The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll

Hammer Films gambled on prestige and lost. They doubled their usual script fee for Wolf Mankowitz. They chased BAFTA-winner Laurence Harvey for the lead.¹ What they got was an intriguing mess—too talky for horror fans, too lurid for the art-house crowd.

The hook is clever. Paul Massie’s Dr. Jekyll sports a laughable fake beard and caveman eyebrows, speaking in funeral-dirge tones. His Mr. Hyde? Clean-shaven, handsome, quick-witted. It inverts Stevenson’s premise while staying true to its spirit—Jekyll wants to indulge his vices without consequence.

The triangle elevates things. Jekyll neglects his wife Kitty, played by Dawn Addams. She’s canoodling with his sponging best friend Paul Allen. Christopher Lee plays Allen as deliciously drunk and dissolute. When Hyde discovers their betrayal, he moves in. It’s more Dorian Gray than Gothic horror, and for a while, that works. Massie’s Hyde is a grinning sociopath, jaunty and merciless.

Lee steals scenes. After gambling losses, someone tells him, “Luck’s a bitch, old boy.” His reply: “I shouldn’t think so. I’ve always had the best possible luck with bitches.” Mankowitz gives him zingers, and Lee devours them.

Indeed, when it works, it sings. Hyde drags Paul Allen through London’s seediest haunts: bare-knuckle fights, pubs, opium dens. One of these things is not like the others, but Massie grins through it all with manic delight. Small touches land—Jekyll blotting his journal’s ink before closing it. Lee’s performance. Addams holding her own despite reportedly clashing with Fisher on set.²

But Massie’s Jekyll is a bridge too far. That fake beard is disastrous—so bad they slapped similar eyebrows on David Kossoff just to make Massie’s less ridiculous. Both men look like they raided a costume shop’s clearance bin. Worse, there’s no transformation sequence to justify one actor playing both roles. After losing out on Harvey, Hammer should have rethought their strategy. Casting someone like André Morell as Jekyll and Oliver Reed (who appears here uncredited as a club bouncer) as Hyde³ might have worked, but their decision to chase prestige led them to the BAFTA-winning Massie.

Director Terence Fisher stumbles too. He can’t escape Mankowitz’s talky, convoluted script. Drug addiction, Victorian morality, unchecked science—it’s all here, none of it resonant. A snake dance sequence dies from Norma Marla’s inability to dance and Fisher’s inability to salvage it.⁴ A can-can number exists seemingly to show off the Megascope format while killing narrative momentum. Jekyll’s finale—“What can I do? To whom can I turn?”—is pure melodrama, moaned to an empty room.

The ideas are here but the execution is muddled. Hammer wanted “elevated horror.” They got confused ambitions wrapped in fake facial hair. Still, I can’t quite dismiss it. Too much gleeful wickedness lurking in the margins.