Silent movies - Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde

I have a confession to make. I have always been a bigger fan of Stan Laurel than of Oliver Hardy. It's probably that underdog thing again.
That's also the reason why I have Stan on my fan wall of bead loomed portraits, but not Ollie (although I did design pendants of both once).

While Laurel and Hardy appeared in a movie together for the first time in 1921, they did only become an official team in 1927.
My silent movie for today is from 1925 and there's just Stan in it which is a first for me. It's called "Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde".
Am I picking up on last week's post with this? Yes and no. Of course, this is a parody of the 1920 "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" movie, but I found this short film first which then led to the other one. I just thought it would be a good idea to start with the original.

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
(you see both "Pryde" and "Pride" in the title)

As usual, here's the plot with spoilers.

"Dr. Stanislaus Pyckle was the most respected man in town - Heaven knows why --" (unfortunately it seems to be the case that the funny intertitles are not original to the film, but at least try to imitate the jokes and puns of that time).

We see Dr. Pyckle in his laboratory walking back and forth, thinking about how to separate Good and Evil in the human mind - surprisingly watched by an audience of men and his lovely lab assistant.

His first experiments don't go the way he wants them - there are a few nice occasions for some slapstick here - but then inspiration strikes and at last he concocts a potion (why do they always have to look so foamy?).

The transformation is a hilarious take on Barrymore's dramatic one. Dr. Pyckle's legs seem to turn to rubber and he jumps through his lab before falling down behind one of his contraptions and getting back up as Mr. Pryde.

With an evil smile, he makes his way into town. And evil he truly is!
His first victim is a small boy with an ice cream cone. Mr. Pryde pulls him towards himself with his cane, steps on his foot to keep him from escaping, and takes his ice cream away. To add insult to injury, he pulls the boy's cap over his eyes.
The horror!

When he hits another boy with a pea shooter, a crowd follows Mr. Pryde to the lab, but he knocks them all out with one single blow from his pea shooter which gives him time to change back to Dr. Pyckle and deny having seen anyone.
Unfortunately, some of the potion has dripped down into the dog's food and turns him into an evil creature ... going for Pyckle's butt.

Do you recognize him from the Buster Brown films?

Pryde's fiendish actions don't end here, he keeps terrorizing the town.
He offers a flower to an old lady, but it's really a blow tickler which frightens her.
He puts a brick under a hat, so the nearing policeman will hit his foot the brick when he tries to kick the hat (instead the brick hits Pryde in the head when he does).
He pops a paper bag behind an unsuspecting woman.
He taunts a man by putting a finger trap on him.
Will he stop at nothing?

This time an even bigger mob follows him to the lab and again he barely escapes by taking the potion.
His lovely assistant is worried about him, though, and asks him to be let in. By now Pyckle who has run out of the potion has changed back to Pryde, so it's him who opens the door. He winks at her, she hits him over the head with a bottle. He slips his head into the necklace she's wearing.
At that moment, the mob arrives at the lab door again and ......!

Yeah, sorry, that's it. Unfortunately, the ending is lost. That is a bit of an anticlimax, but maybe you want to make up your own ending.

I don't mind saying that I really had fun with this, especially after having watched the feature film the day before.
Laurel's slapstick is spoofing Barrymore's slightly over the top Hyde (not that I didn't enjoy that) perfectly.
I think I liked best how he kept stroking his incredible wig.
Oh, and the way he jumped through town.
No, wait! His hands were the best making fun of Barrymore's long fingers.

Okay, so I simply liked the whole short and it made me laugh more than I had expected.
I really wonder what the ending was as the mob got bigger with each little prank Pryde pulled and he had no chance to escape anymore, especially by practically catching himself in that necklace (I bet that was important for the ending).

I don't think you need to see the 1920 film to have fun with this little comedy, but it makes it even better.


Sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (1925) - A silent film review. On: Movies Silently, July 1, 2018
2. "prettycleverfilmgal": The Trickster Imp | Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde. On: Pretty Clever Films, June 9, 2011
3. D. Cairns: The Sunday Intertitle: Another Fine Pyckle. On: Shadowplay, September 3, 2017

More than one copy?

From Jonathan Edward Durham on Facebook:
"I recommend no fewer than 4 copies of any beloved book. A paperback for traveling and lending to friends, an eBook for reading with greasy snack fingers, an audio book so you know how the characters' names are actually pronounced, and a pristine hardcover to be buried with you like a pharaoh."

Okay, I'm not sure I absolutely agree here.
For example, I can't read at all with greasy snack fingers, not even on my tablet (not because it's still rather new, but because I'm just weird that way). I prefer printed books, anyway, and feel like a traitor to my own principles, but I couldn't resist the lure of The Internet Archive.
Also I said often enough that audio books are not for me.
I'm not even sure about paperback versus a pristine hardcover, but since chances are zero that someone will build a pyramid, even a small one, for me, I don't think I will have to worry about that, anyway.

Multiple copies of a book, however .... weeeellll ... it may be possible that I do have one or the other ....
Sounds weird to you? There you have it, just more proof that I'm weird. 
In order to possibly make it even weirder, let me tell you that I bought those multiple copies myself. Those weren't gifts from when someone was brave enough to give me a book by a favorite author thinking I didn't own it yet.

Why would I even want to own more than one copy of a book, though?
The following examples are all children's books. That doesn't mean I don't have extra copies of other books at all, but it was the easiest for me to just go through one cabinet and find something for each one of my reasons.

