The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne

[Ron]

Many thanks, dear Michael!

I`m very glad that the original print seems to be intact and that it will see the light of day in HD for the very first time. This will be definitely the release of the year and I can´t wait to get rid of my old DVD bootleg, which has a poor image quality.

[nolanoe]

Michael, I was refering to this part of your quote:

"There was never any chance of (La Marge) being an Academy release. Partly, as you acknowledge, for the subject matter"

Still all about Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, by the way. Can't wait!!

[MichaelB]

On the left, my now 30-year-old VHS copy.

On the right, the new Blu-ray.



And here's the French original - on the disc, the opening titles will be seamlessly branched according to which spoken language you select. Interestingly, the French version includes one more sentence, which appears in Stevenson's original as "I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations..."

[Koukol]

Ooh my Plasma is gonna love those blacks!

[TMDaines]

Seamless branching! Praise you, MichaelB!

[MichaelB]

We thought long and hard about how best to do this. We were only supplied with the French titles, and nobody had a clue where the English ones were - I know for a fact that one of the English-language prints (the one that played at the ICA in 1985) has been destroyed, and I don't imagine there were that many more.

So our choice was between leaving the opening titles in French, which would necessitate an additional subtitle track in order to translate (or rather revert to) the Stevenson quotation - or we could use my elderly VHS as the basis for a digital reconstruction of the English titles. Which is what we ended up doing - although every effort has been made to match the feel of the French titles, complete with electronically-generated film grain and slight projector-induced wobble. When restoring silent-film intertitles, the BFI even goes to the extreme of reshooting them in 35mm for absolute purism, but this seemed like overkill for our purposes.

The closing credits will be in French, though, regardless of which version you watch - my notionally English-language VHS also had French closing titles, which leads me to suspect that English ones never existed.

Talking of English, I'm delighted to confirm that the 35mm materials did include the English dub - and it consequently sounds vastly better than the hissy old VHS version. Which is a huge relief, as Daniel Bird and I were determined to include the English track come what may (it's essential for the wonderful cod-Victorian dialogue and of course for Patrick Magee's own voice), even to the extent of extracting it from a VHS if it came to that.

[Ron]

On the left, my now 30-year-old VHS copy.

On the right, the new Blu-ray.

Awesome! Great job, indeed!

[Aunt Peg]

Can't wait to buy this and watch it again as I haven't seen it since it's first release.

[MichaelB]

I'm delighted - and relieved! - to confirm that the BBFC has just passed the film uncut with an 18 certificate, for "strong sex, sexual violence, gory images".

I was reasonably relaxed about this one, given that there's nothing here that wasn't in The Beast, but they cut nearly two minutes out of it last time and I had a momentary wobble of concern when I heard last week that the film had been referred to "senior review" - which I think is BBFC-speak for "needs a second opinion". But it's in the clear.

[Ron]

I'm delighted - and relieved! - to confirm that the BBFC has just passed the film uncut with an 18 certificate, for "strong sex, sexual violence, gory images".

These are great news, dear Michael! I read somewhere that the longest version of Dr. Jekyll was released on a Japanese laserdisc and that even the Dutch VHS tape was cut, but I have no idea if this is true or not. Nevertheless the Arrow release seems to be truely the uncut version of the movie.

[MichaelB]

These are great news, dear Michael! I read somewhere that the longest version of Dr. Jekyll was released on a Japanese laserdisc and that even the Dutch VHS tape was cut, but I have no idea if this is true or not. Nevertheless the Arrow release seems to be truely the uncut version of the movie.

All I can say is that we scanned it directly from the original camera negative and that we examined every scrap of 35mm material that was stored in the lab. If there's any additional footage on the Japanese laserdisc (although I can't believe that it would have been visually uncensored given Japanese taboos about genitalia), I'd be intrigued to know where it came from!

Of course, by this stage in Borowczyk's career distributors had a habit of padding out his films with additional but deeply unauthorised footage - hardcore inserts in The Art of Love and Emmanuelle 5, for instance. I don't know if that happened with Dr Jekyll anywhere, but it's worth bearing in mind.

[Pepsi]

These are great news, dear Michael! I read somewhere that the longest version of Dr. Jekyll was released on a Japanese laserdisc and that even the Dutch VHS tape was cut, but I have no idea if this is true or not. Nevertheless the Arrow release seems to be truely the uncut version of the movie.

