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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As for DJ&SH, what can I say other than evil never looked so good.
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I have to say that I would definitely not opt for kuru if it were up to me, so my funerary cannibalism has always been selective.
As for DJ&SH, what can I say other than evil never looked so good.
I had a lot of fun with it! I might have been more interested in the film it was aptly trying to fission off into, though.
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I remember seeing that film the year it came out and not being that impressed!
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That was my read: deteriorated, broken-down. My mother does not herself speak Yiddish, but she was raised by native speakers, and it means that every now and then something comes out in her vocabulary that is not even the standard sort of American Jewish what Leo Rosten called Yinglish. There's also farshimlt which means literally moldy and figuratively in a bad way, but that wasn't what she said. She's reliable enough on sound despite not speaking the language that I had to learn Yiddish to realize that the version of "Oyfn pripetshik" (which she does not pronounce that way on account of dialect) she sang me as a child had variant lyrics.
I remember seeing that film the year it came out and not being that impressed!
It has problems!
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*hugs*
I'm glad to see the 70s Cornish crew are still providing the occasional bit of relief here and there! <3<3<3
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But, hug.
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*hugs*
(TB would have required massive antibiotics and I am all right with not being on massive antibiotics.)
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It was so unexpected and exactly the kind of sleight-of-hand I love in movies. I tried to take a screencap, but of course it just looks like a reflection.
Kate O'Mara seems to have done The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) with Ralph Bates. I have not attempted that one because I would actually have to go looking for it. This one he met Virginia Wetherell on, which is extra-diegetically cute enough that I didn't care about their scene giving me flashbacks to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960).
I'm glad to see the 70s Cornish crew are still providing the occasional bit of relief here and there!
*hugs*
Thirty-second Clive Francis was the affable marquis whose country house hosts the sex parties that made it possible to blackmail an MP! He didn't even rate a credit in the opening titles and I was extremely entertained to see him.
(It is more of a pain to realize that despite some durable film and television work, he really is primarily a stage actor, a problem I normally have with, like, John Clements. Also what was wrong with him and Jane Asher being part of a Twelfth Night at a point in time where I could just be watching the slightly beige transfer off YouTube?)
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(The special effect you describe sound very effective indeed)
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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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Understandably! I worry a lot about randomly encountered art on the internet. When I was still on FB, an image circulated my friendlist purporting to be a modern painting of Bastet done in the style of Waterhouse or Alma-Tadema and it turned out to have been the product of Midjourney or some other plagiarism engine and it pissed me off so much because it was a wonderful idea and someone could have painted it digitally and instead they scraped the work of other artists who had. I didn't like that at all. I'd rather see someone's imperfect attempt at a pre-Raphaelite Bastet than a seamless cough-up that literally no intention or decision or accident went into.
Case in point: I heard a song in a big box store, vaguely pleasant 80s-style synth pop. looked it up when I got home, and am deeply suspicious, having found it, that it's probably AI generated. The song hasn't changed, but I'm not interested in listening to something created by musical-style autocomplete. I want some *person* to have created it. Even a rank hack of a person.
Yes. Earlier this year my father asked me to find him a story he partly remembered which turned out to be Roald Dahl's "The Great Automatic Grammatisator" (1953), which since its publication has gone from a sort of cautionary fable about selling out to feeling way too close to predictive science fiction about the torment nexus. It does make a difference to me if a person wrote my bland elevator music.
(The special effect you describe sound very effective indeed)
(I yelled something at
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I think that's really nice. I am glad it was not lost.
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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.
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Ha, somehow so on brand anyway! XD
It was so unexpected and exactly the kind of sleight-of-hand I love in movies. I tried to take a screencap, but of course it just looks like a reflection.
It gives an even clearer idea of it, though. That is a very cool trick!
Also what was wrong with him and Jane Asher being part of a Twelfth Night at a point in time where I could just be watching the slightly beige transfer off YouTube?
Oh, also cool! If slightly frustrating, lol.
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A legend!
