an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 19, Summer 2022, ISSN 1552-5112
Blatant disloyalties of cinema adaptations: some
diabolically clumsy cases
in Robert Louis Stevenson's works
Stevenson died right before the advent of that
new form of art we call, today, “the cinema.” The very special way Tusitala –‘The Teller of Tales’, as the native Samoans
called him - moves his characters turning them into “figures in landscape”, as
a critic put it; his thrift and precision of style; his fleeing from the three-decker Victorian
novel, even more so, from the detailed realism of the decadents, speak clearly
of the fascination he would have felt for motion pictures and for the many
possibilities of a film script.
We are then here
presented but with the one vision, for all the film versions of his works
appeared posthumously.
Stevenson based his craft on the image projected through action rather than on psychological characterisation. His novels are “filmic”. His scenes could be cut up with scissors and shot. His essays, more especially his early ones, were described as “picturesque” owing to his enormous capacity to recreate the atmosphere of a place as the background to his thought. This is even more obvious in “A Gossip on Romance”, on which we shall dwell in the coming chapters.
The right kind of thing shall fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in music. The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature... This then, is the plastic part of literature; to embody character, thought or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind’s eye. (T28:123, emphasis mine).
These
words read, shockingly, like sound pieces of advice offered to a filmmaker.
They speak, undauntedly, against those static illustrations, those stagnant
images nailed in the nursery, contravening and defying
the whole dictum of Louis’ art, “kinesis”. To state, that the cinema, by reason
of its nature, came to the rescue offering the author the very platform he
needed to enable a wider understanding and appreciation of his works is,
nonetheless, pettifogging and inexact. There are, no
doubt, some excellent film versions of his classics, ponderously celebrated by
cinema reviewers and, more notably and aptly by Stevenson scholars. For
instance, Robert Wise’s 1945 film version of The Body Snatcher, casting
Boris Karloff as Gray, Bela Lugosi as Dr. MacFarlane, and Russell Wade as
Fettes, is still hailed as “a rare artistic achievement”. Robert Stevenson’s
1960 Disney adaptation of Kidnapped, starring an excellent Peter Finch
as Alan Breck, is highly appreciated for its fidelity to the original and the
resemblance of the characters “to their literary counterpart”.
Yet, as our most reliable authority, together with Swearingen, J.C. Furnas, voices:
Films have even more to answer for in the sabotage of the third Stevenson item still high in public awareness;
though perhaps not one in ten who has seen a film version of Jekyll knows who
wrote it... Resistance as well as ignorance may enter here... (Furnas,
1952:378, emphasis mine).
Our critic’s
opinion is duly sketched. For, as was the case with publishers and their
namby-pamby illustrations and other mishandling of his essays and poems, the
film industry has deliberately mangled Stevenson’s stories for over a century
now. Unlike the former, the latter story
is well documented.[1]
And yet like it,
and because of it, the nature of my work here precludes both extensive
enumeration and careful consideration of those too many “apelike horrors
perpetrated... in scenarios smoky with sex in the interpolated orgy scenes”.
All these money-making, notwithstanding its few merits, boomed Louis “on the
basis of sensational effects” and “creeping renown” (...) “to identify him with
literary genres of low prestige. Grave observers prone to mistrust
popularity and virtuosity found this hard to overlook. Stevenson was hardly
cold in his grave when the first peevish exceptions to his literary apotheosis
were entered”. (Furnas, ibid. 379)
In a technological
era that has made visual representation vapid by reason of intemperance of
effects, a mention of those marcescent film versions attached to the stem of
“adaptations”; of but a few “scenes” concomitant with that disparagement on the
big screen must suffice. Scenes rather than stills, for a still is not the
film, same as an illustration is not the novel. Among the most blatant felonies
are those of odd titles bringing the action to recent events; transferring
settings; deviating too grossly to be labeled “inspired by”; making everything
pale by comparison with their barely recognisable
originals. That is the case, for instance, of the 1972 experimental TV Italian
production of Giacomo Battiato’s rendering of The
Dynamiter, which appeared under Dentro
la casa della vecchia
signora. Of Peter Stewart’s 1947 Adventure Island for Paramount
which is but a work of “fabrication and caricature” of The Ebb Tide. Of
Jesús Franco’s 1987 Lago de las vírgenes,
casting Eduardo Fajardo and Lola Gaos, loosely based
on The Isle of Voices. Of the TV mini-series in Giorgio Moser’s 1966 Aventure di mare e di costa, supposedly
“inspired” by The Bottle Inn, yet not as abominable as the most recent,
2005, BBC production by Brendan Maher of Kidnapped and its sequel, Catriona,
shot in New Zealand. Still more censurable, by reason of its much wider
distribution is The Strange Door, Joseph Pevney’s
1951 production for Universal International, with such stars as Charles
Laughton and Boris Karloff, which was set to adapt Stevenson’s story The
Sire of Maledroit’s Door. [2]
Fortunately, these illusive and allusive derivative works appear on screen but rarely, and are not easy to find. And yet, some, like Dylan Thomas’s screenplay based on The Beach of Falesá, “the first realistic South Seas story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life” (L7:161), have never been produced[3] no matter how interesting for both the literary enthusiast and the academic.
