Everybody knows the world's gone wrong

[sovay]

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 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?

Comments

[gullyfoyle]

I know someone who said that if she were going to die of some obscure, exotic disease, then she'd opt for kuru. You have been watching your diet, yes?

As for DJ&SH, what can I say other than evil never looked so good.

[cmcmck]

Persumably from the German verschlimmert (to make worse)?

I remember seeing that film the year it came out and not being that impressed!

[thisbluespirit]

The Hammer doc I watched at the beginning of the year had stuff to say on that film that I remember being interesting but I don't remember at all what it was, except that I somehow also thought it had Kate O'Mara, so make this is doubly (triply?) useless comment! That does sound like a very cool effect, though.

*hugs*

I'm glad to see the 70s Cornish crew are still providing the occasional bit of relief here and there! <3<3<3

[julian]

Uh. Well. It not being TB is good, but at least TB would be an answer. Sigh.

But, hug.

[asakiyume]

The thing (the thing? Okay: a thing) I resent about AI is how, as your linked article suggests, it makes you suspicious even of things that aren't AI. I won't watch any informational Youtube videos that are under two years old because I juuust don't want to begin watching something and then have something in it trigger my AI warning system. I know that sometimes AI-generated stuff can be okay, nice, whatever. 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.

(The special effect you describe sound very effective indeed)

[gwynnega]

I love what you say about that camera effect. 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.)