[edit] On that front, meant to mention earlier: probably assuming that I had a normal familiarity with As You Like It as opposed to the familiarity of a person who read the play almost twenty-five years ago because of a reference in E.T.A. Hoffmann and not much more recently tapped out of the first act of an open-air performance because of the smokers, you neglected to warn me that Clive Francis and Angharad Rees were reteamed for it in the funniest possible fashion, i.e. Oliver and Celia do not even interact except insofar as his reputation precedes him and then he shows up with his confession—really well done, still a pleasure—after which she looks at this only very recently doused trash fire of a man and decides she'll take one, thanks; Orlando in an unusual access of reality for a character in a Shakespearean comedy expresses his doubts of their insta-courtship and the audience is like, eh, their track record as scene partners includes a spectacular hug, they'll be fine. Mirren was unsurprisingly terrific and I am trying to figure out why I had an "oh, that guy" reaction to Richard Pasco. David Prowse at least was not a mystery.
It gives an even clearer idea of it, though. That is a very cool trick!
And the grand total of it is Martine Beswick sitting in an identical chair and dressing gown next to Ralph Bates with the mirror angled and the camera aimed to catch just her. The reflection works for the symbolism, but it's also how the illusion is done. I don't think I've seen anything as tricky in another Hammer film, even the visually weird ones. I love it.
Oh, also cool! If slightly frustrating, lol.
They managed not to work with one another until the 2010's and have since become something of a pair. I'm not actually sure how they managed to avoid one another during the '70's. I'm still charmed.
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Aw, that is rather nice! <3
you neglected to warn me that Clive Francis and Angharad Rees were reteamed for it in the funniest possible fashion, i.e. Oliver and Celia do not even meet except insofar as his reputation precedes him and then he shows up with his confession
Ha, it's been a while since I watched that one, or even the more recent Branagh one I did about 2 or 3 years ago & I never studied it, so even had I assumed I knew it better than you, which wouldn't usually seem like good odds (to me), I had forgotten the precise circumstances.
Orlando expresses his doubts of their insta-courtship and the audience is like, eh, their track record as scene partners includes a spectacular hug, they'll be fine.
Why not, heh?
Mirren was unsurprisingly terrific and I am trying to figure out why I had an "oh, that guy" reaction to Richard Pasco.
Not that I am going to complain about Helen Mirren in a thing (XD) - this was my intro to the play, and good though she of course is, I felt somehow nevertheless that she was not 'my' Rosalind, surprisingly. Which was one of the reasons I jumped on the other version, even aside from Romola Garai and David Oyelowo in the leads, and I really did like Bryce Dallas Howard a lot in that; she had a lighter touch, I thought, and that felt more like what I had instinctively wanted. But Helen Mirren is also in the BBC Cymbeline as Imogen and I thought she was particularly great in that; I loved her performance.
Richard Pasco, though, is IMO Jaques of all time and I love him so much in this, I requested him for Yuletide one time. I don't think I'm supposed to like Jaques as much as I do here! I'm not sure what your recognition is from, but am going, "Well, naturally!" anyway. Seems legit. I had only ever seen him in as a rather dour and solemn Brutus in the BBC Shakespeare Julius Caesar opposite David Collings's Cassius before, so this was a fun contrast. (I mean, I know I've linked to vids from that several times, so it might partially account for the recognition?)
Anyway, yay, Poldark reunions! \o/
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Absolute speedrun on the disaster/charm, it was amazing.
Not that I am going to complain about Helen Mirren in a thing (XD) - this was my intro to the play, and good though she of course is, I felt somehow nevertheless that she was not 'my' Rosalind, surprisingly.
I expected her to be more actually boyish and was interested that she was not directed to be, but it didn't make me not enjoy her performance, especially her liveliness and color in the language and her rapport with Rees, who is definitely holding the brain cell for most of the romance. I have not seen the Branagh version, although I remember when it came out because Romola Garai had just gotten onto my radar. I can see already it should have had a stronger Orlando. The 1978 one existed.
Richard Pasco, though, is IMO Jaques of all time and I love him so much in this, I requested him for Yuletide one time.
Did you get him?
I don't think I'm supposed to like Jaques as much as I do here!
I can't tell: I've never seen another and one of my favorite characters in college was compared in-text to him, so I would have been favorably disposed no matter what. (That was the Hoffmann reference—his recurring character of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, who is also given to cynical flights of philosophy and occasionally just glooming out instead of composing, which is officially his job.)
I had only ever seen him in as a rather dour and solemn Brutus in the BBC Shakespeare Julius Caesar opposite David Collings's Cassius before, so this was a fun contrast. (I mean, I know I've linked to vids from that several times, so it might partially account for the recognition?)
You have definitely pointed me in the direction of that production before, but the more immediate culprit looks like a set of screencaps
Anyway, yay, Poldark reunions!
