekyll is inherently disqualifying.
tl;dr I don't think it's disqualifying as a version of the novella, I just think it disjoints from it. The film departs enough from its source material, it could have kept going.