Mary Reilly - Released in 1996 - Starring Julia Roberts, John Malkovich, George Cole

Released in 1996, Mary Reilly is based on the novel of the same name by Valerie Martin. The book is also loosely based on and inspired by the Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. As in the novel, the movie follows the story of a simple house maid played by Julia Roberts, and her attraction and revulsion of her Master, Dr. Jekyll, played by John Malkovich. Directed by Stephen Frears and written by Christopher Hampton, the movie has brought back together the same team well known for the Oscar winning movie Dangerous Liaisons. The other actors in the movie include Glenn Close, George Cole, and Michael Gambon among others.
The movie begins with the blossoming friendship of Dr. Jekyll (John Malkovich) and his servant, Mary (Julia Roberts). But when Dr. Jekyll announces that he has hired an assistant, the entire house is abuzz with confusion and speculation. Days go by, and the staff, Mary included try to fathom the mystery of Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll’s new assistant. A little more Goth and sinister twists are added, when Mary is asked by Dr. Jekyll to deliver a letter to Mrs. Farraday at the whorehouse. She is to let a room for Mr. Hyde.
Mary like the rest of the staff is curious as to Mr. Hyde’s habits. And one day she follows him into Dr. Jekyll’s lab, where she sees him handing over a cheque for blood money. However, in an attempt to escape so as to go unnoticed she hides in the lab, only to find the exit locked. When Hyde discovers her he merely smiles at her and hands her the key.
The following day, when a hurt Dr. Jekyll sends her to Mrs. Farraday with yet another letter, Mrs Farraday is furious. She shows Mary the room she had let to Mr. Hyde. It is covered with blood everywhere including the ceiling. She returns to Dr. Jekyll with a blood stained handkerchief of his from Mrs. Farraday and a message from the madam demanding that Dr. Jekyll do whatever is necessary to cover up the matter.




Mary finally meets the enigmatic yet mysterious Mr. Hyde and realizes she is drawn to his passionate side. Jekyll asks Mary to go on an errand with Hyde, where they get talking and get to know each other. Hyde taunts her by telling her that Jekyll finds her very attractive. Over time they get to know each other.
One day Mrs. Farraday comes over to meet Jekyll and demands more money from him in order to continue maintaining her secret. The argument between the two continues and Mary who has overheard the conversation steers clear of it by heading to the garden to water the flowers. However, she notices the light in the lab go out. And when she goes to investigate, all she sees is a pool of blood on the lab table. However, she does not see Hyde who is hiding after having committed the murder of Mrs Farraday.
A little while later Mary receives news that her mother has passed away. And she heads out to make arrangements. However, she is grabbed by Hyde who was hiding in an alley after being chased by the police. When she returns to the house, she is questioned by the police in the matter of the death of Member of Parliament, Sir Carew, who incidentally also happened to be a school friend of Dr. Jekyll. She tells them nothing. But the police are suspicious especially with so many deaths surrounding Dr. Jekyll.
However, later Dr. Jekyll tells Mary she should not have covered for Hyde and that he is removing Hyde from his employment. But Mary is stunned to find Hyde the next morning in Jekyll’s bed, especially since he had been dismissed. She tries to raise an alarm, but is stopped by Hyde who then reveals that Jekyll and he is one and the same person. And that Jekyll turned into Hyde every time he would take a serum for his depression. In order to return to Dr. Jekyll, Hyde would inject himself with the antidote.
Hyde makes his advances on Mary wishing to make love to her. However, a very shocked and stunned Mary then demands to leave. She returns to the kitchen contemplating what to do next when Dr. Jekyll enters and demands that another assistant take a sample of the serum to the lab to have it analyzed and also to have certain changes made in it successfully. However, the assistant returns with no success on the matter. In the meantime, Mary decides to leave the establishment. She packs her things and on her way out decides to stop by the lab.
However, when she enters, she is attacked by Hyde. But he doesn’t kill her. Instead he injects himself with the antidote. She witnesses how Hyde transforms back into Dr. Jekyll. Jekyll tells her that Hyde had added a poison to the antidote, and dies in her arms. The last shot of the movie focuses on Jekyll the next morning, who though was dead, has transformed into Hyde and is awake and smiling.
The movie has a dark, gloomy feel to it. It draws it viewers to the gothic, frightening world which was captured in the writings of Valerie Martin. While it is loyal to the original, it is in many ways better than Robert Louis Stevenson’s version, mainly because it does not focus of Dr. Jekyll turning into some sort of “Wolfman”. Neither does it focus of theatrics. What it does successfully achieve is the belief of something evil, and one woman’s psychology of finding both good and evil in one man.
All the performances are restrained. Julia Roberts doesn’t have many dialogues but successfully portrays a woman who is naïve and innocent yet comes from a tormented past. John Malkovich portrays Hyde and Jekyll with not much difference excepting the presence and lack of facial hair as Jekyll and Hyde respectively. The sets are vast, magnificent yet overbearing all at once. But overall, Frears has successfully accomplished what he had set out to achieve, and that is trying to create a film which is visually appealing and free from stereotypical clichés of present day horror movies.

