Transformed Into an Entirely Different Plot
Today's review: The 1990 TV movie adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde.
By this point in the retrospective, I was assuming all the Jekyll and Hyde adaptations would hit most of the same beats. Jekyll would be portrayed as a decent guy who wanted to separate our good and evil halves and there would be at least one major female character to serve as a love interest. The 1990 TV movie adaptation, however, put several unique spins on the tale and thus kept everything from feeling samey. While I appreciate that on one level, I’m not sure I entirely approve of these particular spins.
Most of this movie takes place in flashback, with the framing device being a lawyer named Jeffrey Utterson (Ronald Pickup) tracking down the sole beneficiary of Dr. Jekyll’s will, a woman named Sara Crawford (Cheryl Ladd). The flashback itself has two concurrent stories that take at least half the movie to truly connect. Jekyll (Michael Caine) is a respected doctor and scientist who’s having a feud with his father-in-law Dr. Charles Lanyon (Joss Ackland), partly because of a disagreement of science but mostly for personal reasons. Sara is Lanyon’s other daughter who is clearly harboring feelings for Jekyll, but is caught in the middle of the feud. Then we have the Hyde section, where Hyde is causing trouble all over London and the police are having trouble catching him, concentrating most of their efforts on what I think is a brothel and on an odd bottle of powder they found in Hyde’s rented room. Somewhat going against form, Jekyll is much more the focus of the movie than Hyde is, which has potential to be interesting. Unfortunately, the movie was much more interested in making up new stuff than exploring Jekyll’s psyche.
The opening credits of the movie say that it was “derived from” Robert Louis’ Stevenson’s original story, which was the first indication that this movie was going to take liberties. And oh boy, did it. This is the only adaptation I’ve seen where Jekyll not only has a love interest, but a wife (well, former wife) and living parents. I don’t necessarily object to such major changes, but I’d prefer if they were used in some interesting way. Jekyll’s parents don’t show up until maybe halfway through the movie, and add nothing except the potential for tragedy later on. His dead wife is actually even more frustrating in that regard, since she had the potential to tie in to the plot. We learn that she died of pneumonia, and Lanyon blames Jekyll for it because he was trying experimental procedures (mostly drugs) to save her life, which may have hastened her death instead (though the movie never tells us if they did or not). You’d think that perhaps this is setting up that one of his procedures wound up being the same drink that causes the Hyde transformation, and the transformation was what killed her, or that she died because of Hyde rather than pneumonia, or that the grief of her death is what caused Jekyll to start looking into the experiments that would lead to Hyde. Instead, it adds nothing but an extra reason for Lanyon to dislike Jekyll, one that probably wouldn’t have been necessary if it wasn’t for one thing.
That one thing is the inclusion of Sara, who almost single-handedly turns this movie from “horror story” into “soap opera”. If you stripped the Hyde part out of this movie (which wouldn’t be all that hard to do, as you’ll see), this would play out like a low-tier period piece romantic drama or tragedy. Sara is a married woman who always had feelings for Jekyll, but he chose her sister first, but now with her sister dead and her husband abroad, she’s increasingly tempted to act on her feelings, despite the pressures of both her father and society. You even get tropes like the outraged father punishing her for her indecency, the catty gossiping frenemy (Diane Keen), and the reporter (David Schofield; I also feel like I need to point out that his last name is Snape) who senses a good story and scandal. Sara’s also fairly inconsistent at times, not wanting to cause a public scene one moment and then publicly kissing Jekyll where anyone could see the next, or doing an understandable but unearned 180 between what we see in the flashback and what little we get from the framing device. Oh, and the writers threw in an element (possibly two or three, depending on how you want to look at it) that pretty much give you a melodrama/soap opera bingo. I probably wouldn’t have been too enamored with this if it was an original piece; putting it in the middle of the Jekyll and Hyde story just makes the flaws even more glaring.
Then again, maybe writer/director David Wickes was just using the Jekyll and Hyde story to bolster the material he really wanted to tell, because Hyde doesn’t have too much of a presence or impact on the plot until the final act. He’s mostly on screen for five minute intervals, and doesn’t do much in the way of talking (though he definitely does plenty of unpleasant actions). Everything about him is just kind of there, and that extends to his “backstory”. Ordinarily, we’d get at least one scene explaining Jekyll’s motivation for creating the mixture that leads to Hyde. Instead, it’s vaguely alluded to as his “life’s work”, and he has a few conversations with his students that feints in the direction of the usual “I want to separate the good and bad sides of humans for the betterment of mankind” explanation, but that’s all we get. Indeed, we have no idea how long Jekyll’s been taking the potion, just that we’ve hit the point in the narrative where Hyde is starting to assert control involuntarily. If this was your first exposure to the Jekyll and Hyde story, you’d probably be very confused.
