Crew
Director – Edgar G. Ulmer, Screenplay/Producer – Jack Pollexfen, Photography (b&w) – John F. Warren, Special Photographic Effects – Louis DeWitt & Jack Rabin, Art Direction – Theobold Holsopple. Production Company – Film Ventures.
Cast
Gloria Talbott (Janet Smith), John Agar (George Hastings), Arthur Shields (Dr. Lomas), John Dierkes (Jacob), Mollie McCard (Maggie), Martha Wentworth (Mrs Merchant)
Plot
Janet Smith arrives to take over her late father’s estate in the English countryside. The family doctor Lomas insists on telling Janet about her inheritance – that she is the daughter of the infamous Dr Jekyll. After learning this, Janet abruptly calls off her engagement to George Hastings. Janet then has troubling dreams of being a werewolf like her father was. Around the village there are a series of killing. After Janet wakes from her dreams with mud on her feet and blood on her gown, she comes to realisation that she must be the killer.
The Czech born Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-72) is a director who gained a small critical following in the 1960s. Ulmer’s reputation lies largely on the basis of two films, the interestingly perverse Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi team-up The Black Cat (1934) and the cult film noir Detour (1944). Alas the rest of Edgar G. Ulmer’s oeuvre remains relatively undistinguished. Certainly, by the time he came to make most of the material that interests us on this site, Ulmer was working way down the B-budget end of the spectrum where he made the likes of The Man from Planet X (1951), The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), Beyond the Time Barrier (1960) and The Lost Kingdom/Journey Beneath the Desert (1961).
There had been a huge number of adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) ever since the early silent era with probably the most famous being the Frederic March-starring Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). For a more detailed overview see my essay Jekyll and Hyde Films. Daughter of Dr. Jekyll joins a bunch of spurious Jekyll and Hyde sequelia – there had earlier been Son of Dr Jekyll (1951), although that is unrelated to this film.
Daughter of Dr. Jekyll may be the oddest Jekyll and Hyde film ever made. It centres around the script twist that reveals that Dr Jekyll was actually a Werewolf. We visit Jekyll’s laboratory (which is now located in the countryside rather than in the centre of Robert Louis London as Stevenson had it). There we see various tubes and flasks, but crucially there is no potion that affects the transformation. Moreover, Jekyll’s daughter Gloria Talbott has apparently inherited the lycanthropic condition from her father and is about to turn into a werewolf too. (Although the end casts considerable doubt over this).
I am willing to bet that Daughter of Dr. Jekyll started out as a regular Jekyll and Hyde spinoff and was quickly rewritten as a werewolf film. A month before it was released there was the surprise hit of I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). A month is an incredibly quick turnaround for a film, although they did make them very quickly and cheaply back in the 1950s. I Was a Teenage Werewolf had a teenager turned into a werewolf after being placed under Hypnosis by a sinister doctor; Daughter of Dr. Jekyll has an almost identical plot where a girl is turned into a werewolf by being placed under hypnosis by a sinister doctor. Both films even have a scene where the werewolf peeps in on a girl – doing gymnastics in Teenage Werewolf, in her lingerie dressing here – before rushing in to attack her.
Even then, Daughter of Dr. Jekyll gets bizarre and arrives at an improbably far-fetched twist ending. [PLOT SPOILERS] Here we learn that Gloria Talbott is not a werewolf after all. And that the real werewolf is family doctor Arthur Shields who has improbably been hypnotising Gloria to believe she is a werewolf so that she can be blamed for his crimes. Interestingly this explanation never lets us know whether Dr Jekyll actually was a werewolf or if this was just a story that Shields made up. Which does leave the interestingly weird possibility of a bizarre retelling of the Dr Jekyll story where both Mr Hyde and his friend, who was a werewolf, were running around killing at the same time, or else that Jekyll was also blamed for someone else’s murder spree.
By this time, Edgar G. Ulmer was well and truly a B-budget director. Daughter of Dr. Jekyll looks shot on the cheap – an interior set of the house and some cheap backlot shots of the moors and little more beyond that. We do get a cheap-looking werewolf transformation. The scenes with Gloria Talbott attacking as a werewolf are shot through a distorted lens that looks almost imaginative.
Trailer here
Full film available here