The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960)
Directed by Terence Fisher

Film Review

The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll is one of the more sophisticated of Hammer's impressive run of horror films, an imaginative reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which takes us into darker territory than is to be found in any of the studio's more conventional horror offerings.  The film fits more neatly into Hammer's series of psychological thrillers (mostly filmed in moody black-and-white) than it does into the company's lush period horror films, the thrills deriving not from marauding vampires and re-animated human cadavers, but from the terrifying possibilities of a human mind that has lost its moral restraint.  In a break from previous treatments of Stevenson's famous tale, Dr Jekyll is the unsympathetic, anti-social outsider whilst Mr Hyde is a handsome man-about-town who is able to charm the pants off anyone he meets, male or female.  It's a more serious treatment of an idea that had previously been exploited for comedic effect in Hammer's earlier The Ugly Duckling (1959), playing on the sad truism that evil is always more alluring than good.

Terence Fisher directs the film with his customary aplomb, and with the support of Hammer's talented designers and ace cinematographer Jack Asher the end result is one of the studio's most sumptuous productions, one that offers the most vibrant reconstruction of the demi-monde known to London's pleasure-seekers of the late Victorian era.  A set-piece erotic dance involving a snake and a sequence with high-kicking dancers straight from the Moulin Rouge lend the film a lurid eroticism of the kind that would become increasingly prevalent in Hammer's later horror films as the censorship rules gradually eased in the '60s and '70s.  For its time, The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll was incredibly daring and it now seems remarkable that it should have got past the censors - they clearly saw nothing amiss in the scene in which a semi-naked female dancer writhes in pleasure as she introduces a snake's head into her mouth.  A more graphic depiction of 19th century debauchery and hypocrisy is hard to find in a British film of this era or earlier.  The Jekyll-Hyde dualism provides a cogent metaphor for the two faces of Victorian society which are vividly portrayed in the film, public respectability versus private self-indulgence.

Wolf Mankowitz deserves credit for the first rate script, which offers not only an original and well-structured plot but far more in the way of psychological depth than you'd expect to find in a film by Hammer.  Christopher Lee has cited the film as a personal favourite of his, and well he might for it gave him the chance to play a fully fledged and believable character who speaks naturalistic dialogue, rather than some fantastic made-up ghoul whose every utterance invites derision.  Lee's portrayal of the 19th century libertine Paul Allen is one of the more memorable aspects of the film, although it has the unfortunate effect of diminishing the contribution from Paul Massie, whose attempts to play both Jekyll and Hyde are visibly marred by the actor's limited range and lack of charisma.  Massie's Jekyll is so dull and characterless that he barely registers, whilst his Hyde mostly comes across as a pallid imitation of Lee's character.  It is only in the raunchier scenes with Dawn Addams and Norma Marla that Massie comes into his own and becomes, as the part demands, lethally seductive.  Making his Hammer debut in one scene is an uncredited Oliver Reed, who would go on to feature in some of the studio's classier and weirder films - The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), Captain Clegg (1962), Paranoiac (1963) and The Damned (1963) - before international stardom whisked him off to bigger and better things.  Both Reed and Lee would take the lead in subsequent Jekyll and Hyde re-workings, the former in Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980), the later in Amicus's I, Monster (1970).

Despite being one of Hammer's more adult horror films, The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll did not fair well at the box office and lost £30,000 of its £146,000 budget.  The public seemed to prefer more traditional horror thrills, and this is what Hammer stuck to pretty solidly over the next decade.  It can be argued that it was the studio's slavish addiction to predominately one kind of horror film (the Gothic fantasy) that would lead to its ultimate demise.  It's interesting that whilst the company was fighting for its life in the early 1970s, it would return to R.L. Stevenson's story and give it its most inventive twist yet, in the superbly off-kilter Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971).

Film Synopsis

London, 1874.  Dr Henry Jekyll is so absorbed in his scientific research that he neglects his beautiful socialite wife Kitty.  As her husband potters about in his laboratory, conducting experiments in an attempt to separate the components of the human psyche, Kitty has an affair with his best friend, Paul Allen.  The latter is a hedonistic wastrel who has grown reliant on Jekyll to pay his gambling debts, but Kitty is passionately in love with him.  One day, Jekyll subjects himself to one of his experiments and, in the process, the dull, morally upright scientist is transformed into a handsome pleasure-seeking rascal.  No one could mistake the confident young Edward Hyde for the dreary Dr Jekyll and within no time Hyde has succeeded in gaining the confidence of both Kitty and Allen.  Hyde agrees to pay off all of Allen's debts in return for introducing him to the seedier fleshpots of London and allowing him to take Kitty as his own mistress.  Hyde's amusements are curtailed when, from time to time, Jekyll's personality takes over, restoring him to his former self.  In the end, the Hyde persona gains the upper hand and, having done so, he arranges matters to ensure that Jekyll can never return...