Ryan's Daughter (released in 1970) - Starring Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, John Mills, Christopher Jones, and Leo McKern

The screenplays of this movie - Ryan’s Daughter is by legendary author and screenwriter Robert Bolt, he collaborates once more with director David Lean - the duo who gave cinema classics like Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago. Bolt pens a captivating war romance, which was the highest earning movie at the box office in 1970 despite having almost no critical acclaim; it also won two Academy Awards: Best Supporting Actor (John Mills) and Best Cinematography (Freddie Young), winning nominations for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Sarah Miles, who was married to Bolt at the time) and Best Sound. The year is 1916, in Ireland. The Irish Republicans want to end British rule and launch an offensive that history would refer to as the Easter Rising, for the festive week in which it took place.
Elsewhere in an imaginary village called Kirrary (on the Dinge Peninsula, in a real part of Ireland) during WWI. Rosy Ryan is the youthful, pretty and somewhat rose-tinted daughter of the local pub owner Tom Ryan (Leo McKern); she reads Byron, is in love with the chivalrous Peter Blood and believes in happily ever after; shielded and kept eons away from the reality of the War, secluded in her part of the picturesque village, where a modest British garrison is about the only reminder of the troubled history of the times. Her father, however is an informer of the British, although he puts up an act of  regret that ‘our boys’ couldn’t hold the uprising against the suppressors.
The charming yet somewhat petulant Rosy is above the attentions of the local lads and would much rather set her eyes on someone with a ‘standing’ in society, a fact that Father Hugh Collins (Trevor Howard) is well aware of when she marries the staid, calm and much older than her school master - Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum). The elders of the village including the priest are disapproving of Rosy, yet can do precious little to change her from being a spit fire to a docile housewife!




Soon enough, Rosy is disillusioned and loses sight of the charm she associated married life with; Major Randolph Doryan, a British army officer, arrives to take charge of the garrison and as a result - with Rosy. Randolph was awarded the Victoria Cross for his contribution to the WWI, which left him crippled, and reeling from what we know today as post traumatic stress, then called ‘shell shock’ - for the helplessness soldiers felt when unprotected in the wake of shelling. His physical shortcomings seem lost to Rosy, who finds herself falling in love with the Major. What ensues is a riotous, torrid love affair, rendezvouses in the nights and hush toned sweet nothings. Although he suspects it, yet Charles decides against confrontation, even if the evidence of the affair is glaring and enormous.
All seems well, until the ubiquitous village buffoon Michael (John Mills) unintentionally discloses the secret affair to the villagers - who at once label her indiscretions with choicest epithets. Things take a turn for the worse when Rosy’s father Tom – rats on the plans of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, represented by Tim O’Leary (Barry Foster) to bully the pub owner into helping them recover a cache of  arms that belongs to the Germans. Loyalty gets the better of him as Tom immediately alerts the British. Maj. Doryan confronts the IRB comrades, a gun fight ensues leaving in its wake a wounded O’Leary.
On the family front, Charles decides to let Rosy know that he is aware of her affair, and hopes that she would ‘come to’ - that night Rosy returns to her lover the Major, only to be seen by Charles, who wanders away, hurt and dismayed. He is discovered on the beach by Father Collins. The villagers, meanwhile get a whiff of the fact that their cause has been betrayed by one of their town - and the obvious choice is Rosy, given the palpable evidence there is of her affair with the British Major. In vigilante-style justice, the mob bears down on the couple, almost killing them, whist lynching and shearing Rosy’s hair - she however realizes it’s her father who is responsible for the deception all along, but does not give his secret up - bearing all the humiliation.
Doryan is dejected and feels responsible for her misery, he is led to the cache of yet undiscovered arms on the beach, and in a fit of guilt charged hopelessness, detonates the dynamite - committing suicide. Rosy leaves the village for Dublin, with her husband, Charles, who has decided he’d leave her, although the priest asks him to reconsider. Not a very well acclaimed film by critics, yet it grossed almost $31 million - a number to reckon with in the ’70s. Audiences liked the star crossed lover - meets - patriot ism-meets a whole jumble of human emotions - perhaps more the kind that suit normal movie buffs, as opposed to intellect seeking critics!