1. "I have been looking for you for so long."

When I was a kid, my best friend had the book "Hand in Hand der Sonne nach" by Betty MacDonald, original title "Nancy and Plum". It was about two orphaned girls escaping a terrible boarding school and finding themselves new parents.
I loved that book and as a grownup I wanted to have it in my collection. Easier said than done, a lot easier! It seemed impossible to find that book. I looked in used book stores, at fleamarkets, no success.
Then the Internet came along. Surely, that was my big chance. Dream on. I looked for it regularly and registered email notifications for used book sites, but nothing much turned up, and when it did, someone else had been faster. This was a very sought after book, and as far as I could see, prices were quite ridiculous for the edition I wanted. Because you know, I didn't want a paperback, I wanted exactly the book I loved as a child, dust cover included if possible.
Finally, it was my turn to be the lucky one. It wasn't horribly expensive and I could hardly believe it was really mine after "only" about 25 years or so of looking for it.
For some reason, I was so used to search for it that I didn't stop right away, though. That's why I have more than one now. Or two. I can always finance my old age selling it if needed, right (yup, obviously still sought after)? Well, at least to finance one day of food the way prices are.
Seriously, though, I have found my peace by now and don't look for it anymore (... very often, but not with the intent of buying, I swear).

2. "I wonder what they are like in English." or "I want at least one set that's looking good."

Sounds like two reasons, but it was actually a mix for this particular set.
I told the story of "The Dark is Rising" last year, what it's about, why it looks so messed up, and why I didn't buy a new copy (for the memory).
It's the green one, you can tell how bad it looks compared to the others.

So eventually I got the English set because the price was okay at the time, I was curious if there were differences to the German translations, and I had one perfect looking set.

I have other books in both English and German. Sometimes I replace the translation with the original, sometimes I start a series with the German translation and then continue in English, either because I don't want to wait for the translation - that's why my Pratchetts are divided in German paperbacks and English hardcovers - or because a series simply isn't translated anymore which always makes me wonder if interest in Germany has waned or what the reason could have been to stop translating an alphabet series at R like it happened for Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series for example.
I have begun to add the earlier Pratchetts in English as well, though, bit by bit. As long as I still have space available, I don't need to decide if the German paperbacks will have to go, but it will probably happen eventually.

3. "I have more than one edition and I can't stop."

That may be the weirdest reason for some people. Heck, even it even feels a bit weird to me.
Why would you want different editions of the same book? Okay, maybe an older translation and a modern one if there are significant differences and you have fun comparing them, but what other reason could there be?

There's only one example for that in my collection. Again it's a children's book set and that may make the reason a little more obvious. Sentimentality.
If you have read my post about the "Sue Barton" books, you will know that I don't feel that way about all books. In that case, I got myself the old edition and put the newer ones in the public book cabinet, no regrets. I have also done that with some other books. If I found a better looking copy, the old one went unless there is a story connected to it. In fact, I'm about to look through my books to see if there are still extra copies that I simply haven't pulled yet. We aren't talking dozens here, by the way, probably not even ten.

A while ago, I officially admitted in a post that I don't like the "Mary Poppins" movie (the one with Julie Andrews, I haven't seen the ones with Emily Blunt and don't intend to), but that I love the books.
I had forgotten that I had already mentioned the latter in two posts 15 years ago. Maybe I should write about them and their creator P.L. Travers sometime.

Anyhow, as a kid I got those books from the local library and not just once. I loved everything about them, the stories (yes, there is one especially with aged stereotypes which have been changed in revisions) and especially the magic. I wanted some of that magic so badly myself and maybe part of me still wants it today, I don't know, but I still love the books.
I also loved the illustrations, this is how Mary will always look to me.
In a post about children's book illustrations I wrote this: "If you are anything like me, you may remember the illustrations from your childhood and stubbornly refuse new editions with new, maybe more modern ones because these characters are so familiar to you that it's not possible for them to get new faces just like that. ... It might be interesting to have a collection of children's books in which there are several editions of the same books to see what different illustrators made of them."

Funny, I didn't even think to look at my "Mary Poppins" editions then.

The original series has eight books, but my library only had four of them (a fifth had been translated, but I only found that many years later).
They looked like the one of the left with the striped cover that always reminded me of an old-fashioned wallpaper, with a different color for each volume.
I have these first four books in three different editions, a newer English one, an older and a newer German one. In the picture, there are four books because I also have a "book sales club" edition, but they only published the first volume.
I also have one of the other four books in a completely different German edition, and the other three in English because they were never translated as far as I know.

There are small differences between the older and the newer German editions. The new one adapted single words to more modern language, for example Mister and Mistreß Banks became Mr. and Mrs. Banks (you don't often see that translated to Herr and Frau as you might think), and the "Polizist" (policeman) of the new edition used to be a "Schutzmann" (which used to be the official name for uniformed police, still valid today, but not used that much anymore today).
The differences are too small, however, to be a reason for keeping the new ones. Neither are the illustrations. Only the covers are different, not the pictures in the books. At the moment, it's still the story of how and where I bought the books that made me keep the new ones, well, not that new, I got them 35 years ago (at the time I still noted the date in the books). 
I will definitely keep the one "book sales club" edition because it has different illustrations.