I think that the most likely explanation is that the Dutch VHS tape has PAL speedup (4%), and the Japanese laserdisc has not! If I remember correct there was a similar thing with THE BEAST, that someone said that there's a longer version that the Dutch VHS, but didn't count the speedup!

[MichaelB]

The running time of Arrow's restoration is 1:31:10. As far as I'm aware, the film has never been exhibited in a version longer than 91 minutes, and most versions are in the mid-to-high eighties, largely thanks to a combination of PAL speedup and/or censorship.

As for The Beast, confusingly there are indeed two separate cuts, running 94 and 98 minutes at theatrical speed, but because a 98-minute film will run 94 minutes when PAL speedup is applied it's easy to see where the confusion has come from! But I'm happy to confirm that the Arrow disc contains the 98-minute cut.

[Ron]

I just found out that the Japanese laserdisc was fogged in genitalia scenes and that it was released in NTSC format, which seems to explain the running time difference as compared with the Dutch tape. So, don`t worry: The Arrow release will be the uncut version.

[David M.]

Yeah, it'd have to be NTSC for Japan.

And yes, the Arrow version is uncut:
http://bbfc.co.uk/releases/dr-jekyll-et ... mmes-video" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This work was passed uncut.
Arrow Film Distributors Ltd
Submitted run time 91m 9s
Remarks Previous film and video cuts waived

[MichaelB]

There's no disputing that Arrow's Dr Jekyll is uncut, but BBFC records merely mean "we haven't requested any cuts to what was submitted". I suspect their entry for Shivers is also marked "passed uncut"!

As indeed was the longer version of A Private Collection, which had to be censored prior to submission for legal reasons.

[MichaelB]

A glimpse of the restoration.

[zedz]

A glimpse of the restoration.

The excitement about this release has already stripped people of their power of coherent speech, if this posted comment is anything to go by:

"AWSOME I am start to get your blurs us"

[EddieLarkin]

Use it as a pull quote on the front sleeve.

[The Narrator Returns]

The back copy will just be "tbhumbs up if your wathcing this mvoie in 2015!".

[Ron]

A glimpse of the restoration.

I hated the bad quality of the old DVD bootleg. Watching this new restoration will be a complete new experience. Again, many thanks for the great job!

[EddieLarkin]

Delayed until May 11th due to acquisition of new special features, though the only thing I can see that is newly listed is the singular interview with Udo Kier (though that's great news in itself).

[MichaelB]

Some of the previously announced special features are considerably more extensive than was originally planned - for instance, my intro was originally conceived as a five-minute job but when I realised that newcomers to Borowczyk (for instance, region-locked people in the US who haven't bought any previous Arrow Boro discs) might fancy a beginners' guide, it was expanded to nearly 30 minutes and includes a whistle-stop tour of his entire creative career.

Similarly, the Bernard Parmegiani doc has an additional interview (with fellow electro-acoustic composer Włodzimierz Kotoński), the Sarah Mallinson interview now covers her work with other eastern European émigré animators such as Peter Foldes, and so on. Oh, and this version of Phantasmagoria of the Interior has been completely re-edited to take advantage of the new restoration - the version that played in Rotterdam in January had to source its clips from an ancient VHS tape.

And of course there's the Udo Kier interview, which is excellent - it can be a bit of a gamble interviewing him, but this is one of the most lucid and thorough interviews I've ever seen him give: he clearly had very fond memories of making the film.

[Bikey]

Some of the previously announced special features are considerably more extensive than was originally planned - for instance, my intro was originally conceived as a five-minute job but when I realised that newcomers to Borowczyk (for instance, region-locked people in the US who haven't bought any previous Arrow Boro discs) might fancy a beginners' guide, it was expanded to nearly 30 minutes and includes a whistle-stop tour of his entire creative career.

Similarly, the Bernard Parmegiani doc has an additional interview (with fellow electro-acoustic composer Włodzimierz Kotoński), the Sarah Mallinson interview now covers her work with other eastern European émigré animators such as Peter Foldes, and so on. Oh, and this version of Phantasmagoria of the Interior has been completely re-edited to take advantage of the new restoration - the version that played in Rotterdam in January had to source its clips from an ancient VHS tape.

And of course there's the Udo Kier interview, which is excellent - it can be a bit of a gamble interviewing him, but this is one of the most lucid and thorough interviews I've ever seen him give: he clearly had very fond memories of making the film.

This is going to be one sensational release... cannot wait for it!

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

So the interview with Udo is brand new? That's definitely worth the wait. I always enjoy interviews with him so I'm glad you got him to sit down for a chat.