As I’ve mentioned before, a great concept and a great plot can still be sunk by rotten execution. William Hope Hodgson’s widly imaginative yet incredibly tedious The Night Land is one example.
The 2002 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE is another example. It has the same basic plot as the Fredric March version but the execution is slower and duller.
As in March we have Jekyll (Mark Redfield), a devoted charity doctor who neglects his relationship with his fiancee Miriam Carew to do his duty by his charity patients; he’s even renovating the hospital’s charity ward at his own expense. Claire (Elene Torrez) fills the Ivy role, the sex worker who likes Jekyll but winds up with Hyde (below we see Miriam Hopkins as Ivy opposite March’s Hyde).
Redfield, who produced, co-wrote and directed the show, adds in some elements of the book: Utterson’s encounter with Hyde, Hyde trampling a little girl (too confusing a moment to have the shock value it should), Jekyll already living as Hyde when the film starts. Those work fine. But without Jekyll’s desperate push for an early marriage to his true love — the sexual frustration when he’s told no is what leads to Hyde — it lacks energy. We spent too much time in the charity ward, dealing with multiple characters we never meet again. The investigation into Danvers Carew’s death comes after the climax of the film; here the equivalent crime is much earlier and the rest of the film runs out of steam.
Other changes are just odd. With Miriam’s father sliding into senility, her brother Mordecai proves the main obstacle the union (he’s the one whom Hyde murders). He’s irrationally determined the wedding not come off, to the point I wondered if there was an incestuous subtext. I don’t think so, however.
There’s also Claire’s pimp Jack (Robert Leembruggen), who’s been lifted from Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde; he has a side hustle removing organs from dead women’s bodies for Jekyll’s experiments.
The most interesting element is that Claire ends up one of the rare sex workers in Jekyll and Hyde stories who survives to the end of the story. “I find it strange Jekyll hasn’t mentioned such a dear family friend until recently.”
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