Update August 7: Surprisingly, I just got all four volumes of the early edition for a good price, bound in half-linen with dust covers which makes me really happy. From the stamps inside I could tell that I bought them from the original owner. Maybe I should be getting ready to let the late 80s edition go now, what do you think?

If you are still here with me - shaking your head or not -, would you like to compare some illustrations?

This is Mary how Mary Shepard saw her, the original illustrator for the English books.

You may have heard of her father, E. H. Shepard, who did the illustrations for "Winnie the Pooh" and "Wind in the Willows", for example. Actually, he was the one who was approached about "Mary Poppins" at first, but he was too busy to take the job. Travers happened to see a Christmas card with artwork by his daughter who then illustrated all of the books.
It was not an easy collaboration, especially for Mary and particularly at the end, as Travers "saw the illustrations as servants of the texts rather than artworks in their own right" which left Mary quite forgotten when the success of the books is discussed. I will add two sources at the end if you would like to know more and see more illustrations.

My own image of Mary Poppins, however, was shaped by German illustrator Horst Lemke (who also illustrated Erich Kästner's books after Walter Trier's death). His pictures are in both German editions and I love them as much as the books themselves.
Mary is not a warm person. In my old post I wrote "... she is stubborn, she is strict and stern and thinks very highly of herself" - which annoys Mrs. Banks more than once - "and still she is lovable ...". To be honest, I'm not sure anymore that is the right word. The children love her, for the magic and the adventure and because they feel safe with her, and I'm sure she loves them, but she knows she won't be there for them forever.
She only lets her guard down a little when she's with Bert because it's hard to resist his joy in life, I think.
I think Lemke caught that slightly aloof and professional streak in Mary very well.
I don't know if it's because I know the books so well, but can you see how Michael is all jumpy, the older Jane a bit calmer, and how Mary seems to have them under control although she doesn't even have Michael by the hand. Maybe it's the way she holds her umbrella.

This is an illustration by Emanuela Delignon, an Austrian illustrator and graphic designer, for the "book sales club" edition which also works well, but I still prefer Lemke's clearer lines.

Actually, I couldn't find many pictures of Mary in the first English book at all. I would have loved to find the same scene by all three of them for comparison, but this is the best I've got.

Mary Shepard

Horst Lemke

Emanuela Delignon

Are there any books that you have in more than one copy?
Please tell me I'm not the only weird one 😉


Sources on Mary Shepard:

1. Margaret Baguley and Martin Charles Kerby: Mary Shepard: the artist who brought Mary Poppins to life. On: The Conversation, December 24, 2020
2. Shelley Lloyd: Forgotten Mary Poppins illustrator finally recognised after international search reveals rare original drawings. On: ABC News Australia, March 20, 2020

Random Saturday - Travelling books

In my post about "Little Nicholas" a few days ago, I said that my personal copies of the books had a story of their own.
Here it is.

The year is 1994 and it's two days before my birthday.
We three sisters happen to take the same train home after work and my oldest sister has my birthday gift in a bag which she just picked up from the book store on the way to the train station.
The commute from Bad Cannstatt is about 30 minutes. We talk, we laugh, we get off the train ... that's when my sister notices she has left the book bag on the train!
It's too late to hop back on, so there are only two things to do now, 1. go to the service center and try to have them contact someone, 2. hope that no passenger grabs the bag and decides these are nice books to have.

Losing or forgetting something on a train is a game of chance. Some people will give it to the conductor, so it ends up at the railway company's lost and found (and in an auction if no one claims it), but some go the "finders keepers" route or at least contemplate it (I've seen it myself), and some just ignore it.
The service clerk told my sister they would contact someone at the end of the line and have the train conductor check the train in case they hadn't already found the bag by themselves.
If the bag were there, they would then take it back on the next possible train and drop it off at the service center where my sister would be able to pick it up the next day.

Luck was on our side and my sister picked the bag up the next day.
To celebrate it, she drew a little picture in each book to tell the story.

From left to right - my sister A., yours truly, and my sister B.
There's a lot of detail, from A.'s braid to my long hair worn open
and B.'s bob, but also A.'s typical backpack, my shopper and
B.'s purse, and of course the book bag saying "Stehn", a book
store that doesn't exist anymore today.

What I love most about this picture are two things.
There is the company Hengstenberg which will be 150 years old
next year and produces vinegar, pickles, mustard, etc.
Nowadays there are only offices in that building, but it's still part
of the region's history.
Also, this is still one of the old trains. It's actually possible that we
did ride on one of them because the new double-decker trains
were only just introduced around that time.
Can you see us in the last window?

 

Oh no! We got off the train at home, but the bag is still on there!
Our shocked faces never fail to make me smile 🙃

Tell me without words how the books went back from Geislingen to
Göppingen. Did you notice the speed lines?

The service center of the Deutsche Bahn (which also doesn't exist
anymore because they lost the contract for this line some years ago
and because they expect everyone to be their own service people,
anyway) on the day before my birthday. You can tell from the
clock A. and I took our usual train at the time and oh what
a miracle, it was on time, too!

I think the drawings really make these books extra special. Do you think someone in the future will be holding them in their hands eventually, wondering what all of that was about ...

A Life at Stake

Are you ready for another Summer of Angela (Lansbury) post (with Lisa from Boondock Ramblings)?
Today we got "A Life at Stake" from 1955 on the menu.
Take a look at Lisa's post here. She plans to have two more movies, by the way, but for me this will be the last one.

Fair use via
Wikimedia Commons

The plot (spoiler alert!).

