Terence Fisher | The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll / 1960

this perfect eden

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wolf Mankowitz (screenplay, based on the Robert Louis Stevenson fiction), Terence Fisher (director) The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll / 1960

 

The 1960 Hammer Film Production of The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll directed by Terence Fisher came after remakes of Frankenstein, Dracula, and other horror features for which they were famous. Surely they felt given the success of both the 1931 and 1941 versions that the Stevenson work was a sure-fire way of making money. They were mistaken.

     One of the reasons for this was that they quite thoroughly recontextualized the original story. Although retaining its female figures and the seemingly heterosexual context into which Hyde is thrust once Jekyll gives him permission to appear in society, screenplay writer Wolf Mankowitz completely altered both characters. In this film Jekyll (Paul Massie) is no bachelor seeking a way to experience sex within a society that prohibits it before marriage, but an unhappily married man whose face on which makeup artist Roy Ashton and hairdresser Ivy Emmerton graft appliances and a shabby beard to make the actor so plainly unhandsome that we almost feel sorry for his beautiful wife, Kitty (Dawn Addams). Jekyll, moreover, is not just a freethinker determined to experiment on with the unknown, but firmly stands as a recluse who not only believes that man is at base a beast—he even describes the deaf and mute children who weekly gather by invitation in his yard to play as “dumb human animals”—but that man should be free to act without social restrictions...if only, he pretends, so that he might be able eventually to permit our better natures to rid itself of the internal struggle within.  

      This Jekyll not only neglects his wife and friend—only one man in this case, the replacement for John Lanyon, Dr. Littauer (David Kossoff)—but appears to be a knowing misogynist who is ready to take on the whole of the human race. Is it any wonder that Kitty has found love in the arms of a truly weak gambler, Paul Allen (Christopher Lee), who relies on endless loans (more like gifts) from his disinterested friend Jekyll. Allen is a sleazy womanizer who presumably Kitty loves simply because she can control him, at least financially, through her husband’s wallet. Even Allen seems to recognize that it is his very villainy that attracts her to him, at one point commenting, “That’s what your kind of woman wants in a man Kitty, complete and utter freedom from shame.” In short, she also seeks a kind of freedom even within the social structure in which pretends to still enact her affair.  

      In short none of the figures are at all likeable, so one can only wonder what this film might become with the sudden appearance of a totally despicable Hyde. But here is where director Fischer and Mankowitz have left themselves some fun. When finally the dour Jekyll finishes whipping up his serum and takes the shot, the Hyde that emerges is the matinee-idol handsome, beautifully spoken Paul Massie in which cinematographer Jack Asher’s camera immediately falls in love. Fischer and Asher, as Tim Brayton observes on the Alternate Ending blog is “constantly framing Massie’s face to occupy the center of all his dialogue scenes.” As he summarizes the role:

 

“This is a happy monster, not a raging one, and even as he beats and rapes and murders, he seems to be very pleased with himself. It ends up being so much more unnerving and scarier than the more openly ape-like, animalistic Hydes of most screen performances that for the only time in the character’s cinematic career, he seems genuinely dangerous.”

       Part of the reason for that feeling of endangerment has to do with the fact that even though this beauty of a Hyde seems to follow the path of the Hydes of 1931 and 1941, going after a buxom prostitute (although this one seems far more ready and willing) to torture before finally murdering, we remain uncertain that Massie’s character is really interested in women at all. The only woman he appears to have sex with, the low-life club dancer Maria whose skit consists basically of doing a belly dance with a python dangling round her neck, seems to attract him more for because of the snake than her derriere. He nearly rises out of his seat when she drops the snake’s mouth into her own.  While she falls madly in love with him, he admits to her after one of their sexual get-togethers, “I can’t love. I know nothing about love.” This Hyde appears to see women as things just for the taking, not even for pleasure. Having sex with women seems to be merely the conventional thing which freed men do.

 

      His central focus appears to concentrated fully on Jekyll and his determination to free himself from him and his control. Unlike the previous transformations, in this film they simply wear off after several hours, leaving Hyde gasping for the “free air” he’s been enjoying. And more than having sex with any woman, he seems to get far more enjoyment out of seducing Kitty’s lover and Jekyll’s old acquaintance Allen. The scene, when Allen finally reveals to his new friend Hyde that Jekyll has for the first time turned down his request for another loan, is a remarkably homoerotic sequence as the two men toy with one another about being put under the control of the other. Massie almost drools at the possibility of an intimate relationship with Allen, as the complete sensualist Allen pauses in consideration of what Hyde seems to be offering him. The language between them is suddenly entirely transactional, but they and we are not certain what precisely is beings transacted.

     Hyde offers to take over Allen’s gambling debts as they come in up to 5,000ℒ.

     Allen, however, cannot comprehend what his friend wants in return.

   

                   Hyde: Sell your soul.

                   Allen: No takers.

                   Hyde: I will take it over.

