Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Five for One and One for All

Nathan Darrow in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson wrote two of the most enchanting children’s adventure novels, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, as well as the ineffable A Child’s Garden of Verses, a collection of sixty-four poems for the young. But his most celebrated literary work is most emphatically not for kids. His 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which a scientist obsessed with the human capacity for holding both good and evil within one personality devises a potion to isolate the two impulses and ends up turning himself into a monster – evil unchecked by restraint – shares with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, written half a decade later, the distinction of being the quintessential portrait of the repressed Victorian Age. Jekyll and Hyde is, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a work of conceptual genius framed as a great horror story. And like Frankenstein it’s continued to excite the cultural imagination without interruption since its publication. It’s been filmed repeatedly, notably on three occasions: as a silent picture with John Barrymore in 1920; by Rouben Mamoulian in 1931 with a famous Oscar-winning performance by Fredric March; and in 1941 under Victor Fleming’s direction with Spencer Tracy in his most surprising – and possibly his finest – performance. (The Fleming version is the real gem; it’s one of the best literary adaptations in Hollywood history.) Stevenson’s narrative has generated countless replicas and parodies, the most delightful of which is surely Motor Mania (1950), the Disney cartoon in which Goofy plays the placid pedestrian Mr. Walker and his demonic alter ego Mr. Wheeler, whom Walker morphs into as soon as he gets behind the wheel. At this juncture, sad to say, probably most people know the Stevenson story through the wretched Frank Wildhorn-Leslie Bricusse-Steve Cuden musical.

Cries in the Night: Children of Film Noir – Nocturnarama, A Noir Childhood

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‎BearManor Media (June 2023).

“Nailing down a coffin lid is far easier than nailing down a universally agreed upon definition of the term film noir.”  – Robert Strom

Every so often a book comes along that somehow manages to evoke our childhood and our love of films at the same time. Robert Strom’s Cries in the Night: Children in Film Noir is just such a book.

I grew up in a place I used to call Shadowland, a quiet suburb of Toronto known officially as Don Mills (the first formally designed suburb in North America) where there wasn’t much to do but listen to music and watch movies. Luckily I was also a kid in the 1960’s, a time when the best of both of those pursuits was available to us in abundance. When I was about ten years old my life was changed forever by a secret practice I used to engage in when the rest of my relatively normal suburban family was fast asleep at night. Back in those days, after midnight the public broadcasting system in Canada used to transmit overnight classic movies across the airwaves and into our homes, and I would quietly go out into our dark living room, turn on the television and start watching old films long into the wee wee hours. That was my initial and probably too young exposure to dark movies I would never have been allowed to watch in theatres or during the daylight.

Past Lives: Lives Unlived, Lives Unremembered

Teo Yoo, Greta Lee and John Magaro in Past Lives.

One of the most familiar tropes in sci-fi and fantasy narratives – especially recently – is the existence of multiple existences in different dimensions that echo each other but don’t replicate them. (That is, of course, the premise of the delectable animated Spider-Verse franchise.) In Past Lives, the debut film by Celine Song, those echoes are meant to suggest lives the characters have already led but don’t remember; layered on each other through time, they create a ghostly pyramid that leads us toward the coupling fate intended for us. After Maestro and the Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, Past Lives was my favorite movie last year. It’s not like anything else I’ve ever seen. Song was born in South Korea but her family emigrated to Canada when she was still a little girl, and as an adult she emigrated again, this time to New York, where she is a playwright and now a screenwriter and director. Past Lives is based on her own story, and the idea for it came out of an extraordinary moment when she sat in a Manhattan bar flanked by her white American husband and her Korean childhood sweetheart.