Countless are the
cinema versions of Tusitala’s classics. Prof. Dury, of the University of Bergamo, lists over a hundred
items - leaving aside those of Treasure Island and The Strange Case
of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to which we shall dedicate the coming
paragraphs. Of these, twelve entries are of The Black Arrow, some
seventeen of Kidnapped and The Suicide Club. With a few exceptions, they document how much
the cinema industry has been drawn to the imaginative force and the filmic
value of the writer’s fiction. Yet also, how incurious it has shown itself to
his travel books and other non-fictional works that are equally absorbing and
susceptible of adaptation. We are glad, notwithstanding, that no biopic on
Stevenson has been filmed to date, other than documentaries and dramatisations on his life and works [4]. Coming to the flagships of Stevenson’s fiction, Treasure
Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the filmed
versions quickly multiplied. However, most of these are based on humdrum stage
adaptations rather than on Louis’ originals [5]. Of these, T. R.
Sullivan’s dramatisation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde with Richard Mansfield[6] in the double act, at the Madison Square Theatre, New
York, on 12th September 1887, is of greatest importance, since family members
actually attended what was the first production in that city and Louis tells us
about it in his letters.
Once again, reading
his comments on his works in his marvellous correspondence
is to vouch for that uncommon self-consciousness and foresight about his books.
He consistently proves himself his more outstanding and yet stinging critic.
In 1889, Louis writes to Longman from Honolulu, in his
usual half-acrimonious, half-playful tone:
Yours received
with news of your brilliant feats of war against the man, Mansfield. I
have had some experience of him in his native lair (though I believe as a
matter of history the man’s Irish) and I can appreciate the high nature of your
task. His agent was I thought -if possible-worthy of him: a tougher grain of
the wood, only wanting polish I should like to put up statues of both of them... (L6:260, emphasis mine).
There was something
amiss about Richard Mansfield’s production of Dr Jekyll in London in
August 1888. In a letter to the editor
of the New York Sun, Louis had written:
From
Mr. Sullivan (the author of Mr. Mansfield’s version) I have met with every
civility, and from Mansfield himself I am now in receipt of monthly cheques.
The version is fully authorised by me (L6:125).
Whatever happened to be the trouble? What were these “brilliant feats of war” against Mansfield? Mehew conjectures there was some trouble with the shared royalties on the play (L6: 260, n.1); although a closer look at the letters suggests a less vague reason as I contend. As usually, the answer is provided by RLS in a letter, to Bocock[7] he wrote...
Your prominent dramatic critic, writing like a journalist, has written like a braying ass; what he meant is probably quite different and true enough -that the book is ugly and the allegory too like the usual pulpit fudge and not just enough to the modesty of facts.. Hyde was... not, Great Gods! a mere voluptuary. There is no harm in a voluptuary; and none, with my hand on my heart and in the sight of God, none -no harm whatever - in what prurient fools call “immorality”. The harm was in Jekyll because he was a hypocrite -not because he was fond of women; he says so himself; but people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality. The Hypocrite let out the beast Hyde, who is no more sexual than another, but who is the essence of cruelty and malice, and selfishness and cowardice: and these are the diabolic in man -not this poor wish to have a woman; that they make such a cry about... (L6:56, emphasis added).
He knew that the “allegory”, if such,
was going to be wrongly represented even when he could still not possibly think
of cinematic versions. This first dramatisation was
enough to provoke his distrust. He was right, for the passage quoted above
might well serve as the most straight to the point, perceptive criticism of the
three best known adaptations of his novella for the screen, those starred by
John Barrymore (John Robertson’s 1920), Frederic March (Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931) and Spencer Tracy (Victor Fleming’s
1941).
