aka House of Fright
UK. 1960.
Crew
Director – Terence Fisher, Screenplay – Wolf Mankowitz, Based on the Novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Producer – Michael Carreras, Photography – Jack Asher, Music/Songs – David Heneker & Monty Norman, Makeup – Roy Ashton, Production Design – Bernard Robinson. Production Company – Hammer Films.
Cast
Paul Massie (Dr Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde), Dawn Addams (Kitty Jekyll), Christopher Lee (Paul Allen), David Kossoff (Dr Ernst Litauer), Norman Marla (Maria), Francis De Wolff (Inspector)
Plot
London, 1874. The respectable Dr Henry Jekyll is obsessed with perfecting a serum that brings out the repressed, amoral side of human nature. Using himself as a test subject, he takes the formula and transforms into a smooth, handsome figure that he calls Edward Hyde. As Hyde, he goes out and carouses in dancehalls and gambling dens. There he makes a best friend of his wife’s lover Paul Allen. However, Hyde’s outrages become more extreme and Jekyll soon finds that he is unable to control Hyde from emerging in himself.
Britain’s Hammer Films had huge success in the late 1950s with their remakes of the Universal horror classics with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958). This launched the Anglo-Horror fad and Hammer produced Dracula and Frankenstein sequels for the next decade-and-a-half. In addition, they went on to remake a host of other classics over the next few years with the likes of The Mummy (1959), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), The Old Dark House (1963) and One Million Years B.C. (1966), alongside a number of original works.
Universal never adapted Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). However, there were two film adaptations made during the Golden Age of Horror with Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) starring Fredric March and MGM’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941) starring Spencer Tracy – I have a full essay here at Jekyll and Hyde Films. The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll is another of these horror classics given the rework treatment by Hammer. The story gets a name change over the Stevenson original, which is usually truncated to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by most film versions. Presumably Hammer thought calling the film The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll would allow it to piggyback on the recent award-winning true-life based Split Personality film The Three Faces of Eve (1957). In the US, the film was released as House of Fright.
The great surprise of the film is that though the name of Christopher Lee, who became a star name through Hammer’s remakes, is prominent in the credits, it is not Lee who plays the roles of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The title roles are played by the relatively unknown Paul Massie, a Canadian actor whose film work was all in England. For some reasons, Hammer decided their chief gimmick with The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll is that they would reverse the characters. Usually Dr Jekyll is clean polished and an upstanding citizen, while Mr Hyde is bestial, unkempt and animal-like. Here Dr Jekyll is upstanding but wears a scruffy beard and has a deeper voice, while the transformation into Mr Hyde makes him handsome, charming and much more soft-spoken. This may be the first case of a film where fake facial hair ruins the central performance. As Jekyll, Massie’s fake beard and moustache look absurd (especially in the dvd restoration) and it becomes impossible to take the performance seriously. As Hyde, Massie seems just too polite and charming, hence lacking in much of the way of threat or depravity that character is meant to have.
Christopher Lee later had his turn playing Jekyll and Hyde in the non-Hammer film I, Monster (1971). Here Lee plays the role of a handsome cad and roué who conducts an affair with Jekyll’s wife, while milking his friend Jekyll for money to pay his gambling debts. Lee purportedly called it one of his favourite roles. I don’t know the veracity of that claim but it is easy to believe – after several years of playing unspeaking monsters like Frankenstein’s creature and the title role in The Mummy, or ones such as Dracula that were more presence than he ever had lines, this is a role that gives him the opportunity to do some acting and play the handsomely charming anti-hero. Certainly, he adds a much needed dastardliness to the film that Massie’s Hyde never does.
Traditionally, Jekyll and Hyde films have added two girls to represent the character’s duality – a prim and proper fiancée and usually a loose barmaid/dancehall girl that Hyde carouses with. The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll takes the interesting step of combining both in the character of Jekyll’s wife (Dawn Addams). She is both his marital partner while also maintaining an affair with Christopher Lee behind his back. I am not sure this adds anything radically different to the story, although certainly the scenes with her and Lee have a smooth conniving that brings much to the film. The latter scenes do introduce a fight for her between Jekyll and Hyde, but you feel this should have been a much more central aspect to the film.
The Hammer production team are certainly on good form. The set designs come with a great deal of colour. Terence Fisher does much with the background, from dancing girls filling the halls to moody night-time streets that give the film some undeniable colour. Unfortunately the casting throws the film off in a big way and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll is one film from the classic Hammer that doesn’t quite work.