They also seem to have been in an episode of an anthology called Ten from the Twenties (1975), but I can't find out if it survives. It's got Roland Culver, too. [edit] Yes, if someone's selling a bootleg of it, but it would be nicer if it were just on Dailymotion or something.
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Aww. XD
I expected her to be more actually boyish and was interested that she was not directed to be, but it didn't make me not enjoy her performance, especially her liveliness and color in the language and her rapport with Rees
Oh, yes, they're definitely great together! And it isn't that I didn't appreciate her, I just wanted a different version as well almost immediately. Thinking about it, I wonder if I was thinking of Viola, and my default for her is Felicity Kendall in the BBC Shakespeare, and they are kind of similar in appearance at that date, but also very different, although if so it wasn't conscious. BUt I can't remember which order I watched them in now, and I was so blown away by Helen Mirren in Cymbeline, so if I watched that first, it might also have made me think of Imogen first. Idk, I need to rewatch it sometime, now that I have got an alternative to play with as well.
But, yes, despite the weird setting, the Branagh one was really good! (idk, as I said before when I watched it, WHY he chose that; he does actually avoid being culturally appropriative as such, but whhyyy set yourself up for being very understandably assumed to be doing that by everybody who didn't read the intro text slides closely? It is a pretty setting, and it works, but so would a dozen other settings that wouldn't have thrown viewers and critics so unnecessarily. Also then there wouldn't have been a sumo wrestler in it. But, yeah, otherwise great, lovely, fab cast & the light touch I didn't quite get from the Beeb and was mentally trying to reach for. Must also watch again).
Did you get him?
No! That was when I realised that you apparently have to have seen Richard Pasco to like him or something. idk. I love him, anyway.
You have definitely pointed me in the direction of that production before,
It is SUCH a mix of genuinely awesome and hilarious 'bad day at the BBC' and I love it so much, but yeah. That much is obvious by now. I watched it when I was VERY ill indeed; so much so I ruined the plastic covering of the dvd case by falling asleep while hugging it one very bad afternoon. (The plastic goes wobbly on your favourite dvds if you show your love for them by hugging them for over an hour at a time).
I am now watching a very video-crackly rip of that episode on YouTube when I should be doing something else. Their attention to the sound of the lines reminds me much more of working on opera and art song than theater rehearsals I have sat in on, which is fascinating to me.
Aww. I started watching that very slowly one summer and I was really enjoying it, but I wasn't up to doing enough of it at a time, and I have no idea which episode I got to. Definitely not as far as episode 7, but it was all very interesting.
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I liked how much Rees' Celia hangs out, catlike, observing. And she does sell the sudden pair-off with Oliver—him smitten on sight, her more measuringly intrigued. The production cut one of her slashier lines to Rosalind, alas.
Thinking about it, I wonder if I was thinking of Viola
Hah—I second-guessed and deleted the phrase "Viola-like" from my expectations of her playing. But it is true that's my standard for gender-as-performance in Shakespeare and since As You Like It adds the extra layer of Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-practice-Rosalind, just go all out with it!
and my default for her is Felicity Kendall in the BBC Shakespeare
I have seen gifsets of that production, oddly, which is how I know what Alec McCowen's Malvolio looks like. My default Viola is Imogen Stubbs.
(The plastic goes wobbly on your favourite dvds if you show your love for them by hugging them for over an hour at a time).
It's a permanent mark of affection! Like the scars accumulated from living with cats.
Definitely not as far as episode 7, but it was all very interesting.
I can report that Episode 7 can be watched in isolation if you want some excellent Judi Dench and Richard Pasco and Twelfth Night.
Swerving fandoms wildly, is there any chance that you have either a gif or a macro of Sanjeev saying serenely, "Couldn't give a shit" in the latest series of Taskmaster?
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I've seen and enjoyed the film too! Imogen Stubbs is also a great choice.
I can report that Episode 7 can be watched in isolation if you want some excellent Judi Dench and Richard Pasco and Twelfth Night.
That is indeed very tempting!!
Swerving fandoms wildly, is there any chance that you have either a gif or a macro of Sanjeev saying serenely, "Couldn't give a shit" in the latest series of Taskmaster?
I have reblogged just such a thing! so hopefully that will be of use!
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Brilliant! I shall direct
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That does sound inevitable.
(I assume the radio series is no relation to the TV Crown Court from which
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