The true Stevenson admirer will find
these, no matter how popular and celebrated, among the most baleful and
disgusting to watch. All three interpret nebulous Mr. Hyde as Jekyll’s
repressed sexual drive. All three see in the scientism of this highly
respectable man his “trick” to unleash and to satisfy his sexual appetite
leaving his reputation still intact. As Linehan contends, “Stevenson vents
(here) his exasperation with Victorian prudery that equates sexual appetite
with evil, and thereby fails to see that Hyde’s cruelty stems not from Hyde’s drive
for sex, but from Jekyll’s drive for concealment”. [8]
In other words, it is Jekyll’s
hypocrisy that RLS finds repugnant. He would, surely, be as indignant about
these films as he is in this letter at the insinuation that sexual desire is
intrinsically evil. It is Hyde’s cruelty trampling “calmly over the child’s
body and” leaving “her screaming on the ground” that is diabolical; it is his
cowardice murdering Carew that is utterly evil. Another fabrication common in
the three films is the inclusion of female characters deliberately conceived to
add a strong sexual content. These are both as salacious as they are sordid;
and none of them appears in the original.
Two examples will do.
Source: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) theatrical
poster
https://www.amazon.com/Jekyll-Spencer-Ingrid-Bergman-Masterprint/dp/B07GWD6T5X.
Fleming’s version casts
Ingrid Bergman as prostitute Ivy Peterson - who was not even conceived by
Stevenson - just because Hollywood wanted to give the young voluptuous actress
of the recent “Intermezzo”, a part in the production. Among other deceptions there is the sequence
of sexual fantasies Jekyll undergoes in his incomplete transformation.
Overtaken by some paroxysm of athletic-like seizures, we see an elegant Spencer
Tracy transmogrified into a dishevelled Spencer Tracy
much closer to a brute than to the devilish monster.
Mamoulian
casts Rose Hobart as Muriel Carew, Carew’s daughter and Jekyll’s fiancée, -
also invented - the kind of unattainable lady whose natural desires are
restrained by her rigorous father; which would trigger
Jekyll’s latent urge to murder Carew and to gratify, as Hyde, his sensual
pleasures with Ivy Pierson, a night performer and prostitute. The seduction
scene in which Ivy removes her clothes behind a blanket was taken as a sign, by
a censor, to cut some ten minutes which would be later restored in the video
version. As professor Dury[9] notes, it
was “the many innovative cinematic ideas”, such as “diagonally split screens,
voice-overs (for thoughts), spinning camera and wipes for scene transitions”
that made it so popular. So much so,
that Nollen still calls it "one of the classic
American cinema’s true masterpieces"[10] regardless of its many abominations.
And it was not just Hollywood, for
Continental cinema-makers adhered to these shifts and modifications, both
perpetuating and accentuating them. Of these, surely the most repulsive is
Borowczyk’s Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (1981),
which Guy Barefoot says constitutes “a further case of the story being
transformed so as to fit the conventions of the time... this strand of
post-1960 European cinema demanded not love interest and comic relief but a
display of, and often assault on, the female body”. Borowczyk, Barefoot goes on
to assert, was unscrupulous “to claim that his version was based on Stevenson’s
original notes which he had discovered while undertaking research at Oxford
University.”[11] He later dismissed
the story as a gag.
Film versions make the classic a big
case addition, aside from Jekyll’s transforming potions and his miscalculations
there is no intimation in RLS’s original that Jekyll was doing drugs unlike
Conan Doyle’s hero overtly smoking marijuana.
Among these machinations, run mostly by the greed of money-making and to compete with other remades, the most spurious to Stevenson’s conception and treatment of the story is that disclosing, from the outset, that Jekyll and Hyde are not two independent beings but that they embody the same and only man.[12] The enormous G. K. Chesterton had pointed, way before these irruptions onto the screen, that Stevenson was under attack from “the Post-Victorian mudslingers”.
…
those anonymous authorities in the newspapers, who dismiss Stevenson with such
languid grace, will say that there is something quite cheap and obvious about
the idea that one man is really two men and can be divided into the evil and
the good. Unfortunately for them, that does not happen to be the idea. The
real stab of the story is not in the discovery that the one man is two men; but
in the discovery that the two men are one man. After all the diverse wandering and warring
of those two incompatible beings, there was still one man born and only one man
buried. Jekyll and Hyde have become a proverb and a joke; only it is a proverb
read backwards and a joke that nobody really sees (Chesterton, 1927: 51,
emphasis added).
Chesterton was right, Stevenson
constructed the novella meticulously so that there is no intimation of such
hellish duplicity in his pages, no spoiler as there is in the fleeing images
thrust onto the screen. The novella cannot be read afresh,
because its motive is too well known. The mystery is solved and more
than sparsely given out in the very first minutes. But in the original the
truth is revealed only when we reach the very last pages of the final chapter,
“Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case”. That is where the real punch
against the too many false virtues of the dogmatic, philistine and prude
Victorian society lies. It is, precisely, that dreadful game on ambivalence
that cinema makers overlooked. They were vastly possessed by the ghostly yarn,
too intent on their Freudian interpretations to grasp the subversive critique.