Hammer have adapted Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde three other times. The first occasion was The Ugly Duckling (1959), a comedy treatment starring Bernard Bresslaw, which remains one of their least known genre films. The subsequently returned to the story with the far more successful Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) in which Dr Jekyll (Ralph Bates) undergoes a gender flip to turn into Martine Beswick. More recently, the revived Hammer Films conducted another version with Doctor Jekyll (2023) in which Eddie Izzard plays a female Jekyll/Hyde.
Terence Fisher’s other genre films are:– the sf films Four Sided Triangle (1953) and Spaceways (1953), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Mummy (1959), The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960), The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), The Gorgon (1964), Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), all for Hammer. Outside of Hammer, Fisher has made the Old Dark House comedy The Horror of It All (1964) and the alien invasion films The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), Island of Terror (1966) and Night of the Big Heat (1967).
The film came with a screenplay by Wolf Mankowitz (1924-98), a celebrated novelist and playwright of the era. The other genre screenplays of note that Mankowitz produced were the End of the World film The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), while he worked as one of the writers on the James Bond comedy Casino Royale (1967). Mankowitz also wrote the 1953 novel that was adapted into the quasi-fantastical A Kid for Two Farthings (1955) about a boy searching for a unicorn.
Other versions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde include:– Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1908); Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1910) with Alvin Neuss; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1912) with James Cruze; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913) with King Baggott; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) with John Barrymore; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1920) with Sheldon Lewis; Der Januskopf (1920), a lost German version with Conrad Veidt; the classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) with Fredric March; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941) with Spencer Tracy; Jean Renoir’s The Testament of Dr Cordelier (1959) with Jean-Louis Barrault; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (tv movie, 1968) with Jack Palance; I, Monster (1971) also with Christopher Lee; The Man with Two Heads (1972) with Denis DeMarne; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (tv movie, 1973), a musical version with Kirk Douglas; Walerian Borowczyk’s Dr Jekyll and His Women (1981) with Udo Kier; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (tv movie, 1981) with David Hemmings; a 1985 Russian adaptation starring Innokenti Smoktonovsky; Edge of Sanity (1989) with Anthony Perkins; The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde an episode of the tv series Nightmare Classics (1989) with Anthony Andrews; Jekyll and Hyde (tv movie, 1990) with Michael Caine; My Name is Shadow (1996), a Spanish version starring Eric Gendron; a bizarre tv pilot Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1999), which combined the story with Hong Kong martial arts and featured Adam Baldwin playing a Jekyll as a superhero in the Orient; Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical (2001) with David Hasselhoff; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2002) directed by and starring Mark Redfield; the excellent British tv reinterpretation Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (2002) with John Hannah; The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Rock’n’Roll Musical (2003) with Alan Bernhoft; the modernised Jekyll + Hyde (2006) with Bryan Fisher; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2006) with Tony Todd; the modernised BBC tv series Jekyll (2007) with James Nesbitt; Jekyll (2007) starring Matt Keeslar where Hyde becomes a virtual creation; and the modernised Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2008) starring Dougray Scott.
Other variations include the would-be sequels Son of Dr Jekyll (1951), Daughter of Dr Jekyll (1957) and Dr Jekyll and the Wolfman (1972); the comedy variations Abbott and Costello Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1953), The Ugly Duckling (1959), the Italian My Friend, Dr Jekyll (1960) and The Nutty Professor (1963) with Jerry Lewis and its remake The Nutty Professor (1996) with Eddie Murphy; versions where Dr Jekyll turns into a woman with Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), the Italian comedy Dr Jekyll and the Gentle Lady (1971) and Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde (1995); the gender-reversed Madame Hyde (2017); a Looney Tunes cartoon Dr Jekyll’s Hide (1954) where Sylvester the Cat transforms into a dog after taking the formula; the erotic/adult versions The Naughty Dr. Jekyll (1973), The Erotic Dr Jekyll (1976), Jekyll and Hyde (2000), Dr. Jekyll & Mistress Hyde (2003) and Jacqueline Hyde (2005); Dr Black and Mr Hyde (1976), a Blaxploitation version where Jekyll is a Black man who turns into a white-skinned monster; the amusing sendup Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again (1982); and a wacky children’s tv series Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde (1995); Killer Bash (1996) set in a frat house with an avenging female Jekyll; the excellent deconstruction Mary Reilly (1996), which tells the story from the point-of-view of Jekyll’s maid; while the tv series Jekyll and Hyde (2015) concerns Jekyll’s grandson (Tom Bateman) hunted by various parties during the 1930s. Dr Jekyll appears as a character in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) played by Jason Flemyng, in the tv series Penny Dreadful (2014-6) played by Shazad Latif and in The Mummy (2017) played by Russell Crowe, which all feature team-ups between Famous Monsters, while the animated The Pagemaster (1994) features a Dr Jekyll voiced by Leonard Nimoy.
Trailer here
Full film available here