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

.

‎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.