Authentic Jekyll and his unsatisfying children: movies

I was confident I wouldn’t see an adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde that’s both good and faithful to the book because it’s not a cinematic story. The great French writer/director Jean Renoir proved me wrong with his THE TESTAMENT OF DR. CORDELIER (1959), known in the US as Experiment in Evil and The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment.

This opens at the end of the novel as the notary Joly (Teddy Billis), the Utterson figure, confronts Opale (Jean-Louis Barrault)—the Hyde character—about the disappearance of Joly’s friend Cordelier (also Barrault). Opale presents Joly with Cordelier’s testament on tape (this is the first film I’ve seen that goes with Stevenson’s mystery structure rather than showing the Jekyll/Hyde connection up front); we flash back to Joly frowning over Cordelier’s strange will leaving everything to one Opale, then witnessing Opale assault a small girl on the street.

Barrault captures Stevenson’s idea of Hyde as looking normal but unsettling everyone around him: his body language is twitchy and strange enough to make him disturbing as well as malevolent. Cordelier is a moral cesspit even before he transforms, for example raping an unconscious patient in one scene; the sins he wants to commit as Hyde are primarily his taste for cruelty. I’m glad I was able to catch this rather than relying on synopses. “The tragedy has often taken root in the lives of its victims before they suspect its existence.”

Amicus’ I, MONSTER (1971) is also faithful but not very good despite Christopher Lee as Dr. Marlowe (and his alter ego Blake) and Peter Cushing as Utterson (the book Amicus Horrors says the studio thought Jekyll and Hyde were overused, hence changing the leads’ names).

Blake discovers a drug which can dissolve either the id or the superego (a psychiatrist friend says their Freudianism is sub-par), test it on himself and — well, you know what comes next.

Scriptwriter/producer Milton Subotsky gets the lion’s share of the blame. He chooses the wrong moments to be faithful to Stevenson: where Renoir’s Joly witnesses the little girl attacked, we hear about it in I, Monster but never see it. In other cases, he changes the story for the worse: when Blake and Utterson meet, instead of the barbed conversation in the novel, Blake slinks away in silence. Another weakness may be that Subostky planned this film for a new 3D process which he abandoned after viewing it gave the audience headaches. “I saw something the other day that I’d call a crime of pure evil.”

SON OF DR. JEKYLL (1951), which I first watched last year, stars Louis Hayward as the son of Dr. Jekyll, dedicated to clearing his father’s monstrous reputation by proving his research worked — but what was the research? Damned if I know; it’s not even clear whether his dad’s formula worked or Jekyll simply led a double life. The focus of the story is a stock melodrama plot where Hayward’s guardian Lanyon has been embezzling his inheritance and now hopes to drive him insane to cover it up. A forgettable flop; Hayward’s earlier and better turn as a legacy character in Son of Monte Cristo would be an obvious double-bill. “They’ll never stop creating monsters, will they?”

Son Scriptwriter Jack Pollexfen then took the same concept and reworked it into 1957’s DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL. It’s the same inheritance plot but this time there’s a real monster, albeit one resembling a drunk in need of a shave. Gloria Talbot plays the protagonist who discovers she’s descended from that “human werewolf” Dr. Jekyll and may indeed have inherited his curse — but then again, it’s possible the real werewolf framing her for monstrous murder framed her dad too. Neither Talbot nor the ever-wooden John Agar pump any life into this but the isolated estate where it’s set is more memorable than London in the first film. “Money is never a joking matter — that’s something rich and poor agree on.”

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