A few last movies I rewatched for Watching Jekyll and Hyde.
Rewatching DR. JEKYLL’S DUNGEON OF DEATH (1979) confirmed that it’s the kind of sleazy low-budget crap that would have gone straight to video a few years later. Along with testing his ancestor’s formula for unleashed aggression on kidnapped guinea pigs (in a rare moment of sanity in this subgenre, Jekyll points out that self-testing is a stupid risk to take), Jekyll is raping the captive woman who once rejected him, leching on the sister he lobotomized (and gaslighting her that she’s a Hideous Scarface) and plotting revenge on a professor for reasons we never learn. Despite assuring us this takes place on a Vast Estate, the one or two shots we see outside are a suburban street; the eponymous dungeon is Jekyll’s basement. “We both know that genius is born of madness.”
THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL (1960) improves slightly on rewatching – Dawn Addams is better than I gave her credit for — but ultimately still falls flat. Having Hyde (Paul Massie) attempt to win back Jekyll’s faithless wife (Addams) from shameless cad Christopher Lee is a great set up but I don’t know the characters well enough to care (did Mrs. Jekyll ever love Henry? Did Henry ever love her before he became an obsessive mad scientist?). I do like the trope reversal at the end, with Hyde struggling to purge himself of Jekyll only to lose when Jekyll resurfaces. That’s all to recommend this other than Christopher Lee’s performance as a complete weasel. “We English never know what we feel.”
For all Amicus producer/screenwriter Milton Subotsky wanted I, MONSTER (1972) to be The Most Faithful Adaptation, the most interesting idea is to make Christopher Lee’s Dr. Marlowe a practicing psychiatrist (as opposed to the standard approach of providing charity medical care or focusing on research) whose frustration with conventional psychotherapy leads to drug experiments to cut through human repression …
I do wonder if Subotsky wasn’t influenced by Two Faces as Dr. Marlowe’s belief (Subotsky renamed the leads in the belief audiences wouldn’t come to a Jekyll and Hyde film) that Evil Is Ugly could easily be refuting Two Faces screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz’s belief Evil Should Be Sexy (alternatively it could be a way to rationalize why the drug changes Marlowe physically). After watching this I decided it was impossible to pull off a faithful adaptation until Jean Renoir proved me wrong. With Richard Hurndall as Lanyon and Michael des Barres as a street punk who picks the wrong toff to rough up. “What is more to the purpose — I’ve had a lesson.”
I’m glad I rewatched JEKYLL (2007) as I don’t think I appreciated on first viewing how much it riffs on the March/Tracy template, sometimes in ways that are not obvious (like Tracy and March, Matt Keeslar’s Jekyll reveals his split identity to the Bad Girl before killing her, though in this case it’s unintentional). One reason this doesn’t work for me is that Keeslar isn’t a convincing Hyde, and I can’t buy that a former, hard-partying wild man (that comes from Stevenson, of course) would be that unnerved to find the stripper Bad Girl turns him on.
That said, this is one of the more contemporary adaptations, incorporating computer games, Utterson as a female BFF for Jekyll and no slut-shaming of the stripper. It has its merits, just not enough of them. “This is the moment — the single incident that defines the rest of your life.”
I rewatched the Tracy version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941) after reading a letter from Joe Breen (the top enforcer for the Production Code) warning that when Tracy whips Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner in one hallucination sequence, the whip mustn’t be seen striking the women. That’s the kind of hairsplitting the Production Code specialized in, but it works: I was genuinely surprised to realize the whip never does land — all we see is Tracy’s Jekyll cracking a whip while he rides in a hansom cab pulled by the two women.
I was also intrigued by Breen’s directive a second hallucination sequence cut out all scenes with “the girl and the swan” — they did and I’ve had no luck researching what it was.
The 1980 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE is definitely in my list of top adaptations. David Hemmings is excellent as a middle-aged Jekyll, a clergyman’s son wracked by guilt over his addiction to banging sex workers and hopeful his miracle drug will cleave off his sinful side and let him become pure. Instead it turns him into a younger, devil-may-care Hemmings by the simple expedient of ditching the middle-aged false whiskers and poundage; not only does he have more fun but Jekyll’s fiancee finds him way more charming as Hyde. Discounting gender flip adaptations (Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde), this is the only Hyde who goes for men as well as women. Even there we only see one male sex worker providing services (I’m guessing Hyde stiffs him on his pay because of Jekyll’s guilt about M/M sex). With James Bond’s Q, Desmond Llewelyn, as the ever-doomed Sir Danvers Carew. “I never thought the pleasures of the flesh were the work of the devil.”
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