         Nearly willing, Allen pauses however in trying to imagine what that might mean, just as we too are forced to ask that question as the camera again zooms in on Massies’ handsomely smiling face. To relieve the tension, Hyde himself suggests that his soul wouldn’t be worth much to him either. But he then opens up the possibilities yet again, as if we might have missed what the writer and director are suggesting through their coded words: "Hyde: There are other ways you can repay me."               

     Allen himself now moves directly to a more sexualized language as well: “London is an oyster and I am the one who can open it for you.” We recall that when Hyde first entered a dance hall in a previous scene, he announced: “London and I are virgins to one another.”

      Hyde’s response is equally suggestive of entering virginal anal territory: “Open it wide. Break the hinges. Rifle its pearls.”

      If you might imagine that the very next frame might show us the womanizer introducing his friend to even more willingly corrupt females, you’d be mistaken. Instead, the camera cuts immediately to two males boxing and wrestling one another, truly an emblem of male/male eroticism. And in the next scene the two are taking in a mostly male inhabited bar where a group of drunk singers are serenading their stone-drunk, passed out, companion. The lithe Hyde stands,  slithers over to them, and pours a mug of beer down the drunken lug’s throat, orally intruding this time with the liquid in his tankard that further poisons a man already near death. The final territory to which Allen takes him is an opium den, where Hyde sits alone sucking upon and stroking a long opium tube as if it were an instrument like a clarinet.

 

    When Allen has finally run out of places to which he might imagine introducing his still greedy friend, having also run up a debt over the limited amount, Hyde invites him and his lover Kitty to meet with Jekyll at the Sphinx dance all.

      Since Kitty now wants a divorce and Jekyll has seemed to have disappeared, the couple agree.

 They are met at the club door by a woman with her hair tied up in a tight bun and dressed in a variation of a man in his housecoat, clearly a lesbian, knows precisely where they can find Hyde. We have now finally entered a world to which this Hyde has taken us outside of heterosexual desire.

 

     Allen is led to a room above the dance floor which Hyde as rented for the evening, obviously adjacent to the belly dancer, Maria’s apartment. Hyde greets Allen, opening up a door to a room in which Jekyll presumably awaits him, locking it quickly behind as his friend enters. Inside Allen finds what Hyde describes as “this perfect Eden,” a snake which will phallically enwrap him, putting him to death.

       When soon after Kitty arrives, Hyde rapes her, representing neither love nor pleasure, but with violence and hate, knowing, given her still conventional notions of morality. that she will behave precisely as she does, defenestrating herself from the room’s balcony, crashing through the glass- topped dance hall to her death at the dancers’ feet below.

        Having made it clear that he has no desire for women, he can now joyfully strangle Maria after he has again “taken” or raped her.

        The only female left in the film is the lovely young deaf and mute child of the first scene, who the still convulsing Jekyll, coming to from his Hyde personae, pushes to the ground. It is now up to the men, the police and Littauer to bring down the man who has committed these unspeakable crimes: in their mind not the good looking and sweet natured Hyde, but the reclusive, wife-hatting Jekyll. And Jekyll, finally a totally broken man realizes that truth while staring into a mirror where he sees his Hyde mocking him.

       If one has previously failed to noticed just how Massie has calibrated his voice in order to portray Hyde we now have it clearly demonstrated for us. In their campy dialogue, Jekyll grumbles out his complaints in a low baritone voice, while Hyde challenges and dismisses his threats in a tenor almost effeminate voice, a scene that reminds me of something right out of Charles Ludlam’s performances for the Theater of the Ridiculous.

       Quickly calling in a man to lug away Maria’s body, hidden in a chest, Hyde kills the worker, sitting him at Jekyll’s desk to as he sets fire to the place just as the police pound down the door, he expressing his appreciation for being saved from the madman’s suicidal pact.

        The courts rule Hyde guiltless and the presumed dead man, Jekyll, guilty of all crimes, as the beautiful boyishly grinning Hyde begins his walk to true freedom. But once again as in Jekyll and Hydes gone past, Jekyll manages one final transformation of his visage, having not, as he claims, won the battle between him and evil, but in fact assuring his being sentenced to death. This Jekyll is punished, ultimately, for having kept his hidden self—being like Stevenson’s Hyde a man fearful of his sexual identification—invisible. If you can read coded films, this movie has finally revealed the truth about Hyde’s sexual inclinations, which Jekyll had long kept so very deeply within.

       The critic I quoted early, Tim Brayton apparently doesn’t quite know why he likes this film so much better than others which came before it, having the vague feeling that Fisher’s version is “getting away with something.” Yet he recognizes it as being a “top shelf Hammer horror film” and can’t understand why it still remains so undervalued. But I think it’s pretty apparent why 1960 audiences could not quite make sense of the transgressive values this version seems to embrace. It just didn’t look anything like what the fans of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movies could have expected. Thank heaven.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).