My Best Friend’s Wedding and Stereophonic: Too Much Music and Not Enough

Matt Doyle and Krystal Joy Brown in My Best Friend's Wedding. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios)

The notion of a jukebox stage musical based on the 1997 romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, featuring the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David and directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall (who has helmed ace Broadway revivals of Kiss Me, Kate, Wonderful Town and Anything Goes), sounded promising. (The movie uses Bacharach-David tunes in key moments.) But the show, which is premiering at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine, is both synthetic and clunky. The movie, written by Ron Bass and directed by P.J. Hogan, is an unconventional romantic comedy in which the heroine, Julianne, a magazine food critic, plays every dirty trick she can think of to stop her best friend and one-time lover Michael from walking down the aisle with Kimmy, the woman he’s fallen head over heels in love with, but her schemes keep backfiring. It’s a tricky proposition, because we fall in love with Kimmy too, yet Julianne is the heroine and the movie won’t work if we end up disliking her. The movie pulls it off because Julia Roberts, in a wonderful comic-neurotic performance, plays Julianne.

Pulling Strings: Ronnie Burkett's Wonderful Joe

Joe Pickle and Mister (left) in Ronnie Burkett's Wonderful Joe. (Photo: Ian Jackson)

Ronnie Burkett, the internationally acclaimed Canadian puppeteer and recent recipient of the Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Award, brings his latest production Wonderful Joe to Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. This poignant and wickedly funny show, running until Oct. 24, spotlights Burkett’s unparalleled skill in marionette theatre, weaving a tale that is both deeply human and fantastically imaginative.

The Weir: Ghost Stories

Stephanie Jean Lane, Philip Themio Stoddard, Harry Smith, Sean Bridgers and Joey Collins in The Weir. (Photo: David Dashiell)

Director Eric Hill, scenic designer Randall Parsons, lighting designer Matthew E. Adelson and a first-rate cast of five actors bring a hushed intimacy and a profound sense of place and community to the Berkshire Theatre Group’s production of Conor McPherson’s The Weir. The play, which premiered in London in 1997 and transferred to Broadway two years later, is set in a rural pub in County Leitrim where four locals share drinks with a young Dubliner, Valerie (Stephanie Jean Lane), who has just rented an old house in the area. Finbar (Harry Smith), a hotel proprietor who no longer lives in the countryside, is showing her around the town. The pub’s owner and bartender is Brendan (Philip Themio Stoddard); the other men in the room, Jack (Sean Bridgers) and Jim (Joey Collins), are older. Randomly the conversation turns to episodes that the tipplers have had, directly or indirectly, with fairies and ghosts.

The Lost Weekend: A Brilliant Darkness

Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1945).

“It’s like the doctor was just telling me—delirium is a disease of the night, so good night.” – Bellevue Nurse Bim, in The Lost Weekend.

The Lost Weekend, released November 29, 1945. Paramount Pictures. Directed by Billy Wilder, Produced by Charles Brackett, Screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on a novel by Charles Jackson. Cinematography by John Seitz. Edited by Doane Harrison. Music by Miklos Rozsa.  Duration: 101 minutes. Featuring Ray Milland and Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Howard Da Silva, Doris Dowling, Frank Faylen. Wilder has explained that part of what originally drew him to this material was having worked with Raymond Chandler on the screenplay for Double Indemnity, subsequent to Brackett’s brief vacation. Chandler had been a recovering alcoholic during that stint and claimed that the stress and tumult of his working relationship with Wilder (actually not that much different from Wilder’s relationship with Brackett) caused him to start drinking again to survive the collaboration. Wilder has claimed that he made the film, about a drunk with chronic writer’s black, at least partly in order to explain Chandler to himself.

One’s Company, Two’s a Crowd: that could be the business card logo of struggling novelist Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend, but also of his real life alter ego Charles Jackson, author of the novel on which Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett based their Academy Award-winning 1945 cinematic study of the struggle to outrun your own shadow. This unsettling masterpiece of internalized noir is an example of a certain brand of dark cinema at its finest, and when it was shown recently on the TCM network we got to see exactly why that is: it’s a kind of exotic corporate merger between personal and professional angst, exploring two competing compulsions, writing and drinking, and it takes no prisoners in exposing the raw nerve inhabiting and inhibiting the urge to tell stories. Ironically, it also demonstrated to Brackett and Wilder that, at least for the time being, they were stronger working in tandem than apart, despite the fact that they could barely stand being in the same room together.