That being said, the movie did surprise me by having quite a few beats that were similar to the original story, especially since it deviated so wildly in a lot of other respects. The movie doesn’t make an immediate connection between Jekyll and Hyde (it takes twenty minutes before we see a transformation); one of the first acts of the story is that Hyde knocks down a young girl, similar to the first chapter of the book; Jekyll’s will is a plot point; Jekyll and Lanyon disagree on certain matters of science and medicine, though it’s a much more friendly disagreement in the book; and Jekyll as Hyde seeks the aid of and then transforms in front of someone near the end of the story. The story even kind of uses that plot point I mentioned in my review of the silent version, though it’s executed slightly differently. Clearly, David Wickes has read the original story, but I don’t know why he’d throw in small beats like this while mostly ignoring the main plot or the more classic variations of it. To make it feel more legitimate, perhaps?
The last things worth noting about the movie are the aesthetics and some awkward continuity choices. While the movie mostly goes for the usual Victorian feel, there are a few instances where they go over-the-top. One, predictably, is Hyde’s makeup-while all the previous versions I’ve covered still looked relatively normal if a bit off-putting (an understatement when it comes to the ’31 version), this one is more akin to the Elephant Man. A lot of Jekyll and Hyde art likes to depict Hyde as monstrous, so this doesn’t bother me too much. I had more of a problem with the depictions of the women’s clothes. While the Victorian era was the era of big bustles, they seem far too large and ungainly, and while it’s possible they actually were that bad back then, it doesn’t jibe with what we see in other movies or art. Actually, most of Sara’s outfits just seemed off in one way or another, and since her outfits are generally the most colorful thing in a shot, it becomes way easier to notice those problems. Finally, the madam (Miriam Karlin) who runs the establishment where Hyde likes to hang out is downright grotesque. She reminds me a bit of Tim Burton/Helena Bonham Carter’s look for Mrs. Lovett, only off-putting rather than quirky. Her character is a trope and generally meant to be ugly, but I think it goes a step too far here, especially since almost everything else isn’t operating on that level. I think I was more unsettled by her than by Hyde, if you can believe that.
As for the continuity errors, there are only three I can think of, but they’re pretty glaring. One comes right at the beginning, as we transition into the flashback and the main story. In the framing device, Utterson is talking to Sara, and she angrily tells him she wants nothing to do with Jekyll’s will because of Hyde. Utterson seems confused, and we focus on his face as we transition to the flashback. It’s obvious that Utterson is unaware of the true nature of Hyde, so my thought was that we would get some flashbacks of Utterson’s experiences with Hyde, then we’d come back to the framing device and Sara would fill him (and us) in on the rest. Instead, the whole flashback plays out uninterrupted. It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but those who were paying attention might be a little annoyed that the movie gives the impression that Utterson is remembering things he couldn’t possibly have known about or been present for. The second is less a continuity error, but just an odd beat. When we finally get the first transformation scene, Hyde takes a picture of himself. Jekyll was clearly setting it up beforehand, so it wasn’t entirely Hyde’s idea. I assumed he’d done it to provide evidence of what he’d done, to show Lanyon or someone else that his ideas actually worked, but then it only ever comes up again once, briefly, and not in the way I expected. So why did Jekyll want to get a picture of Hyde? With no other evidence to work with, I have to assume he was following orders from Admiral Plot Device.
Finally, the big one is the transition to the third act. Sara has had an encounter with Hyde that’s left her with notable bruises on her face. Despite this, She and Jekyll decide to embrace their feelings for each other, and the music swells as they kiss. Then we get a montage of quick images of her and Jekyll being romantic and domestic together, and the music continues until we finally cut to a scene of Sara (sans bruises) and Jekyll attending an opera, whereupon the story resumes. Up until we got to the opera, I had thought the montage was a series of images that flashed through Jekyll’s head of what he wanted, but couldn’t actually have because of Hyde. But no, we’re later told that two weeks have passed since Sara met Hyde, so I guess all of that actually happened. Around the same time, we cut back to the police investigation, where they’ve finally called Dr. Lanyon in to investigate the powder, even though the police said they wanted to find Hyde quickly and Lanyon had been brought up earlier as someone to ask for help (and there’s no indication that he wasn’t able to come until now). Given that most of the other developments with the powder had happened relatively quickly, this gave the odd impression (to me, at least) that time had advanced for Jekyll but not for the police. Obviously that wasn’t the case, but everything about that material just didn’t feel like it flowed naturally with what had come before. I guess Wickes wanted to get to the dramatic climax and decided to rush things to get there, sense be damned.
