Roy Ward Baker | Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde / 1971

entering a strange land without a destination

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Clemens (screenplay, based on the story by Robert Louis Stevenson), Roy Ward Baker (director) Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde / 1971

 

Roy Ward Baker’s Hammer Production of yet another transformation of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde myth, this titled Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), is a holy mess of a movie that retains issues that are truly at the heart of Stevenson’s tale, but also takes it into completely new territory.

      Here, as one might suspect from the film’s title, the dedicated Doctor (Ralph Bates) shares his split personality this time around with a full bodied and voluptuous woman (Martine Beswick) named Mrs. Edwina Hyde, who is far stronger and more sexually interested than the timid experimenter whom his upstairs neighbor, Howard Spencer (Lewis Fiander), suggests may be “impervious to women.”

      Actually, the good Doctor—and he is a “good” man compared to all the womanizers around him such as Spencer, the doctor’s friend Professor Robertson (Gerald Sim), and the local sailors and low life males of the Whitechapel area in which Jekyll resides—is very much interested in women, but simply for “other” reasons. Having done away with all the added plot contrivances appended to Stevenson’s tale through the years, writer Brian Clemens focuses on Jekyll and Hyde him and her-selves as Jekyll seeks out an elixir that might make him live longer so that he can find a potion that might prevent all infectious diseases from Cholera, Smallpox, Typhoid, Malaria, to, had it been around in those days, Covid. Robertson suggests he will need more than a single lifetime to solve the riddle of so many diseases, and Jekyll, taking him quite seriously, seeks first, accordingly, a potion that might help him live longer than the usual man. Don’t women live longer?

      Clemens has jerry-rigged a plot in which Jekyll becomes convinced that female hormones are the answer, but accordingly he must eviscerate the bodies of woman to protract the needed material.

      For a period of time, he is able to find, through a local coroner, bodies of young girls who have recently died. But running out of fresh bodies, he is forced to turn to William Burke (Ivor Dead) and William Hare (Tony Calvin), invoking the names and stories of the famous Irish duo who did away with numerous ill and not so indisposed individuals in order to sell their bodies to medical institutions. Indeed, the tendency of this film to take on and assimilate other stories is one of its biggest flaws. For it soon also establishes Jekyll as the real Jack the Ripper. But for the moment we’ll overlook that.

      In any event, after even the flow of whores and other “road” kill that Burke and Hare provide runs out upon their being found out and captured—Burke hung by the mobs and Hare blinded in a vat of lye—Jekyll is forced, after pondering his moral scruples, to stalk prostitutes himself, kill them, and cut out the specific gland that produces the needed hormones. Hence the designation of “Ripper.”

      In so doing, however, we discover this time around that it is not Hyde—at least not yet—but Jekyll himself who is the true monster, in this case showing himself to be a horrific misogynist out to murder nearly anyone of the opposite sex. One could hardly describe this Jekyll as being “impervious” to women since he is utterly obsessed with them, seeking out their deaths in order to create his elixir for eternal life.

     But then Ms. Hyde appears and everything changes. As Robertson has advised his young friend:  

“Put a woman in your life, and one day you’ll wake up a changed man.” Indeed, Jekyll has done just that, waking up as a woman he later describes as his sister, Edwina. Talk about “coming out!”

     So does this ambitious film begin to tackle the far more profound theme of gender transformation, a subject which it first takes on rather rambunctiously without knowing precisely where it might end.

 

    When Jekyll first sees himself in the mirror he is amazed by the lovely woman he sees before him. The scene is actually quite well conceived as Jekyll, discovering his own female breasts, at first tentatively, but then seriously explores them, carefully and yet deliberately coming to realize they are part of his/her own anatomy, the realization which begins as slight amazement, shifting to astonishment, and finally joy. Moving her hand soon to her hair, then to her face, as if fearful that it is all just an illusion, she hints at feelings which soon turn to what we might describe as relief and liberation.

