Fraser Sherman's Blog

My brother Craig, like me, is a fan of Hammer Horror so while he was here I put on DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE (1971). Despite director Roy Ward Baker coming up with the title as a joke—he was quite surprised Hammer then jumped on it—it’s a good film. I could not, however, kick back and enjoy it without my analytical, writing-a-book-on-this hat coming on.

In contrast to Stevenson and most of the adaptations I’ve seen (e.g., the Barrymore, Fredric March and Spencer Tracy versions) Ralph Bates’ Dr. Jekyll has no interest in splitting good from evil — he starts out wanting to cure all diseases. When a fellow doctor (Gerald Sims) points out it would take several years just to cure cholera and diphtheria, Bates decides to work on eternal life first, because that will be so much easier, right? And then he’ll have time to cure all diseases. It doesn’t occur to either doctor that curing diphtheria and cholera would save thousands of lives by themselves, get his name in the history books and inspire other researchers to follow in his wake.

He’s also unusually low-rent: where March’s Dr. Jekyll is filthy rich and most film Jekylls have servants, Jekyll here lives by himself in rented rooms. By Victorian standards, the lack of a household staff or at least a gentleman’s gentleman makes him slightly disreputable.

Another thing that occurred to me is how much Jekyll and Hyde films use hands. The Stevenson novel makes good use of them as shorthand — when Jekyll starts to lose control of the transformation, one of the first signs is waking up and seeing Hyde’s hands instead of his own. The Johny Barrymore film shows Hyde’s spidery hands—

— and the March film opens with Jekyll’s elegant hands playing piano. Sister Hyde frequently uses close-ups of Bates’ hands changing to Martine Beswick’s as signs of the transformation. A much easier one, I’m sure, than focusing on the face every time.

I’ll have more to say when I watch it purely for the book. “It is I who exist, Dr. Jekyll — not you!”

Earlier this year my brother performed in JEKYLL AND HYDE: The Musical (1997) and as it’s streaming online, I took a look (it’s the source of the title quote on this post). This was much more polished than the version I saw some years back, and (as I now realize) clearly based on the March/Tracy story: a romantic quadrangle with a Madonna (Jekyll’s fiancee) and a Whore (Hyde’s lover/victim), Sir Danvers Carew as Jekyll’s father-in-law (surprisingly he makes it to the end of the show unscathed — Carew isn’t that lucky in most adaptations I’ve seen).

In this version, Jekyll’s inspiration is his own father’s insanity — if he could separate good from evil in our minds, wouldn’t that enable his father to regain normality (an odd rationale as his father isn’t a psycho killer but comatose)? When he tells the hospital board he wants to use one of the patients in the madhouse as a guinea pig, they not unreasonably object; the bishop on the board raises the question not enough people do, after the split where does the evil go? Jekyll denounces them as hypocrites and ultimately decides to test the drug on himself.

I like the detail of Hyde sensing people by animalistic sniffing; I’m less thrilled with his odd, armored carapace, like he was about to turn supervillain. Hyde assaults a young dancer/sex worker who’d attracted Jekyll’s attention then discovers the bishop dropping in on the brothel for some action and settles Jekyll’s score with him. Ignoring the bishop’s hypocrisy, the papers trumpet him as a murdered saint; as the show’s set in 1888, Hyde’s killing spree is obviously meant to parallel Jack the Ripper. While the board members do turn out to be hypocrites there’s no way Jekyll could have known that when he spat the label at them. Jekyll of course struggles to regain control; we all know how that’s going to work out.

This shows the problem with writing about stage shows. Not only are the cast fixed but the show has been tweaked since the original hit the boards and there are other versions out there. In some of the early versions, for instance, one board member was Jekyll’s romantic rival and also the brothel keeper, emphasizing the hypocrisy theme. Splitting them in two gives us two unremarkable characters. For that reason I’ll be watching the David Hasselhoff streaming version which I believe is closer to the original Broadway musical, then comparing the two. “Comments on a lack of style should never be made by those who have none.”

CLIMAX: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1955) was an episode of an early TV anthology show starring Michael Rennie as the gruesome twosome. Unusually this opens near the end of the Stevenson novel, with Utterson leading Jekyll’s household staff to confront Mr. Hyde in Jekyll’s laboratory; after Hyde keels over dead (suicide by poison) Utterson finds Jekyll has left him the journal of the doctor’s experiments.

Here Jekyll’s interest in dividing good from evil is purely scientific: dissection will show us the nature of the soul just as if it were a living organism. There’s no fiancee for Jekyll but his Hyde (a less apelike version of the Fredric March’s evolutionary throwback) does take an interest in a singer at a local pub. When he discovers she has a fiancee he does not take it well.

This is not an A-list version but Gore Vidal’s script does a great job showing Jekyll (pronounced GEEkil as in the March film) slowly sliding into corruption. At first he figures there’s no harm letting Hyde play — in fact it’s rather fun. When things go bad, well you can’t blame him! It was Hyde, and all of us have a Hyde within! Yes, Dr. Lanyon says, but most of us keep him caged. “You talk of innocence but you reek of Hell.”

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