After reading Marcus Hearn & Alan Barnes’ THE HAMMER STORY and visiting Chris Woods’ cheeky BRITISH HORROR FILMS website (google it, the film reviews are a scream!), I have been working my way through most of Hammer Film’s core output especially the often overlooked and unfairly maligned early 1970s films. The first part of this is due to the films being unavailable in America for awhile due to distribution problems while the bad rap comes from unfair criticism from hardcore fans because the company was trying something different. DOCTOR JEKYLL & SISTER HYDE is one of the very best examples of this new approach forging the old style Gothic look with clever scriptwriing that is both reverant and irreverant to the source material. This comes as no surprise since the driving force behind the film is Brian Clemens the man chiefly responsible for THE AVENGERS. In addition to an interesting twist on the Jekyll/Hyde theme, we get Jack the Ripper and Burke & Hare seamlessly added to the mix
The setting is all too familiar. Victorian London with endless fog swirling about the streets. Well to do people in 19th century clothes strolling about while the lower class types are seen milling about the local public houses. Dr Jekyll (Ralph Bates) is seeking an elixir to prolong life and deduces that he needs female hormones to do it. As a result of these hormones, his alter ego becomes a woman and the “battle of the sexes” has begun. In order to keep up his supply he/she is forced to murder prostitutes hence Jack the Ripper. Brilliant! Although 50 years before the Ripper, Clemens works Burke & Hare into the story since they are a part of the British “penny dreadful” tradition and well known to British horror audiences. Add references from Val Lewton’s THE BODY SNATCHER and 1968’s OLIVER and you have a movie that is a delight from start to finish.
Adding to the fun are the remarkable performances of Ralph Bates and especially Martine Beswick as Jekyll & Sister Hyde. They really do seem to be an inseparable part of each other. The transformations are well handled and just watch how Martine handles discovering that she now has a female body. The film is bloody not gory and since it was shot entirely on a soundstage, this allows director Roy Ward Baker to have complete control over the look of the film from the quality camerawork to the sublime set lighting. The lush, psuedo-Rachmaninoff score is also a definite plus. It’s an example of where everything came together on a film from the settings to the performances to even the cheeky title which is wonderfully lurid (a publicist’s dream) and delightfully appropriate. My favorite 1970s Hammer film after HANDS OF THE RIPPER and an absolute must for fans of the Jekyll/Hyde saga and Jack the Ripper.
The Capsule Critic 