Look at this film writing--my goodness

Thursday 5/1/25

I've been sitting here the last few days grinding away--just doing the work--on Nightmares Be Damned: Writings About Horror Films Worth Staying Up For. This is from this morning. There's no film writing out there like it.

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Hammer was a literate studio. They were going to tackle the case of Dr. Jekyll before long, and that’s exactly what they did in 1961, after first giving movie horror a kick in the trousers with The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula. Having roused, it was time to ponder. The studio was attempting to get us to think right from the title: This is not Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but rather The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. Only one of the main characters—who both happen to be the same person (biologically)—gets the billing. We see what you’re doing there, Hammer! The rub is that Hyde is equally Jekyll as Jekyll is Jekyll, as in, every bit as valid an indication of the individual man. The omission of Hyde’s name also subtly suggests a degree of heroism—Jekyll cannot be conquered—but is also a laying of blame; as in, Jekyll is culpable for the existence of Hyde and thus Hyde is Jekyll’s fault because that is his psychological and moral bailiwick.

This is a film of contrast. Jekyll is mild-mannered and soft-voiced, while Hyde is manic and pronounces his words in this curious, phoneticized style but views himself as God’s (or the devil’s, one supposes) gift to elocution.

Jekyll has been cuckolded. Christopher Lee’s Paul Allen helps himself to Jekyll’s wife Kitty (Dawn Addams), who keeps serving herself up. Jekyll takes this, somehow, in stride—or he’s that defeated and tired—whereas Hyde sees it as an invitation to rape, which sounds like an oxymoron, until you realize that he views everything as a personal accommodation to do as he pleases, whenever he pleases, as hard as he pleases.

Paul Massie is workmanlike in the dual Jekyll/Hyde role. Raise the voice, lower the voice, look cowed, leer, shrink within one’s self, shake that fist aggressively. It’s like he’s playing an emotional yo-yo. The main character, though, isn’t so much the picture’s main character as attendant ideological implications are.

This is Hammer going heady. Jekyll has agency with Hyde. He brings the latter out in the first place—then again, you could argue Hyde exists all along. Was there from birth. We all have our Hyde. That portion of us that wants what it wants and thinks not of scruples or others. Emotional impulse. Which is quickly gotten under control or bypassed by most adults, such that it may not consciously register. Yes, she looks good in line at the Starbucks, but that doesn’t mean it’s pawing time, does it?

There’s a temptation to read The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll as a film about the effects of drugs or drink. The self-abetted parting of our better selves from whom we are instead becoming, and the resulting reduction of agency. Put this into that, and you lose what this—the important thing—was. Jekyll is increasingly at Hyde’s mercy, and given that Hyde doesn’t do mercy, that’s a problem.

Hammer films from this period always look the part, and this is no exception. The Frankenstein pictures tend to feature a muted (and sometimes mooting) palette. They appear wonderfully washed out on that spiffy new upgrade disc you bought because they’re meant to be somber, low-key, indicative of dispersion rather than communion. Cinematic color field painting. Frankenstein stains humanity. That’s why those films resemble patches of skin still bearing the marks of earlier injuries. The bruise that never completely fades but remains forever discernible.

The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll is an Impressionistic orgy of colors. A mad swirl of brightness and contrasting tones. The mind is having at itself, then launching the sortie, with imagistic bombs emblazoning the sky. Detente is achieved by a supreme effort of willed reason, but this, too, has the quality of a takeover—a case of using the tactics of Hyde to rescue Jekyll at the last possible moment, for the limited utility of that final moment, because this is the passage into death.