Jean-Louis Barrault as the mischievous Monsieur Opale in Jean Renoir’s Jekyll & Hyde opus, LE TESTAMENT DU DOCTOR CORDELIER.
the casually violent thug Opale. After Opale’s street crimes (tram- pling a child, murdering a digni- tary) have made him a fugitive and an offscreen transformation has shocked Michel Vitold’s Dr. Séverin (Lanyon) to a heart at- tack, Joly is summoned to the Cordelier residence by the doctor’s servant because it seems Opale is holed-up in Cordelier’s laboratory and may be on the point of murdering the scientist. When Joly confronts Opale, the villain insists the law- yer listen to Cordelier’s taped confession (in French, also un testament), which explains the familiar business of Cordelier’s experimental serum and his transformation into the anarchic libertine (“When I became Opale for the first time, I succeeded in shattering both my own body and the framework of your society”). Now addicted to the transform- ing drug, Opale commits sui- cide by taking an overdose and
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becomes Cordelier in death: a slight rejigging of the novel, in which Utterson breaks in to find Hyde already dead and then reads Jekyll’s confessional nar- rative. Delaying the monster’s death until after the lengthy flash- back makes for a more satisfy- ing screen story.
Renoir’s chief interest in the project seems to have been the opportunity to work with Barrault, best known for his work in Les Enfants du Paradis [US: CHILDREN OF PARADISE, 1945]. The role of Jekyll-and-Hyde is one of those challenges that tempts actors into horror; Barrault, while staying remarkably close to the novel’s conception, delivers one of the most surprising, singular and creepy readings of the part(s). Tom Milne, in THE AURUM FILM ENCYCLOPEDIA: HOR- ROR, notes the kinship between Opale and Michel Simon’s “ni- hilist tramp” in Boudu sauvé des eaux [US: BOUDO SAVED
FROM DROWNING, 1932], but it seems to spring out of an even earlier movie hobo. The dignified, dapper, white-haired Cordelier is the image of the offscreen Charlie Chaplin of later years, down to the squeaky voice. Opale, the cane-twirling, shaggy- haired murderer in shabby clothes, hitches his shoulders and shuffles like the Little Tramp—or the French come- dian Max Linder, whom Chaplin acknowledged as an inspiration. He even seems to move at jerky silent speed through modern Paris, staging his crimes as sight gags. Chaplin films offer senti- ment tinged with sadism: the little fellow kicking the huge cop in the ass is, after all, also the director who has complete power over the bit-player who gets kicked. Renoir (the great hu- manitarian) and Barrault (the great mime) must have had am- biguous feelings about Chaplin (who, nicknamed “Charlot,” is
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