Edgar G. Ulmer | Daughter of Dr. Jekyll / 1957

tie me up! tie me down!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Pollexfen (screenplay), Edgar G. Ulmer (director) Daughter of Dr. Jekyll / 1957

 

Women commentators on Edgar G. Ulmer’s Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957) have jumped head-first into the pool of argumentation that Ulmer’s grade F movie—as critic Barbara Jane Brickman, for example, has expressed it—is “lesbian camp.” Such commentators must forgive us rather slower-minded gay boys and the film’s heterosexual audience if we need a bit more time to assimilate that reality. I am convinced that Brickman and others are totally correct in their assessment, but since the movie pretends that the real criminal of this crazed re-visiting of Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde myth is a male who is attacking and raping local women in order to gain control of his former friend Jekyll’s mansion—which in itself is a rather absurd conclusion since Dr. Lomas (Arthur Shields) coincidentally turns into a werewolf with the rise of every full moon—we need perhaps to start at the beginning in order to comprehend just how this quite silly and very strange movie might be described as camp and what the significance of describing it in that manner entails.

 

     The very beginning of this film provides us with our first important clue. Brickman in her essay “’A Strange Desire That Never Dies’: Monstrous Lesbian Camp in the Age of Conformity,” describes the introduction to our tale thusly:

 

 “In the opening precredit moments of Edgar Ulmer’s lesser-known horror gem Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957), the viewer comes face-to-face with a smiling fiend who emerges from an absurdly dense veil of fog—not the titular daughter but a father figure. At first appearing in profile as the embodiment of the backstory being offered, this shrouded male creature sits among scientific paraphernalia, including beakers and test tubes, while the narration conjures a legend of the “strange experiment” that transformed the good Dr. Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous work of terror into Mr. Hyde, “a human werewolf.” Clearly taking a bit of license with Stevenson’s narrative, the precredit scene transitions from the silhouetted doctor figure into a close-up of a monster, with sparse werewolf-like hair covering much of his face and vampire fangs protruding from his impishly grinning mouth. When the authoritative voice-over promises that the evil will be vanquished in the end, this ghoulish grinning figure squeals out to the audience from within the diegesis “Are you sure?” and, with high-pitched giggles, fades back into the fog.”

 

      Several critics such as Gary Morris and even I immediately recognized this as what Morris describes as one of the horror genre’s “most memorably campy” prologues, with its self-conscious artificiality and determined mockery of similar such “real” introductions to many horror films, often delivered by actors such as Vincent Price or for that matter even Alfred Hitchcock’s TV series which had begun to be aired two years prior to this film’s release. I even giggled back in response, something I’m not prone to do as I sit alone in my living room respooling my movies via DVD.

      Soon after George Hastings (John Agar) drives up to a manor house in a 1912 Ford Model T., with his passenger, Janet Smith (Gloria Talbott), who steps out of the car to say, “My, I had no idea that my guardian lived in such style!,” to which her fiancée, as we soon discover, replies in an attempted remark of wit, “Downright cozy.”

     Janet is already impressed and excited about the new work into which, at the usual coming-of-age moment, her 21st birthday, she is about to enter. Given the fact that she has been summoned by her guardian because it is the moment of maturation, the age of coming “out,” her reactions are important, as she reveals her curiosity and intrigue about the new world while George can hardly wait until they get back to London, leaving the guardian and his money safely behind. Like every patriarchically-trained male he is determined that he alone will be the family breadwinner. And it is, in part, the couple’s sudden announcement of their upcoming marriage to Janet’s lying leprechaun-like guardian, Dr. Lomas (Andrew Shiedls) who delays his announcement to her and the audience (about 20 minutes into the film by my clock, some claim even longer) who she is: the daughter of his esteemed and beloved but generally hated Doctor Jekyll, whose house this was, and which, now that Janet is of age, is now hers. 

