|
Opinion: June / July 2002
Peter Haining once edited a book called Detours Into the Macabre,
collecting Horror stories by major writers from other fields (William
Faulkner, Somerset Maugham, Raymond Chandler, even Winston Churchill).
It is a commonplace that all important writers, from DH Lawrence (The
Rocking Horse Winner) to Fay Weldon (Puffball), come up
with a least one ghost or Horror story. Less noted is that the same
holds true for the cinema: most A-list pantheon directors manage at
least one genre movie. Witness: Bergman (Hour of the Wolf),
Fellini (Toby Dammit), Murnau (Nosferatu),
Dreyer (Vampyr), Hitchcock (Psycho),
Powell (Peeping Tom), Truffaut (The Green Room)
and Kubrick (The Shining). Hawks puppeteered Christian
Nyby through The Thing From Another World, Kurosawa
and Welles both played Macbeth for weird horror and
Buñuel's macabre streak included a crawling hand in An
Exterminating Angel. There are even weird credits for Richard
Attenborough (Magic) and James Ivory (Savages).
Many of these balance the low esteem of being Horror movies with the
cultural plus factor of being literary adaptations. For his 'detour
into the macabre', Jean Renoir, frequently nominated as one of the top
three or four film directors of all time, selected Robert Louis Stevenson's
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
TV techniques
Renoir's Le Testament du Dr Cordelier, made for French
television in 1959, was shot less like a film than a live broadcast.
It opens with a brief explanatory sequence set inside a TV studio that
explains some of the techniques used: the cast rehearsed as if for a
stage play and each scene was covered by up to five cameras so the director
could make editing decisions during taping. Even scenes shot not on
sets but on everyday Paris locations have an effectively makeshift look,
reminiscent of early British television shows like Dixon of
Dock Green or the Quatermass serials, with
surprised passersby rather than drilled extras sometimes getting in
on the action. Like FW Murnau (Der Januskopf) and Stephen
Weeks (I, Monster), Renoir changes the character names,
but Le Testament - though set in contemporary Paris
- is the most faithful filming of the novella. Following Stevenson's
story structure, the first half presents Jean-Louis Barrault's Docteur
Cordelier (Jekyll) and Monsieur Opale (Hyde) as separate people. The
viewpoint character is Joly (Teddy Bilis), Cordelier's lawyer (Stevenson's
Utterson), who is puzzled when the humanitarian researcher draws up
a will (in French, un testament) leaving his property to the casually
violent thug Opale. Unlike almost all other versions of the story, Renoir
does not pad out the text by introducing extra characters (typically,
two women to mirror each side of the character's double life).
Street crime
At about the half-way mark, after Opale's street crimes (trampling a
child, murdering a gdignitary) have made him a fugitive and an offscreen
transformation has shocked Dr Severin (Michel Vitold) to a heart attack,
Joly is summoned to the Cordelier residence because it seems Opale is
holed up in Cordelier's laboratory and may be on the point of murdering
the scientist. When Joly confronts Opale, the villain insists the lawyer
listen to Cordelier's taped confession (in French, also un testament),
which explains the familiar business of Cordelier's experimental serum
and his transformation into an anarchic libertine ('When I become Opale
for the first time, I succeeded in shattering both my own body and the
framework of your society'). Now addicted to the transforming drug,
Opale commits suicide by taking an overdose and in death becomes Cordelier.
In the novella, Utterson breaks in to find Hyde already dead, then reads
Jekyll's confessional narrative; this slight rejigging, delaying the
monster's death until after the lengthy flashback, plays much better.
Renoir's chief interest in the project was the opportunity to work
with the major stage star Barrault, best known in films for Les Enfants
du Paradis. The role of Jekyll-and-Hyde is a challenge that tempts star
actors into Horror; Barrault, while staying remarkably close to Stevenson's
conception, delivers one of the most surprising, singular and creepy
readings of the part(s). Tom Milne, in The Aurum Film Encyclopedia,
notes the kinship between Opale and Michel Simon's 'nihilist tramp'
in Renoir's 1936 classic Boudu Sauvé des Eaux,
but the modern viewer is more likely to make a connection with an earlier
hobo, the screen character created by Charlie Chaplin, and Testament
works as a deconstruction of the public and private Chaplin
personae. The dignified, dapper, white-haired Dr Cordelier is the image
of the offscreen Chaplin of later years (down to the squeaky voice),
while the sexualization of his motivation (in one of the few scenes
invented for the film, a younger Cordelier resists a seductive patient
even though he writhes with obvious desire) recalls the comedian's well-known
womanising.
Silent speed
Opale, the cane-twirling, shaggy-haired murderer in shabby clothes,
hitches his shoulders and shuffles just like the Little Tramp, as if
moving at jerky silent speed through modern Paris. Cordelier's initial
liberation and eventual enslavement through projecting himself onto
Opale not only mirrors Chaplin's specific situation but that of any
performer who becomes overly identified with one role and wishes to
move on.
Chaplin's own escape was Monsieur Verdoux, a dapper French mass murderer
who could well be a younger Cordelier or an older Opale. Chaplin offers
sentiment tinged with sadism: the little fellow kicking the huge cop
in the bum is, after all, also the bigshot director with complete power
over the booted bit-player. Some scandal-seekers (cuing Malcolm McDowell's
murderous Chaplin-á-clef in Blake Edwards' Sunset)
have gone so far as to suggest that Charlie was personally overfond
of taking his fists to defenceless bystanders. The scene in which Opale
tramples the child (always the most shocking Hyde transgression) is
a bizarre, cruel reminder of Chaplin's penchant for underage love matches.
Renoir, the great humanitarian director, and Barrault, the great mime,
must have had ambiguous feelings about Chaplin (Charlot is practically
a sainted figure in France), and this combination of tribute and character
assassination manages to work through their feelings about the Little
Tramp and his unhappy creator. Entertaining and charming as Opale is,
especially compared to the stuffy supporting cast, he is also a monster.
Minor Renoir
Withal, this is minor Renoir. Though it has one of the great Jekyll-Hyde
performances, it isn't even a major Stevenson adaptation. Aside from
Barrault, the neglected cast shuffle through stooge roles (the only
other iconic presence, in a tiny part, is Gaston Modot, star of Bunuel's
L'Age d'Or and Renoir's La Règle de
Jeu). The on-the-streets sequences have a looseness that is
almost nouvelle vague, but the hastily staged interior scenes are interminably
talky (not a fault of Stevenson's impeccably concise book). Though composer
Joseph Kosma provides a wonderful comic-horrid motif for Opale, much
of the music score is appalling, melodramatic bombast. Yet, as Opale
jaunts through the streets of Paris, searching for mischief to be made,
something genuinely different and challenging is done with one of the
most important and easily taken-for-granted of all Horror properties.
KIM NEWMAN
First Published In: Shivers no.97 (June
/ July 2002) pp.38-39 (UK)
Visit
Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
|
|