I wouldn’t particularly recommend this version, especially if you’re a fan of the original story. Caine is decent enough, but the massive changes to the story are so baffling (and at times frustrating) that you can’t even appreciate it as a fresh take on the material. But if that’s what you’re looking for, you might have better luck with our final entry in this retrospective…
By this point in the retrospective, I was assuming all the Jekyll and Hyde adaptations would hit most of the same beats. Jekyll would be portrayed as a decent guy who wanted to separate our good and evil halves and there would be at least one major female character to serve as a love interest. The 1990 TV movie adaptation, however, put several unique spins on the tale and thus kept everything from feeling samey. While I appreciate that on one level, I’m not sure I entirely approve of these particular spins.
Most of this movie takes place in flashback, with the framing device being a lawyer named Jeffrey Utterson (Ronald Pickup) tracking down the sole beneficiary of Dr. Jekyll’s will, a woman named Sara Crawford (Cheryl Ladd). The flashback itself has two concurrent stories that take at least half the movie to truly connect. Jekyll (Michael Caine) is a respected doctor and scientist who’s having a feud with his father-in-law Dr. Charles Lanyon (Joss Ackland), partly because of a disagreement of science but mostly for personal reasons. Sara is Lanyon’s other daughter who is clearly harboring feelings for Jekyll, but is caught in the middle of the feud. Then we have the Hyde section, where Hyde is causing trouble all over London and the police are having trouble catching him, concentrating most of their efforts on what I think is a brothel and on an odd bottle of powder they found in Hyde’s rented room. Somewhat going against form, Jekyll is much more the focus of the movie than Hyde is, which has potential to be interesting. Unfortunately, the movie was much more interested in making up new stuff than exploring Jekyll’s psyche.
The opening credits of the movie say that it was “derived from” Robert Louis’ Stevenson’s original story, which was the first indication that this movie was going to take liberties. And oh boy, did it. This is the only adaptation I’ve seen where Jekyll not only has a love interest, but a wife (well, former wife) and living parents. I don’t necessarily object to such major changes, but I’d prefer if they were used in some interesting way. Jekyll’s parents don’t show up until maybe halfway through the movie, and add nothing except the potential for tragedy later on. His dead wife is actually even more frustrating in that regard, since she had the potential to tie in to the plot. We learn that she died of pneumonia, and Lanyon blames Jekyll for it because he was trying experimental procedures (mostly drugs) to save her life, which may have hastened her death instead (though the movie never tells us if they did or not). You’d think that perhaps this is setting up that one of his procedures wound up being the same drink that causes the Hyde transformation, and the transformation was what killed her, or that she died because of Hyde rather than pneumonia, or that the grief of her death is what caused Jekyll to start looking into the experiments that would lead to Hyde. Instead, it adds nothing but an extra reason for Lanyon to dislike Jekyll, one that probably wouldn’t have been necessary if it wasn’t for one thing.
That one thing is the inclusion of Sara, who almost single-handedly turns this movie from “horror story” into “soap opera”. If you stripped the Hyde part out of this movie (which wouldn’t be all that hard to do, as you’ll see), this would play out like a low-tier period piece romantic drama or tragedy. Sara is a married woman who always had feelings for Jekyll, but he chose her sister first, but now with her sister dead and her husband abroad, she’s increasingly tempted to act on her feelings, despite the pressures of both her father and society. You even get tropes like the outraged father punishing her for her indecency, the catty gossiping frenemy (Diane Keen), and the reporter (David Schofield; I also feel like I need to point out that his last name is Snape) who senses a good story and scandal. Sara’s also fairly inconsistent at times, not wanting to cause a public scene one moment and then publicly kissing Jekyll where anyone could see the next, or doing an understandable but unearned 180 between what we see in the flashback and what little we get from the framing device. Oh, and the writers threw in an element (possibly two or three, depending on how you want to look at it) that pretty much give you a melodrama/soap opera bingo. I probably wouldn’t have been too enamored with this if it was an original piece; putting it in the middle of the Jekyll and Hyde story just makes the flaws even more glaring.
Then again, maybe writer/director David Wickes was just using the Jekyll and Hyde story to bolster the material he really wanted to tell, because Hyde doesn’t have too much of a presence or impact on the plot until the final act. He’s mostly on screen for five minute intervals, and doesn’t do much in the way of talking (though he definitely does plenty of unpleasant actions). Everything about him is just kind of there, and that extends to his “backstory”. Ordinarily, we’d get at least one scene explaining Jekyll’s motivation for creating the mixture that leads to Hyde. Instead, it’s vaguely alluded to as his “life’s work”, and he has a few conversations with his students that feints in the direction of the usual “I want to separate the good and bad sides of humans for the betterment of mankind” explanation, but that’s all we get. Indeed, we have no idea how long Jekyll’s been taking the potion, just that we’ve hit the point in the narrative where Hyde is starting to assert control involuntarily. If this was your first exposure to the Jekyll and Hyde story, you’d probably be very confused.