Architect Edward Shaw, broke, unemployed, and in a lot of debt thanks to a gambling business partner, gets a business proposal from ex-real estate agent Doris Hillman. She will buy up land, he's supposed to build houses on it.
Her wealthy husband who is the one who will put up the money for this, though, insists on a key-man insurance for Edward in case something happens to him.
The situation is complicated by the fact that Edward is drawn to Doris - and she to him? I think you already get the idea, so I don't have to beat around the bush.
Edward is getting suspicious because he thinks the Hillmans are just after the insurance money. When Doris's younger sister Madge (who's in love with him) tells him that Doris's first husband died in an accident, he's even more convinced about them trying to kill him.
As the police doesn't believe him even though he has been drugged by Hillman and hardly survives an accident, he and Madge plan to pull Doris on their side. Doris, however, lures him to their mountain cabin and shoots him when he wants to leave. Next, her husband turns up and wants to shoot her to make it look like a murder-suicide, but Edward hits the gun out of his hand before being knocked down. Doris picks it up and shoots her husband who tumbles towards her and pulls her down with him through a clifftop doorway.
Just when Edward stumbles outside, the police and Madge arrive, and Edward is taken away in an ambulance with Madge by his side.

The only surprise about this movie was Angela Lansbury as femme fatale again (after Please Murder Me!). She did that surprisingly well, but not good enough to save this movie for me.

"A Life at Stake" is a film noir, but I don't really know that much about film noir. I doubt this movie is playing in the big league, though. It has its moments, but not even those really grabbed my attention.

I just didn't manage to feel any connection to the hero at all at the start or during his affair with Doris whatever exactly that was supposed to be. Throwing Madge into the mix didn't do anything for me, either. Edward, what did you want and what did you expect to come of this whole thing? Getting rid of Hillman - how? - and run off with Doris? Where to? Writing Madge a card every, now and then?
There are some other things I didn't understand.
Why would you dance with your coat on?
How did you make it out of that car without any injury? And how did you get home (always an important question for me)?
Who on Earth would build a cabin with a door leading right down a cliff? "No one felt comfortable on the porch", so instead of putting up some bricks or whatever and a window they just locked the door? Which opened to the outside? How do you even close it again? "One day I'm going to put a big picture window there." Couldn't the guys who took down the porch - how? - have done that right away? One day - after throwing someone down there?

Of course everyone knew something was going to happen there, but at that point I didn't really mind anymore who of them was going to fall down.

If you look around for reviews, you will see that some people say that it's a very decent independent film noir or you have the ones who feel like me.
That's fine, not everyone likes the same things. This may not be a movie for me although it was easy enough to watch (the runtime of only 76 minutes helped with that), but maybe it's one for you.

Silent movies - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Can you believe I had never read Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" until about two weeks ago? I guess the basics of the story were so familiar to me that I forgot about actually reading it. Thinking about it I had found I had also never watched it, none of all the different versions!
How did I even dare calling den Dekan my furry little Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde if I don't even know what exactly I'm talking about?
I immediately started reading the novella to the cats - which helped a lot with concentrating during the philosophical dialogs - and put three versions to watch on my list, the one from 1920 which today's post is about and the talkie versions of 1931 and 1941 because I always have to go overboard (I added the one from 1912 because it was only about 12 minutes long).

Public domain

Here's the plot with spoilers although it will be hard to spoil much in this case, I think.

Dr. Henry Jekyll is a doctor in London and spends his time either in his laboratory or in his free clinic for the poor.
Sir George Carew, whose daughter Millicent is in love with Jekyll, won't believe that a person can just be good and thinks you have to yield to temptation in order to get rid of it.
So he takes the doctor and some other friends - Dr. Lanyon who believes Jekyll is "tampering with the supernatural", Utterson who is Jekyll's lawyer, and Utterson's cousin Enfield - to a nightclub to tempt him.When he notices Jekyll's fascination for the dancer Gina, he has her brought to the table, but Jekyll doesn't give in to temptation and leaves.

He can't forget Carew's theory, though, and starts experimenting with a potion that will separate the both sides, good and evil. It turns him into his evil counterpart, Edward Hyde, and back again.

He orders his butler Poole to grant Hyde access to the house and laboratory at any time and even makes a will in which he leaves everything to him to ensure access to his money in case something goes wrong.
From then on, he starts living a double life as the philantropist Jekyll and the depraved Hyde who gives in to every temptation, women, drink, opium, and doesn't care about anyone else. He brings Gina to live with him and once he gets tired of her, he throws her out. When he meets her again at an opium den later, worn out and sick, he even taunts her for her looks before turning to a new victim.

Jekyll feels the danger of Hyde taking over his life, but he's determined to not let that happen, also because of Millicent.

He fails. Hyde is taking over more and more even without the potion.
One day, Carew goes to see Jekyll in order to ask him about neglecting Millicent. He happens to see Hyde knocking down a small boy in the street, but when people keep him from escaping, he offers money for recompensation. He writes a cheque as Jekyll. 
Just in time, he makes it to the laboratory to turn back into Jekyll before Carew arrives to confront him about his connection to Hyde and threatens that he will not let him marry Millicent. Carew is terrified when Jekyll turns into Hyde before his eyes and tries to run, but Hyde catches up and clubs him to death, then goes back to the lab to drink the last potion in order to avoid being arrested.
Afraid to turn into Hyde anytime, Jekyll locks himself in the lab sending out Poole for the drug he needs for the potion, but it can't be found anywhere in town.