It was easier to lose the poignant argument to “adapt” the beasty tale.
All of these “pecadillos”,
and many such more, where already present in the earliest version mentioned
here, to wit, Robertson’s 1920 for Paramount, where, Dury
tells us, Carew “suggests Jekyll should "go on the town", and
encourages an exotic dancer to seduce him”; “Barrymore’s Jekyll is the first to
indulge in sexual depravity and lacks the virtuous justification added by later
Hollywood versions”.[13] And still
again Nollen states, though it "deviates
considerably from the novella, yet it… ranks as one of the definitive
interpretations of a Stevenson work" (Nollen,
1994:183)
We could point to many more recent
cinema versions of the great story about the “vivisection of a soul”[14] to the same critical comment: that Stevenson was well alert
for all these ominous representations were already present in the stage
adaptations of his day. Further evidence added to that in his correspondence is
the following excerpt from an interview, in which Stevenson, complains about
these “forerunners to this trend”,
...
Dr. Jekyll should be the central figure and not Mr. Hyde, but on the stage the
first character is made subservient to the second, which was not my idea at
all.[15]
These melodramas, especially the
“long-running Sullivan-Mansfield version[16] overshadowed competing serious stage adaptations in the
years that followed, becoming a central influence on the many silent film
versions[17] created in the early
twentieth century”... And through its popularity, it took “a further leap in
the era of sound films” (Linehan, 2003: 150). The
audience who contemplates these adaptations and has some familiarity with the
books, surmises that something is not quite right with them. Though captivated
by Stevenson’s stories, in which he found the vehicle for his popular
recreations, Victor Fleming’s 1934 Treasure Island, for MGM, with an
annoying Jim (Jackie Cooper) is described by Nollen
as “maudlin” and full of “Hollywood hokum” (Nollen,
1984: 417).
Source: Treasure Island (1934) theatrical
poster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island_%281934_film%29
Furnas condemns, very rightly, Byron Haskin’s 1950 Disney production of Treasure Island, with Robert Newton playing Long John Silver and Bobby Driscoll as Jim Hawkins, which he says, “has taken the worst beating”... “casting Jim as a child instead of a vigorous youth in mid-teens, and particularly distinguished itself by carefully throwing away the story’s best sound-film scenes, such as the squawking of the parrot in the dark blockhouse, Ben Gunn’s parlour” (Furnas, 1952: 458, n.8).
Scriptwriters show a vast ignorance of
Stevenson’s stance as an author of the Scottish Calvinist tradition he strove
to leave behind, and, above all, of his essays. In “Lay Morals”[18] they would have found what Louis really meant. The danger
is not to be “tormented by a very imperious physical desire” which is “a
physical need, like the want of food or slumber”. This is adequate inasmuch as we don’t become hypocrites and fall on the “one
declension which is irretrievable and draws on the rest. And this is to lose
consciousness of oneself”...
(T26:28, emphasis added).
In “Reflections and Remarks on Human Life”[19] RLS gives us his musings in a strikingly beautiful
paragraph that accounts both for the use of violence in Treasure Island,
he had been unsparingly accused of, and for “love’s capacity to promote psychic
self-unification and moral self-awareness” (Linehan, 2003:208).
... And while I may still continue by my inconsiderate or violent life to spread far-reaching havoc throughout man’s confederacy, I can do so no more, at least, in ignorance and levity; one face shall wince before me in flesh; I have taken home the sorrows I create to my own hearth and bed; and though I continue to sin, it must be now with open eyes (T26:89).
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 19, Summer 2022, ISSN 1552-5112
Notes
[1] In 1984, McFarland Incorporated published an
in-depth study of Stevenson’s cinematic legacy, Robert Louis Stevenson:
Life, Literature and the Silver Screen, by the
prestigious film critic, Scott Allen Nollen, together
with a thorough discussion and demonstration of how Stevenson’s stories have
been misinterpreted by Hollywood. References to such disfiguring are also found
in William Luhr and Peter Lehman’s reflective Authorship
and Narrative in the Cinema. New York: G.P. Putnams’s
Sons, 1977, and in the many interviews with directors who like Rouben Mamoulian -see The Film Journal, 2:2 (Jan-Mar 1973): 36-44-
adapted Stevenson’s novels.