 

     Almost immediately, as Brickman observes, George shows himself to be a weak example of masculine independence, as he alters his plans to financially “go-it-alone” by stating, “Well I must admit I have no objection to money. I’ll try to accustom myself to it.” By the next morning he already is wearing what we recognize is supposed to be a striped regatta blazer but appears more like a pajama top, and kissing his rising bride-to-be, responds, “All this and money too.” We begin to see Agar—former husband to American’s sweetheart Shirley Temple and leading man of the late 40s now divorced and becoming known as a lead in grade B films—as a rather clumsy and failed model of virility as he stumbles about his fiancée’s mansion with a seeming answer to all of its weird goings-on and a witty come-back for any odd behavior. Perhaps not even intentionally given Jack Pollexfen’s abysmal screenplay written, at times, in the Ed Wood manner, we do see glimpses provided by the far wiser and experienced Ulmer of camp intentions.

     There is that oddly placed bust of Shakespeare on a pedestal outside Janet’s seemingly black-lacquered door. While George is appropriately bedded in the “blue” room (he is, after all, a boy, while the script is perhaps suggesting that he might also be “blue” as in “gay?” or even unhappy with the entire), behind Janet’s door there is already a girl waiting, a kind of maid-servant, Maggie (Molly McCard) with whom she suddenly feels wonderfully comfortable, asking her help with lacing her bustier, wondering about the girls unexplained horror of returning home under a full moon, and suggesting even that she might stay the night in the mansion. She seems to develop a relationship with the young girl far deeper than what we witness on the screen, a relationship which leads her to talk of the girl with the head housekeeper Mrs. Merchant (Martha Wentworth) and George, who at one point even complains about her fascination about the child.

      Even stranger, the young woman who came to the house with a sense of the future spread before her, after hearing of her birthright fears so strongly that she herself might be transformed into a drug-induced werewolf like Edgar Hyde, that she suddenly determines to break off her plans for marriage.

     One can well explain George’s immediate determination to get her out of the mansion, back to London, and into the wedding chapel. But how to explain Janet’s sudden infatuation about a girl she hardly knows? It seems that her previous life in London would surely have brought her face to face with people as eccentric as these she now encounters. Or we begin to ask ourselves, is it something about the place—as in another LGBTQ fantasy, Poe’s The House of Usher—that has changed her, emanating perhaps from her new sense of empowerment after suddenly finding herself in charge of her very own Manderley?

     Spending his time wandering around the house, George discovers the necessary hidden room opened by lifting the arm of a suit of armor—what is supposed to protect one during battle—to reveal her father’s former laboratory. What we don’t yet know is that it also provides another route out of the mansion. In short her fiancée begins to explore his possible new-found wealth, while Janet turns inward.

      What George, blinded by his seeming rationality, doesn’t observe is that the increasingly nervous and fragile Janet, apparently still troubled by her link to a madman werewolf, is being attended to, a bit too closely, by the doctor who despite his statement of his distaste for drugs is increasingly drugging her with sleeping potions—why we don’t yet know.

     And it is through the increasing tensions between Janet’s growing irrationality and George’s insistent rational explanation for everything she feels and imagines that finally hints of another trope that director Ulmer hinting at: a campy exploration of the reality behind the cultural truism that men are rational beings and women are simply not. Increasingly as things begin to happen that cannot properly be explained, George’s rational explanations, in fact, seem trivial to the stronger and far more fascinating irrational pulls of Janet into the “horror” we have all along expected.

 

    It only takes one night in villa Jekyll for young Maggie to be brutally killed on her way home after Janet has dreamt of actually committing the murder, the ripping apart of the girl’s throat which seems far closer to vampirism than to the standard male consummation of body parts and organs as consumed by a wolf. Even the idea of Jekyll as werewolf is absurd if you’ve read Stevenson.  The man grew hair only in the various film versions, and even then he was not defined as a werewolf but as a rapist and physical abuser of women and others. This film takes the original in a direction much further than we might describe as merely “taking some liberties.”

     Yet in many ways it comes closer to the original. In Stevenson’s own tale, as I’ve discussed previously in my several essays on the fable, Hyde’s behavior seemed much more homosexually motivated. And here the woman has become something usually ascribed to a male—a werewolf—and transformed even that stock monster, with her vampirish bites, quite differently from the later werewolf type.

      The fact that Maggie, who has supposedly been sleeping during the entire episode awakens to find herself splattered with blood, her shoes muddied, even defies George’s rational explanations, although he insists upon them nonetheless.