Going Home (released in 1971) - A nasty movie starring Robert Mitchum, Jan-Michael Vincent and Brenda Vaccaro

A typical ‘slice-of-life’ drama, the film is directed by Herbert B. Leonard. The audience is introduced to the characters of the scene in a macabre setting - a bleeding and battered woman, obviously beaten without mercy, staggers down a flight of stairs where her young son, too shocked and horrified to react, and tries to stay out of her bloody embrace. As she dies on the floor, his father’s drunken and disheveled   silhouette shadows the doorway. He had brutally assaulted his wife with a ten-pin bowling trophy and killed his wife in a fit of drunken rage.
Thirteen remorseful years later, Harry Graham is out on parole, with nothing but a pocketful of honest intentions of eking out a living and staying out of the public eye. He heads for a trailer camp, unbeknownst to his nineteen year old son, Jimmy (Jan-Michael Vincent). Over the past many years, he has been in and out of foster homes and boys’ care homes - he now wants to rekindle the almost nonexistent relationship with his father. When he comes to know that Harry is out on parole, his search takes him to a trailer park, where his father is.
Although the young man and the older Harry try their best to get to know each other, and build a relationship over the mangled remains that are shrouded with the tragic demise of their mother and wife - life is anything but easy, add to that Harry’s new love interest - Jenny (Brenda Vaccaro) whom Jimmy isn’t too fond of. But something doesn’t seem to fit in right, for Jimmy seems too sincere about making amends, at the same time appearing to be secretive and guarded. Harry is the awkward, and mostly clueless father - he once initiates a conversation about ten-pin bowling, not really aware about the horrific memory the teenager has attached to the game.




Jimmy is actually a disturbed boy-man, rendered impotent by his rage; he one day tricks Jenny and brutally rapes her - he was drunk, intentionally, trying to recreate the night when Harry murdered his mother. He seems to goad his father relentlessly, seeking an explanation for why he murdered his wife; all the while trying to play lord, master and protector of Jenny, for whom he feels a range of frustrating emotions - from jealousy to affection, anger to helplessness.
After he rapes Jenny, he runs off to Pennsylvania, to where the three once lived. The house is now a bar cum bordello. Guilt ridden, he calls up Harry and confesses to raping his father’s lover (an oedipal twist). Harry is livid, and he beats the pulp out of Jimmy - years of anger over why he testified against him in the open court and the horror of what a monster he’s become - this fuels his anger.
The sensitive characterization of Harry is the coup d’état in the film, overshadowing all else. In the end, the complexities of their relationship remain, tangled and without resolution; Jimmy seeks a difficult answer : why did Harry murder his mother? Finally his father answers, rather frostily that there was no reason, it was a crazed reaction borne of rage. It would seem for now that Jimmy’s search is over, as Harry drives away, leaving him all by himself.

Secret Ceremony (released in 1968) - A tragic film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow, Robert Mitchum, and Peggy Ashcroft

'Ceremonia Secreta', the 1960 novel by Argentinean author Marco Denevi is the inspiration for the film Secret Ceremony, directed by Joseph Losey. The film opens with a blonde Elizabeth Taylor, who takes her wig off to reveal her lush black hair, as she places the hair piece on its stand; she caresses the black and white photograph of a young child - a girl, which is placed on the dresser. The character of Liz is Lenora, a prostitute, who a year ago has lost her daughter to death. As she boards a bus one day, a young girl (played by Mia Farrow) sits by her side, looking at her longingly, and whispering audibly ‘Mummy’ as Lenora alights from the bus; the girl follows her into a church - where she stands looking at Lenora from behind a pillar, as she kneels in a pew. Lenora looks slowly walks out of the church, into the cemetery, where she stops by the grave of a child, placing a bunch of blue forget-me-nots at the tomb. Lenora turns to find the girl from the bus standing behind her, when she looks into her eyes, in her mind; she sees the eyes of the child in the photograph. Shocked, she willingly lets the girl lead her away from the graveyard, to an opulent  Gothic style apartment.
Once there, Lenora sees photographs of the girl with her mother, who bears a strong resemblance to her. The man standing beside her - his face is blackened. Suddenly, the girl clutches her and cries out ‘mummy’ - stunned, Lenora pushes her away and tells her she’s not who she thinks she is. The girl just looks at her and when asked if she’d like some breakfast, she says yes, and when left alone, decides to pocket a silver coin and ermine coat - she even tucks into the breakfast hungrily. When the girl tells her that she lives all by herself - no cook, no nanny, no father - Lenora seizes the opportunity to take advantage of the child’s lapse of memory and plays along, fitting perfectly into the role of her mother. The girl reveals how Albert (apparently Lenora’s husband, and Cenci’s step-father) had behaved inappropriately - upon hearing which, Lenora slaps her - and shocked with her behavior, she apologizes to the crying girl. They both decide that she needs to take care of her - and so, Lenora settles in, making herself at home.