By request of Poole, Millicent and Jekyll's friends come to his house and Millicent goes to the lab, but not Jekyll opens the door for her, Hyde does. He takes her into his arms, then starts convulsing, so she can escape. When Lanyon enters the lab, he finds Hyde dead in a chair, he has committed suicide. Before his eyes, Hyde changes back to Jekyll.
Millicent, Utterson, and Poole come into the lab and Lanyon tells them Hyde has killed Dr. Jekyll. Millicent sinks down next to him grieving while the others leave the lab.

First of all, I want to tell you that I - and my guess is you as well - have pronounced Jekyll wrong all this time.
I learned that Jekyll is a Cornish/Breton surname and is traditionally pronounced "gee-kal". I can't wait to drop that info in a conversation to prove what a smart alec I am 😆 Oh wait, I guess I just did.

Stevenson's novella was published in 1886.
In 1887, it was adapted into a stage play by Thomas Russell Sullivan with Richard Mansfield in the dual role. The play debuted in Boston and went to the Broadway next. Mansfield, who had been the one securing the rights for adaption for both the USA and the UK, got good reviews and was invited to bring the play to London in 1888. Does the year sound familiar? When Jack the Ripper started murdering women in Whitechapel, Mansfield was suggested as one of the suspects (which was picked up in the "Jack the Ripper" two parter with Michael Caine in 1988) and the production was a financial failure.
Sullivan made several changes to the novella which were taken up by some of the movie adaptations, such as the introduction of a fiancée, turning Hyde into a hideous creature, and emphasizing the moral contrast between Jekyll and Hyde.

The only women in the novella are servants, there is neither a fiancé nor a dancer. In fact, it is thought that Hyde's depravities are actually homosexual relations here which were criminalized at that time although sex isn't mentioned at all. Of course not, after all these were the Victorian times.
Also, Jekyll is neither young nor a saint. In his final letter to Utterson, he explains that he has done things - which aren't specified - and was ashamed of them, so he indulged in them as Hyde then and thus separated them from his own person.
Hyde isn't a hideous creature. In the novella he is young and also not ugly, but people still feel repelled by him without being able to describe why exactly. I understand that in the play and movies it was easier to show the difference by creating a monster instead, and of course it was an amazing effect for the audience.

It sure worked on me in this movie (at the time of writing this I haven't watched the others yet).
John Barrymore was a very good looking man (and they used every chance to show his beautiful profile ... had I mentioned before that I can be superficial?) and his Hyde was seriously creepy and repulsive.
It was amazing that there wasn't even any makeup in the early stages of transformation, Barrymore simply did that by distorting his face and moving differently. With each transformation, he got more hideous (very Dorian Gray) with the help of make-up and prosthetics, but a big part of it were still the eyes and the way he moved.
So maybe it was a bit over the top sometimes, but I enjoyed it ... well, if you can call being creeped out enjoyment. There was one moment when I actually cried out because I was so surprised.
He definitely made the movie.

Another big change was that in the novella Jekyll didn't need someone to make him perform his experiment.
The movie, however, took Sir George (who is just an innocent murder victim in the novella, we only learn that he was an MP) and made him the instigator who practically forced this on the saint Jekyll. Say, have I mentioned Dorian Gray already ... does this make you think of Lord Henry Wotton as well? Only it's made clear that Carew may be a "man of the world", but he's very protective of his daughter (isn't it funny how some fathers seem to warn their daughters about men who behave like they do/did themselves?).
Clara Beranger who wrote the screenplay wanted Jekyll to seem almost "god-like" to make Hyde look even worse. Hyde changing back to Jekyll in the end was meant to show his redemption while Stevenson let him stay in the body of Hyde for all eternity.

The novella is not just Gothic horror, it's also philosophical which this movie isn't too openly, and I was fine with that because it would have taken a lot of title cards to replicate some of Stevenson's dialogs.

Even if Barrymore dominates this movie, he could obviously not have done it without the other actresses and actors.
Most of the characters were quite straight.

Millicent is mostly allowed to be longing for Jekyll, she is sweet and loving. Unfortunately Martha Mansfield's life was cut short due to a tragic accident during another film.
Utterson is much more important in the novella because it's written from his point of view, but it's a solid performance here. The same goes for Dr. Lanyon (who dies in the novella).
Why they thought they had to make Utterson's cousin Enfield look like a creep, I really don't know, not that he had an important part.
Gina was obviously meant to be the prime example for how little Hyde cared about other people and the consequences of his actions on them by showing her before and after being with him. I think it shows the total separation of Hyde and Jekyll that Jekyll didn't even think about dealing with some of those consequences instead of just worrying about himself. Very saintly.
It's a puzzle, however, why Gina would ever have gone with Hyde at all. My only guess can be money, a lot of money. Nita Naldi came from the Ziegfeld Follies, by the way, which was hard for me to believe seeing her dancing.

Brandon Hurst as Carew was the only one who had the chance to show more than one dimension to his character, the enabler egging on Jekyll with that shifty look and the loving father.

Despite the changes to the original plot, I really liked this movie. Of course I haven't seen the talkies yet, but I think this worked great as a silent movie because the motivation and the horror resulting from it were conveyed through looks and body language much more than through the intertitles.
I'm sure this wasn't the last time I watched this movie (not just to see Barrymore's profile, I assure you!).