    Besides we’ve seen it, watched Janet chase down Maggie and “devour” her, even if it was only in her dreams. No matter how he might try to explain it away, it is still clearly a lesbian fantasy. And we begin to perceive that what Ulmer is telling us is that his film should be read as we must

read nearly every homosexual story before and many even after Stonewall, as a heterosexual annexation of a homosexual act. Forget the werewolf act, and later even the explanations of the Dr. Lomas’s involvement and enactment of the crimes. We have entered a campy world similar to Tony Perkins playing out his mother’s love for him in Psycho.

      Janet has apparently gone wild, and for two nights has her way with women who attract her, on the second night devouring a woman who has just refused her boyfriend’s physical expression of love, proving that, if nothing else, even as a werewoman she’s loyal to her own sex. This time she has, like a wondrous Houdini, demanded she be tied down and the door locked. Yet still she is there chasing down her newest victim, as Brickman describes her, an “over-the-top representation of the [monstrous and] predatory lesbian, right down to the unplucked eyebrows, twilight cruising, and aggressive sexual advances.”

        Brickman brilliantly substantiates this figure through the pre-film trailers and promotional banners announcing to its presumably mostly female teenage audience as being precisely a lesbian fantasy:

 

“While the tagline focuses on the hereditary monstrosity—promising “Blood Hungry Spawn” of

Jekyll—other promotional items, including the trailer, flirt with a queer desire closeted within a young woman as the force behind the horrors. The ‘hidden’ danger (or open yet ambiguous secret)

of a lobby card warning of a “Bestial Fiend Hidden in a Woman’s Sensuous Body!” is more clearly the theme of the trailer, which is punctuated with ever more desperate and dangerous questions (with lurid phrases placed in all caps) that fly across the screen: “Is there a RAVAGING BEAST Hidden in Her Body? Is there a STRANGE DESIRE that Never Dies . . . But prowls the earth LUSTING FOR BLOOD?” Obviously, as Hyde was the evil hidden within Dr. Jekyll, one wonders what is this “STRANGE DESIRE” that never dies in his daughter.”

      Finally, by accepting the murder scenes as lesbian camp allows us further to comprehend what might otherwise seem simply as the atrociously bad theatrical attempts by George, who upon discovering the real werewolf is Dr. Lomas, fights him off to save his would-be lover. Seeing it as camp, we can truly appreciate the rest of the movie as a kind of puppet-show in the manner of Godzilla, wherein a punch never lands near its intended victim and a simple shove sends the fighter across an entire room. We can almost enjoy the fight scenes between the supposed young and fit George with the elderly werewolf Lomas, who is so powerful that can be brought down only by the hulking silent representative of town justice, the former mansion handyman Jacob (John Dierkes), who thrusts a wooden stake through Lomas’ heart, presumably ending his life and returning order to Janet and George’s heteronormative universe.

     Janet can now be properly scolded for her previous hysteria and George praised for his abilities to explain the details of the radically loose-ended plot. Everything becomes masculinely rational again. Lomas’ motives were simply financial after all. And Janet has just imagined everything that helped to put her in that absurd swoon.

      Just to be sure that you realize, however, that Ulmer is still kidding us with that crap, he repeats the very same scene with the same language of the first frames of the film, but this time presenting it in far lower ranged, more masculine voice, whose darker and deeper giggles make you wonder whether next time it might not be a man going wild for other men.

      Interestingly enough, except for the highly eccentric French version by Jean Renoir Le Testament du docteur Cordelier 1959), the next major film version of Stevenson’s work was Polish director Walerian Borowczyk’s Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (1981) which despite its title, featured a truly bisexual Hyde who is so absolutely delighted to rape and maim in S&M style every attractive individual who he can get his hands on that there is no need to present the work in the form of camp theatrics. Borowczyk’s is high-art porn film, openly challenging those who cannot embrace its fascination with power, love, and punishment. And the last of such films which I discuss, named Hyde’s Son (1990), features a child that appears he might return as Damian Thorn in The Omen.

      It’s fascinating that these three final works take us closer to Stevenson’s early queer tale than all the others in between.

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).