Once, when they are in the bath together, Cenci pretends her duck is drowning – this upsets Lenora, who asks her ‘what do you know about drowning?’ and starts to cry hysterically. In bed, Cenci says her prayers with her ‘mother’, and they settle down for an afternoon nap. When she awakens, she goes down to the kitchen, to see Cenci carrying out an animated conversation to … an empty chair. She appears to be warding off the advances of the ‘person’ in the chair - asking ‘him’ to take his hands off of her - Lenora is scared to see this crazed, psychotic banter.
Two nosy women - former sisters in law, come to pilfer on the pretext of looking up Cenci; as Lenora hides, the women get suspicious that there is someone in the house besides the girl - but who? They leave hurriedly.
In this surreal world, enter Albert (Robert Mitchum) - who may well be the reason why Cenci is a disturbed child. When she gingerly peeps through a window one morning after hearing the bell ring - she sees an almost derelict and unkempt man in the front lawns. He leaves when she doesn’t let him in. One morning, Leonora pays a visit to Cenci’s aunts who had come to the house - telling them she was a cousin of their sister-in-law Margaret. She learns a lot from them, especially that Albert and Cenci had an incestuous relationship, which probably drove the girl mad and killed Margaret with grief. The aunts, of course, think the girl’s crazy - Leonora is hurt by this observation, and tells them that if they were to visit again - she would tell the police. While she was out, Albert comes home, telling Cenci he cannot help himself, as he kisses her. Leonora goes to church and  prays for strength to go back to the house, not for the money, but for the fact that she wants to protect Cenci - she wants to be there to ‘save’ her, unlike her own child. But after being abused, Cenci orders that Leonora leave the house -killing herself by overdosing on sleeping pills, which she downs with milk.
When Leonora attends the funeral, visibly shattered, Albert tells her that Cenci was responsible for the break - up with Margaret - that the child-woman had nymphomaniacal tendencies - this is the final straw for Leonora, who lashes out at the man and tries to kill him. Macabre, disturbing and sad, the movie does play on the audience sentiment, and one feels sorrier for Leonora, for having lost two ‘children’. Serious watch.

Written On The Wind (released in 1956) - Starring Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone

"Written On The Wind" is a drama from the director, Douglas Sirk's stable. It stars his favorite, Rock Hudson along with Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack. Based on Robert Wolderman's novel of the same name, it is said to be based on the life of playboy Tobacco Heir, Zachary Smith Reynolds. A tale of love, money and greed, it has all the ingredients of a potboiler.
Texas oil baron, Jasper Hadley, is a great success with his business, but his children have totally disappointed him. Plagued with their childhood experiences, Kyle and Marylee are dysfunctional and spoilt. With money power, Marylee seduces every one and is a total alcoholic. Kyle is a womanizer and is heavily drowning in spirits. Kyle finds love in Lucy Moore, a simple executive secretary and marries her after a whirlwind courtship. She is a calming influence in his life and things start looking up for the Hadleys. But alcoholism has made Kyle incapable of fathering a child and this drives him to depression. Jasper Hadley does not make things easier with his high expectations and low appreciation. Kyle is driven by the bottle and starts physically abusing Lucy.



Mitch Reynolds is a geologist in Hadley's oil business. Marylee loves Mitch and even Jasper finds a surrogate capable son that he always wanted. But Mitch loves Lucy, and even if it is a one sided affair, Kyle becomes suspicious of Lucy's fidelity. Jealousy rips the couple apart and physical abuse becomes the norm of the day. Lucy becomes miraculously pregnant but this drives Kyle in to a rage as he suspects the child to be Mitch's. As the result of the push Lucy looses the baby and breaks ties with her husband. Mitch vows to leave town with her as soon as she is well enough. A jealous Kyle tries to shoot Mitch. Marylee tries to reason with him and Kyle is shot fatally in the melee. .
Marylee threatens to implicate Mitch for the murder if he does not return her love. Mitch refuses to be seduced or threatened and stand by Lucy. Marylee implicates him for the murder at the inquest and soon realizes that love can never be won sadistically. She changes her statement and allows Mitch and Lucy to depart to another life. She is left alone to mourn her brother and handle the reins of the company.
The movie is a typical potboiler with lot of sexist elements woven in to it. Sometimes it surprises me, how Mitch could just be with the goody two shoes Lucy who is boring compared to the smouldering Marylee. Dorothy Malone who plays Marylee does a un-paralled act which ultimately won her an Oscar. Stack also performs admirably and is said to have been ignored by the award company under pressure from 20th Century Fox. The movie also had a great outing at the box of ice even if the critics had not favored it much.
But still there is something missing from the whole story, and that being the repetitive story line. How often we have been fed with the spoilt rich kid against the nice poor guys saga? The women are never strong; with poor whimpering Lucy getting all the sympathy and Marylee being torn to pieces because she gets what she wants. The lack of originality is the film's death knell as it cannot stand scrutiny with the passage of time. If one has time on their hands and nothing much to look up to, then try a watch. Not highly recommended though.