Selected sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) - A silent film review. On: Movies Silently, May 18, 2013
2. "Mr. Bones": Reviewing the Classics: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. On: Morbidly Beautiful, November 14, 2018
3. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on Wikipedia - the film, the novella (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), the play

From my children's book cabinet - Little Nicholas

"Le Petit Nicolas", "Der kleine Nick", "Little Nicholas" ... I don't know how popular he is where you are, but he sure was here in Germany when I was a kid and still is with a lot of people, not few of them people who grew up with him like I did.

Nicolas started out as a comic strip, but he really got popular when he turned up in a short story written by René Goscinny (whose "Asterix" texts were the first Latin class for countless children) and illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé (also known for his covers for "The New Yorker") and published in 1959 in the Sunday magazine of the "Sud Ouest" newspaper.
Thanks to the sudden popularity, the comics were published in "Sud Ouest" and later also in "Pilote" until 1965.

The first book wasn't successful until Goscinny and Sempé were invited to a literature program on TV after which they followed up with four more books between 1960 and 1965.
Today "Le Petit Nicolas" is a French classic and not just in France.
The world of Nicolas is not the world today. It wasn't even the world of the time when the books were written. There is no politics, there is no war, there are no big problems.
There is Nicolas and his little world, his parents, his friends, school, and he's telling us about it from his point of view and in the way a child often tells a story, naïve, straightforward, in run-on sentences that sometimes seem a bit breathless (I don't know about the French original, but the German translation warns children not to use the style in school because it doesn't make teachers happy 😉 but I'm afraid this is sometimes the style you see on my blog, now you know why).

In German, he uses the words "prima" or "klasse" a lot which is "chouette" in French and "great" in English, but "prima" for example is not a word I think young people use much anymore and was very much slang of the time. Funny about that is how quickly something can change from "prima" to something that makes him cry and go back to "prima" if it is resolved. 
His train of thoughts can go from a broken store window to the nice store owner and how his mother shops there and buys jam for example, strawberry is best because it doesn't have stones and is "prima". That could be me, to be honest.
Nicolas and his friends live very much in the moment (except when they plan to run away, see down below).

Both Goscinny and Sempé didn't have easy and happy childhoods, for different reasons, and they created Nicolas's childhood like one they couldn't have.
That doesn't mean there's no conflict at all. Nicolas and his friends get into fights a lot and the grownups argue quite a bit as well, within the family or with the neighbors, but as Sempé put it, it was a dream childhood of his - scuffles that didn't hurt and arguments that didn't end in separation.

Anyway, Nicolas's world is mostly that of boys. There are girls, but rarely, and Nicolas is not quite sure about most of them at first, but one story in particular shows that girls are not even always that different which makes him change his mind.

Also, there are of course no modern inventions and toys. There are no computers, no smartphones, but a lot of wild imagination.

Is it merely a nostalgic joy then to read these books, for grownups who idealize and miss their own childhood? No.
There is more to these books ... there are the parents, the teachers, the neighbors, the camp supervisors, the shop owners, etc.
These are the parts that might be enjoyed a lot more by grownups than children because it shows the natural anarchy of children which can drive grownups to despair - the photographer who tries in vain to get the class under control, so he can take a good picture, the camp supervisor who is ready to chuck it in after just one day, the parents who get woken up several times in the early morning because Nicolas got a new watch and is ready to use it for good (making sure his father isn't late for work), the sales clerk in a shop full of fragile items that gets run over by the boys because they want to buy a gift for their teacher.
Of course, the humor is in the exaggeration here, but we may still recognize or remember one or the other incident that could have inspired a similar story.

One of my favorites is the soccer game that starts with the boys playing, but then the fathers "support" them until they have taken over completely and don't even notice that their sons have already taken off to one of the friends' house to watch television there (which not all of them had at the time).

What's timeless about these stories is the friendship and the love. No matter how often one of the boys is threatening to run away because something doesn't go their way and not come home again before they have a lot of money, a car, and a plane, in the end they couldn't be happier about being back at home and get a nice dessert. Dessert is mentioned a lot.

Idealized? Sure. Funny? Definitely. An escape? Yes. But don't we all need a little escape every, now and then to be able to make it through reality? A snicker, a laugh, a bit of relief?

P.S. In 2004, by the way, Goscinny's daughter Anne found unpublished Nicolas stories in the attic which even Sempé hadn't been aware of. Her father had died quite young in 1977, but Sempé was still there and he made drawings for them.
In Germany, the translator of the original books, went to work again although he was already over 80. I know not everyone is happy with his translations, but my school French is not good enough anymore to pass a judgment on that myself. Possibly people don't like the domestication (see more on that topic in my post here), in this case by replacing the French names of people and towns with German ones. I think that was a good call here because the original names were a bit unusual even for France. Except for the very first one, the English translation also replaced the names, by the way.

My personal copies of the books are extra special to me because they have a story of their own, but I'm going to tell you about that in another post.


Sources (mostly in German):

1. "Le petit Nicolas" Original website (in French)
2. Jürgen Ritte im Gespräch mit Frank Meyer: Der große kleine Nick. On: Deutschlandfunk Kultur, March 30, 2009
3. Bettina Kugler: Grosser kleiner Nick. In: Tagblatt, April 20, 2009
4. Volker Weidermann: Fünfzig Jahre "kleiner Nick": Freund fürs Leben. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 29, 2009
5. Torsten Landsberg: Zuflucht in der Kunst - Sempé zum 85. On: DW. Kultur, August, 17, 2018
6. Interview mit Anne Goscinny. On: Weltexpresso - Online-Magazin für Zeitgeschehen, Film, Kunst, Literatur und Musik, December 2, 2022

10 on the 10th - Would you rather ....

