Rewatching THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL (1960) I find it has more good points than I remembered. As Hyde, star Paul Massie is stiff and awkward enough to fit the concept of Hyde a normal looking man who makes everyone uncomfortable, though I suspect it’s Massie being a stiff actor rather than design. And the ending inverts the usual set up by having Hyde terrified Jekyll is going to take control of their body from him.
None of that, however, makes it work better than the last time I watched it. The concept is that Jekyll’s obsessively working on his mad-science research and neglecting his wife Kitty (Dawn Addams), who’s found refuge in the arms of Jekyll’s buddy Paul (Christopher Lee) who has no qualms asking Jekyll to cover his debts, then jumping Mrs. Jekyll. When, as Hyde, Jekyll learns the truth, he sets out to get his own wife as his mistress but things don’t go as planned …
While the idea of Hyde lusting for Jekyll’s woman goes back to the Victorian stage, Kitty’s faithlessness and Hyde’s desire to win her rather than rape her could have made this interesting, a triangle in which two points are the same person. Unfortunately that would require much more development of the Jekylls than we get. Dawn Addams’s Kitty is flat and we never learn whether she once loved her husband or was always going to stray on him. Nor do we learn what Jekyll’s feelings are beyond possessive, though I do like that he’s incapable of figuring Kitty out in either persona (“You overestimate my freedom from convention Mr. Hyde.”). Like The Ugly Duckling, Hammer flopped with this treatment of Stevenson. ”I don’t have your highly laudable respect for life, Jekyll.”
ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE (1958) was a typical flop by low-budget filmmaker Bert I. Gordon, though lord knows he’s done worth. A woman working for lonely puppeteer John Hoyt discovers he’s creating his own found family by shrinking people (including her and boyfriend John Agar) and keeping them in bottles to uncork for special events. Hoyt gives an above-average performance for a Gordon film though Agar as the hero is stiff as he always is. This got my attention because Hoyt stages a Jekyll and Hyde puppet show at one point, though not significant enough to justify inclusion in my book. “You don’t want to meet your fiancee wearing nothing but a napkin do you?”
Switching to other media, I caught a brief BENNY HILL SHOW skit in which superheroic Wonder Gran takes on Dr. Jackal and Mr. Hide (both Hill), a rather werewolf-like take on the character; given the usual nudge-nudge wink-wink of Hill’s shows, it’s surprising the villain is just a crook (Jackal shows more lechery).
I also caught a late 1941 JACK BENNY SHOW in which Jack plays both Jekyll and Hyde; while nothing in it provokes deep insight, it’s certainly funny, including that everyone around Jekyll knows he’s two people. The follow up, Dr. Hyde and Mr. Jekyll, reverses things by having Jell-O (the sponsor) turn the grumpy Hyde into sunny Mr. Jekyll. It’s also very obvious there’s more visual humor pitched at the studio audience than I’d expect in radio. “This is Mr. Hyde’s office — no he isn’t in, and if he was, heaven help you!”
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