Scott Pembroke and Joe Rock | Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde / 1925

mr. pyckle and mr. pryde

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tay Garnett (screenplay), Scott Pembroke and Joe Rock (screenwriters and directors) Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde / 1925

 

Pembroke and Rock’s 1925 21-minute short riff on the John Barrymore version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde seems today more like either a 1970s film routine from the Carol Burnett Show or a skit from Saturday Night Live which is alternately quite funny and a trivial piece of satire. Like the Barrymore Jekyll, Pyckle determines to better mankind by separating out the good and evil inside individuals, using himself as a guinea pig. After going through the jerky athletics as director John S. Robertson puts Barrymore through in his transformation into a hairy beast, Stan Laurel is suddenly made over with a wig and face putty into the kind of figure that might easily have been played by Tim Conway or Dana Carvey.

     A mad man on the loose, Pryde quickly grabs an ice cream cone from an unsuspecting young boy, and shoots two other teenage boys playing in the street with a peashooter. Quickly, the police gather and a gang of righteous fathers and mothers gathers to trace the fiend’s footsteps back to Pyckle’s medical laboratory, only to find the proper Doctor Pyckle within having seen neither hide or hair of the monster.

 

    His enamored, gum-chewing female housekeeper attempts to enter, but Pyckle is quickly engaged in drinking down his second transformative cocktail, ready to go on the street once more to terrorize everyday citizens.

     This time he knocks on a woman’s door, only to blow a party-puffer in her face and, soon after, pop a paper bag at the back of a strolling shopper’s head. In his race to escape the police, he places a brick under a bowler hat which when discovered, the cop kicks, accidentally hitting Pryde in the head, but perhaps doing damage also to the copper’s toe.

     Finally, he demands a passing stranger put one finger and then the other in a Chinese finger trap, the kind of child’s toy consisting of a small cylinder of woven bamboo into which the forefingers are placed, end to end, resulting in the impossibility of pulling them out.

      For these crimes against human nature, Pryde is again chased back into Pyckle’s studio. But this time, without sufficient amounts of one of the ingredients, Pyckle cannot fully come back, leaving him only with Pryde, while nonetheless being able to convince the neighbors that no one by Pyckle is within.

    His housekeeper struggles to enter the laboratory, worried for the man she loves, Pyckle, Pryde finally allowing her to enter obviously with evil intentions. She is shocked when she sees him, but when he comes near her, she simply takes up a large vase and knocks him over the head, the crowd rushing back on account of her scream of surprise.

    Presumably this film finds Hyde’s early actions to be basically not as terrifying as the film makes them out to be.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2022