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MARY REILLY – George Fenton
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review byJonathan Broxton
In the mid-1990s there were a series of big-budget Hollywood films which adapted classics of the horror genre to the big screen, with the most famous being Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992 and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1994. One of the films which is now somewhat forgotten is this one: Mary Reilly, an adaptation of a 1990 novel by Valerie Martin, which was itself inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The twist here is that this story is told from the point of view of Henry Jekyll’s housemaid, the Mary of the title, who falls in love with her master, but then makes an enemy in the form of Jekyll’s “assistant,” Edward Hyde. The film stars Julia Roberts as Mary, John Malkovich as Jekyll and Hyde, and has an excellent idiosyncratic supporting cast that includes Michael Sheen, Glenn Close, and Michael Gambon, plus British TV stalwarts like George Cole of Minder and Kathy Staff of Last of the Summer Wine. It was written by Christopher Hampton and directed by Stephen Frears, who had previously worked together on Dangerous Liaisons in 1988. Read more…
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