Jekyll and Hyde do comedy!

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1953) was Boris Karloff’s only turn as Jekyll (Hyde was played by his stuntman). It was one of seven movies Abbott and Costello released in 1953, four of them rereleases, due to the smash success of their TV show. Unfortunately, much as I love their comedy, this is one of their weaker ones.

Tubby and Slim (Lou Costello, Bud Abbott) are American cops training at Scotland Yard. “The Monster” is a serial killer striking apparently at random, looking a lot like Hyde from the 1932 Fredric March version (though a bit more werewolf-ish). As the inept Yanks aren’t impressing anyone, they figure capturing the Monster will turn things around. No way that could go wrong, right?

The Monster, of course, is Dr. Jekyll. He tells the police at one point that he’s working on a drug to nullify humanity’s propensity for violence. He’s also using the drug to turn into the Monster; the murder we see at the start of the movie was a fellow scientist who scoffed at Jekyll’s theories. We never really learn how this happened — unlike most movies, he’s already transformed when the series starts. Is he lying to the cops? Did he test on himself and become addicted to killing his enemies? We never really learn. We do see that he has some regular mad-science weirdness going on: he has a rabbit in his lab he’s endowed with the bark and aggression of an angry dog.

Further complicating things, Jekyll’s in love with his ward Vicky (Helen Westcott) and she’s fallen in love with reporter Bruce Adams (Craig Stevens). Vicky’s a suffragette which the movie mines for a lot of dated comedy; she’s also a can-can dancer in a music hall which makes the Good Girl the equivalent of the Bad Girl in earlier adaptations. The end result is forgettable — though I’ll note that this and Horrors of the Black Museum are the first adaptations to use injections rather than a drinkable drug. “Is it true you’ve been experimenting with weird drugs that change humans into animals?”

Hammer Studios isn’t associated with comedy but they did several mostly adapted from TV Britcoms. One of them, 1957’s I Only Arsked — based on the military sitcom The Army Game — showcased Bernard Bresslaw as a gormless private, did very well and inspired Hammer to do a follow-up comedy film for him. By some alchemy that became the Jekyll and Hyde version THE UGLY DUCKLING (1959).

As clueless dork Edward Jeckle (their spelling), Bresslaw is a complete embarrassment to his siblings, who have hopes of someday rising in society; bad enough they’re stuck with those awful stories about their ancestor but Edward’s a complete joke to everyone. Then he discovers a copy of Dr. Jekyll’s formula, guaranteed to turn a timid man into a confident tiger. Taking it creates “Teddy” Hyde (a reference to the Teddy Boys, flashily dressed punks of the era), a coolly confident but completely amoral character. So amoral that when he discovers the manager of the local Palais (dance halls, really a big deal back in that era — though in the 1960s, night clubs and discos would squeeze them out) is plotting a jewelry heist he deals himself in.

When his brother (Jon Pertwee) and potential girlfriend (Jean Muir) discover this, they’re horrified and Edward winds up having to undo the robbery by restoring the gems (in a nice twist, the girlfriend points out that whatever he can do as Teddy, he can do as himself). The end result relies heavily on Bresslaw’s appeal as a leading man and he doesn’t have much. Nor does the film really explore how it feels to go from zero to antihero or do much at all with Teddy beyond what the plot retires. I’ll be interested to compare this to The Nutty Professor which has similar elements. “You couldn’t just go out and strangle a blonde like our great-great-grandfather, could you?”

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