tie me up! tie me down!
by Douglas Messerli
Jack Pollexfen (screenplay), Edgar
G. Ulmer (director) Daughter of Dr. Jekyll / 1957
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.
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
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.”
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).
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