    All too soon, Jekyll’s hairy hand appears to be stroking her shoulder, and she realizes just as suddenly that the transformation has been only a temporary one, and she shall soon be back in a male body. And in that moment we glimpse a sense of the issues of transsexuality, dysphoria, and hormone replacement therapy all in one fell swoop.

       It takes no time at all before Edwina Hyde realizes that she is the stronger of the two, daring to take on the sissy-like Jekyll by secretly ordering up dresses—all in red—and before long taking over the necessary murders and dissections, particularly since it has become dangerous for Jekyll, who is more likely to be identified, to undertake them.

       But that, alas, is also the rub. Edwina loves the violence and is quite obviously motivated by the purloined hormones to which she owes her survival. But the writer and director also have the audacity to also make her into an “evil” woman, like almost all of those represented in this film. The only innocents are Howard Spenser’s virginal sister Susan (Susan Brodrick) and her mother, who with Howard live above Jekyll’s laboratory. One might simply chalk Edwina’s character up, accordingly, to the film’s general demonstration of all things misogynistic.

       Yet we cannot but realize that in her evilness Edwina is also powerful, and her character, set against all the simpering, drunken, and harassed women and the womanizing and weak-willed men of this film, she becomes almost a beacon, strangely enough, of feminist values.

        And the film suddenly becomes great fun as Edwina sets her sexual sights on Howard at the very moment that now terrified Jekyll finds himself vaguely interested in Susan, he agreeing, in his most spontaneous moment of the film, to join her at a concert.

        Howard, meanwhile, absolutely lusts after the woman of whom he has caught a glimpse of feeling breasts in a mirror, and the two soon get together for what might almost have been a porno scene were it not interrupted by the arrival of Susan. As the two women meet one another for the first time, Edwina immediately wonders aloud in her internal struggle between her and Jekyll—a brother and sister within a single body (which further calls up the myth of the siblings of the House of Usher)—who will win the love the real brother and sister, Howard and Susan, neither of whom of course can imagine what she might truly mean by “winning.”

       The film delights in the fact that its audience knows that Howard and his sister are equally sexually aroused by the very same being. As Robertson earlier on, inspecting the murdered bodies, notes: “It’s a queer business sergeant. Very queer.” In fact, he is soon done away with by Edwina for his growing knowledge of the truth.

        Baker and Clemens seem to absolutely delight in the sexual confusions they have created through their character’s indeterminate gender.

      At one point when Jekyll unexpectedly comes into contact outside his door with his neighbor, Howard, they exchange the following conversation:

 

howard: How is your sister.

jekyll: Fine. Fine. ....I am in excellent health.

howard: Oh no, you misunderstand me.

jekyll: (Reaching out to touch his neighbor’s face, and purring the word) Howard.

       

     Ultimately, Edwina almost does get her wish, or perhaps we should say, Jekyll is almost able to complete his gender transformation as he, dressing for the concert with Susan, reaches into his closet to pull out an overcoat but instead grabs Edwina’s red dress. Naturally, he fails to show up for his date.

     Yet the conventions of the day (this film was, one must remember, made in 1971) and even more importantly the established traditions of Jekyll and Hyde stories, encourage the film’s creators to reestablish the good Doctor’s credentials as a male of moral credence as he struggles to pull away the knife from Edwina’s hand at the very moment she is about to stab her female foe, Susan, in the back. Like so many other Jekylls, this one scurries back to his laboratory to finish scribbling down his diary entries so that everyone will know that “he done them wrong.”

      If we imagine that he, like other Jekyll’s, might swallow a vial of poison, we are wrong, however, as the Edwina in him just wants to live! He goes scrambling like a squirrel up the side of a building, crossing over on a ledge as thin as Edwina’s dainty feet, and jumps across the street to slide down the slope of a mansard roof, hanging for life on the rain gutter, only as he once more transmogrifies into Edwina and losing strength, falls to her death.

     Baker’s film dared to enter a strange land without knowing the destination that might have made his work transcendent.

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).