For these 10 on the 10th "Marsha in the Middle" gave us another list of "Would you rather ..." questions. Let's see if I can answer all of them - all 11 of them!! 😉

1. Would you rather eat deep fried Twinkies or butter?

Sorry, no idea. I have never had a Twinkie in my life - we don't have them here and I never thought to try one during my USA trips - and simply can't answer this.

Picture via pxhere

2. Would you rather eat a hot dog cooked or uncooked?

Not at all, I have been a vegetarian for more than 35 years. I don't think I have ever had an uncooked hot dog before that.
I did have uncooked sausage like "Saiten" (what we call Vienna sausage in my part of the country" or "Rote" ("red sausage"), a bit like a thicker version of "Saiten") and I liked those better than cooked, but I wouldn't want to compare a hot dog to either of those.

3. Would you rather dig for gold or dig for gemstones?

I wouldn't want to do either because it's hard work.
I would prefer the gemstones over the gold, though 😉

Quartz and amethyst in my wire
crochet stars for a necklace

4. Would you rather plant your feet in the sand or in the snow?

That's easy. I like looking at snow from inside with a nice beverage in my hands, but I don't want to be in it. Sand it is.

Picture via pxhere

5. Would you rather read a book with no chapters delineated or a book with no chapters at all?

The first one, I guess.

6. Would you rather wear flip flops with tights or high heels with tube socks?

I hate flip flops with a vengeance. I hate the look and I hate the sound even more.
My high heels times have long been over, I probably wouldn't be able to make a single step in them, but if you force me, I'll take them with the tube socks. I had a dream about tube socks just a few days ago although I have no idea why a food truck would give them out and why we got a complimentary extra pair. They were yellow and red, it would be very hard to find heels working with those.

According to "British Vogue" everyone in London is wearing socks with heels right now, by the way. At least, they still did in February.

7. Would you rather wear the twins Polly and Esther or their evil cousin, Latex, for a posh evening of your choice?

Polly and Esther it is. No one wants to see me in Latex. I know I don't.

8. Would you rather watch a really bad movie with your bestie or a really good movie by yourself?

I would do both. Watching a bad movie with a friend can be absolutely hilarious, but I usually watch movies by myself, anyway.

9. Would you rather color in the lines or outside?

That depends on my mood. It can be a concentration exercise to color in the lines, but it can also be incredibly liberating to color outside of them.
That works for all kinds of creative ventures, I think.

Picture via pxhere

10. Would you rather drink warm root beer or cold "hot" chocolate?

I get sick from root beer, I can't even stand the smell, but I could bathe in chocolate, so the choice is easy. I prefer cold beverages to hot ones, anyway.

Picture via pxhere

11. Would you rather have taco chips or celery string stuck in your teeth?

Well, celery is another thing I don't like, so I'll go with the taco chips.

If nothing else, you have sure learned a lot now about all kinds of things I don't like or hate! 😂

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I know it's a shame, but although I knew the basic content, I had never actually read "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and I had never seen an adaptation of it, either.
So I welcomed the movie from 1945 being part of Lisa's Summer of Angela on Boondock Ramblings. Maybe I'll even try to read the book - Oscar Wilde's only novel - eventually (update: I did).
You can find Lisa's post here.

Fair use via
Wikimedia Commons

The plot ((partial) spoiler alerts for some, but probably not for all).

Lord Henry Wotton visits his friend Basil Hallward, a painter. There he meets the young, handsome aristocrat Dorian Gray who poses for Hallward. He convinces him that only youth is worth having and Dorian makes a wish in presence of an ancient cat statue, the wish that his portrait should age instead of himself.
Inspired by Wotton's words to enjoy his youth, Dorian turns to the half-world where he meets the tavern singer Sibyl whom he falls in love with and even wants to marry although her brother James, a sailor, isn't happy about it at all.
Wotton recommends to put her to the test, when she doesn't react to Dorian's liking, he breaks off the engagement.
The next day he regrets it, but it's too late, Sibyl has killed herself. Hallward is shocked at Dorian's callousness when he brings him the news.
Afterwards, Dorian notices for the first time that the painting has changed and he hides it away from others.

For years, Dorian is leading a life full of vanity, pleasure and sin, but he never changes which makes people suspect and avoid him. The painting, however, is showing a hideous creature by now.
One day he shows Hallward the painting, but then murders him to keep the secret, and blackmails his friend Campbell into disposing of the body for him. Campbell can't bear the guilt and kills himself.
Then Dorian asks Hallward's niece Gladys to marry him.
Sibyl's brother comes home after many years in which he has tried to find the man who is to blame for his sister's death. Following him to his country estate, he gets accidentally shot during a hunting party.

Dorian realizes he can only save Gladys from similar misfortune by leaving her. He breaks off the engagement by letter and seeing a small change for the better in the painting he hopes to overcome the spell by stabbing it.
When the blade hits the painting, however, he screams terribly and falls over. His friends find him dead in front of the painting, turned into the hideous creature while the painting once again shows the young handsome Dorian.