That being said, the movie did surprise me by having quite a few beats that were similar to the original story, especially since it deviated so wildly in a lot of other respects. The movie doesn’t make an immediate connection between Jekyll and Hyde (it takes twenty minutes before we see a transformation); one of the first acts of the story is that Hyde knocks down a young girl, similar to the first chapter of the book; Jekyll’s will is a plot point; Jekyll and Lanyon disagree on certain matters of science and medicine, though it’s a much more friendly disagreement in the book; and Jekyll as Hyde seeks the aid of and then transforms in front of someone near the end of the story. The story even kind of uses that plot point I mentioned in my review of the silent version, though it’s executed slightly differently. Clearly, David Wickes has read the original story, but I don’t know why he’d throw in small beats like this while mostly ignoring the main plot or the more classic variations of it. To make it feel more legitimate, perhaps?
The last things worth noting about the movie are the aesthetics and some awkward continuity choices. While the movie mostly goes for the usual Victorian feel, there are a few instances where they go over-the-top. One, predictably, is Hyde’s makeup-while all the previous versions I’ve covered still looked relatively normal if a bit off-putting (an understatement when it comes to the ’31 version), this one is more akin to the Elephant Man. A lot of Jekyll and Hyde art likes to depict Hyde as monstrous, so this doesn’t bother me too much. I had more of a problem with the depictions of the women’s clothes. While the Victorian era was the era of big bustles, they seem far too large and ungainly, and while it’s possible they actually were that bad back then, it doesn’t jibe with what we see in other movies or art. Actually, most of Sara’s outfits just seemed off in one way or another, and since her outfits are generally the most colorful thing in a shot, it becomes way easier to notice those problems. Finally, the madam (Miriam Karlin) who runs the establishment where Hyde likes to hang out is downright grotesque. She reminds me a bit of Tim Burton/Helena Bonham Carter’s look for Mrs. Lovett, only off-putting rather than quirky. Her character is a trope and generally meant to be ugly, but I think it goes a step too far here, especially since almost everything else isn’t operating on that level. I think I was more unsettled by her than by Hyde, if you can believe that.
As for the continuity errors, there are only three I can think of, but they’re pretty glaring. One comes right at the beginning, as we transition into the flashback and the main story. In the framing device, Utterson is talking to Sara, and she angrily tells him she wants nothing to do with Jekyll’s will because of Hyde. Utterson seems confused, and we focus on his face as we transition to the flashback. It’s obvious that Utterson is unaware of the true nature of Hyde, so my thought was that we would get some flashbacks of Utterson’s experiences with Hyde, then we’d come back to the framing device and Sara would fill him (and us) in on the rest. Instead, the whole flashback plays out uninterrupted. It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but those who were paying attention might be a little annoyed that the movie gives the impression that Utterson is remembering things he couldn’t possibly have known about or been present for. The second is less a continuity error, but just an odd beat. When we finally get the first transformation scene, Hyde takes a picture of himself. Jekyll was clearly setting it up beforehand, so it wasn’t entirely Hyde’s idea. I assumed he’d done it to provide evidence of what he’d done, to show Lanyon or someone else that his ideas actually worked, but then it only ever comes up again once, briefly, and not in the way I expected. So why did Jekyll want to get a picture of Hyde? With no other evidence to work with, I have to assume he was following orders from Admiral Plot Device.
Finally, the big one is the transition to the third act. Sara has had an encounter with Hyde that’s left her with notable bruises on her face. Despite this, She and Jekyll decide to embrace their feelings for each other, and the music swells as they kiss. Then we get a montage of quick images of her and Jekyll being romantic and domestic together, and the music continues until we finally cut to a scene of Sara (sans bruises) and Jekyll attending an opera, whereupon the story resumes. Up until we got to the opera, I had thought the montage was a series of images that flashed through Jekyll’s head of what he wanted, but couldn’t actually have because of Hyde. But no, we’re later told that two weeks have passed since Sara met Hyde, so I guess all of that actually happened. Around the same time, we cut back to the police investigation, where they’ve finally called Dr. Lanyon in to investigate the powder, even though the police said they wanted to find Hyde quickly and Lanyon had been brought up earlier as someone to ask for help (and there’s no indication that he wasn’t able to come until now). Given that most of the other developments with the powder had happened relatively quickly, this gave the odd impression (to me, at least) that time had advanced for Jekyll but not for the police. Obviously that wasn’t the case, but everything about that material just didn’t feel like it flowed naturally with what had come before. I guess Wickes wanted to get to the dramatic climax and decided to rush things to get there, sense be damned.
I wouldn’t particularly recommend this version, especially if you’re a fan of the original story. Caine is decent enough, but the massive changes to the story are so baffling (and at times frustrating) that you can’t even appreciate it as a fresh take on the material. But if that’s what you’re looking for, you might have better luck with our final entry in this retrospective…