Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, along with others of their intellectual brethren, left Europe and the overhanging threat of war in the late 1930s and came to Southern California. Life in sunny California was different and invigorating and fun, and movie making was a focus of much of the fun. The two decided to try their hand at writing a movie and Jacob’s Hands, A Fable is the treatment that they wrote together. It was never taken up for a film or published in any form, and it was only after Sharon Stone started rooting around for it in the 1990s that the treatment found again. It was finally published as a novel in 1998.
Jacob’s Hands offers a riotous glimpse into what two continental types thought made up the American, and particularly western American, psyche: the men are either quiet, resourceful, and noble, or petty, loud, and vulgar. The lead woman is beautiful but only mildly talented, with stars in her eyes, a heart of gold, and lacking even a minimum of judgment. The conflict between good and evil is illustrated through desert purity versus city venality, the search for simple living versus the fight for big bucks. The plot is simple: a man gifted in hands-on healing, has only one weak spot: his love for Sharon, the first human he heals, taking away the crippling weakness of her leg. She was lame but is no longer and once on two feet she takes off for Hollywood. Jacob follows her their, both are tempted with moral corruption and money: guess who falls? Jacob makes it back to the desert, with a new friend in a kind Black chauffeur and limiting his help once again to animals only.
The dialogue in Jacob’s Hands is especially entertaining:
“I can get all the singers I want. In this city they’re a dime a dozen.”
“I see….SO that’s the way it is.”
“That’s the way it is, baby. Now are you going to be reasonable, or aren’t you?”
“Listen Lou. You win. But let me tell you something. If I find you double-crossing Jacob, God help you. Because then I won’t care what I do to you. Understand?”
All of the dialogue is this deliciously gimmick-ridden and crackshot. I loved it!
This book is thoroughly fun to read and very, very easy to envision as a movie. Huxley and Isherwood provide everything, from the wardrobe of each character to the background landscape to entrances and exits and expressions on faces. I can see Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood at prologue and epilogue, playing the kindly black chauffeur and the mystically-gifted Jacob. But who to play their younger characters? And the woman, object of desire? She has to be played by a young Sharon Stone type: after all, the character in the book is named Sharon and it is thanks to Sharon Stone that we have the delights of Jacob’s Hands to read and enjoy.