Painting by Henrique Medina,
now believed to be in a private collection

First of all, let me say that I don't know what exactly I did expect Dorian to look like (I didn't know he was described as blond with blue eyes and very emotional in the book, for example). Maybe I thought of someone classically handsome (whatever that means), someone more angelic exuding innocence, someone "shining", whatever, but not Hurd Hatfield. It nagged me just a tiny bit all the way through the movie.
It also made me wonder how I would have imagined Dorian if I had read the book first.

Dorian didn't show much emotion throughout the movie and that was what Albert Lewin wanted. It can't have been easy for Hatfield to keep that up, but Lewin wanted his face to be like a mask. He even shot closeups in the morning, so Hatfield wouldn't look tired (you should see me in the morning, that would definitely not work) and stopped filming with him at 4 p.m.
So the transformation of Dorian from an innocent young man to a man with a rotten soul has to be shown merely through his sins - of which we only get a few to see, however, so we can let our fantasy run wild - and his eyes, and I think Hatfield did that really well which also helped me mostly getting over his looks, actually before I knew this was Levin's intention.

George Sanders made a great Henry. He's elegant, witty, and utterly unlikeable. Yet it's not hard to understand how someone like he would be able to corrupt a young man like Dorian although even Henry seems to be surprised at how quickly and deeply Dorian's transformation is going.
I don't understand that well why Basil is friends with him, but I've seen it in books before, a villain having a good friend, good in every sense of the word, probably hoping for the villain to mend their ways eventually.
What annoyed me about Basil was that he didn't really seem to try to counter Henry's bad influence with anything but telling Dorian not to listen to him. From someone who was obviously in love with Dorian, may it be for himself or for his art, I would have expected a bit more effort. It might have saved his life, but of course we'd also have a very different book and movie ...
Talking about being in love, Gladys didn't convince me at all, either. In what kind of dream world was she living?
Actually, in what kind of dream world were they all living regarding Dorian's everylasting youth? How did no one grab a pitchfork and torch and try to get him?

I loved Angela Lansbury's performance for which she got an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe.
In the book Sibyl is an actress, not a singer, but of course the change worked perfectly for Lansbury.



Often when a young man falls for an actress or singer from the half-world, they are described as women hardened from their experiences, calculating their chances with a rich man, gold-diggers, blood suckers.
Sibyl is nothing like this although she has such a woman for a mother. You can tell when she takes the money from her mother and gives it back to Dorian.
She's innocent, trusting, romantic, and sweet. She loves him so much that she gives in to his demand to stay overnight just so she won't lose him (still sounds all too familiar today).

All of that makes Dorian's behavior towards her even more cruel, it's his first step into the abyss. To top that, he regrets it the next day, but then rather quickly shows indifference when he hears of her suicide, a sure sign he has chosen his path now.

The film is beautifully shot in black and white which gained it an Academy Award for "Best Cinematography, Black-and-white" (Harry Stradling), only the portrait is shown in Technicolor four times, both in its beautiful and in its ugly state which emphasizes its importance.

Painting by
Ivan Le Lorraine Albright,
now at the Art Institute of Chicago

The sets are very Victorian and there's a good contrast between the two different worlds, but as pointed out rightfully in one blog, the men's costumes don't exactly scream Victorian.
Levin seems to have been so keen on capturing the mood right and even sticking to the novel's text closely in parts that I don't understand why he would be okay with that.

I enjoyed the movie a lot although the only persons I actually liked were poor Sibyl and her brother James (although he shouldn't have trusted their mother to take care of her, but I doubt he could have done much being off to Australia when he had just found out).
I even enjoyed it so much that I went straight onto YouTube to look for another version for comparing, and I did watch another one.

This one is a television play from 1976 (someone complained about a novel by a playwright being turned into a play on television) with Peter Firth as Dorian, Jeremy Brett as Basil, and John Gielgud as Lord Henry.
It's an episode of the BBC series "Play of the Month".

I have known Peter Firth for a while, but had never seen him that young before. Except for his blond locks being a tad too luscious for my taste, he definitely matched my image of Dorian better, but - intended or not - he overdid the camp a bit too much sometimes.
The scene in which he left Sibyl - a very young actress in this case - was really good. She was completely broken and he didn't give a fig and was so mean to her.
Oh, and the scene in which he asked his friend Campbell to get rid of Basil's body was a lot more emotional.
I really liked him, but much to my surprise I liked Hatfield even more. So much for looks, huh?
I definitely preferred George Sanders to John Gielgud which probably had to do more with age than his play. Somehow I didn't see Dorian and Henry that far apart in years.
Not to my surprise I liked Jeremy Brett although the death scene was over the top.

Obviously the sets were limited to a few interiors, a television play isn't a feature film, but I enjoyed it nevertheless, also that there was a narrator introducing some of the scenes.

I don't think I feel like watching another version anytime soon, I already couldn't finish another one that didn't work for me at all.
So the next stop was the novel instead.


Sources:

1. Jay Jacobson: 151. The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1945. An unforgettable and thought provoking supernatural thriller. On: Jay's Classic Movie Blog, April 30, 2024
2. Trystan L. Bass: TBT: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). On: Frock Flicks, October 5, 2017
3. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) - A Timeless Reflection of Vanity and Corruption. On: Surgeons of Horror,  March 2, 2025
4. "hurdhatfieldluv": Hurt Hatfield in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1945) ... Is he really a good actor?. On Tumblr