HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 27
1st of 4 Hammer films

Writer Brian Clemens came up with the high concept for Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde as a joke when a bunch of Hammer folks were boozing it up down the pub in Bray (probably the same building that Heston Blumenthal took over in the 90’s and is now the most exclusive restaurant in England – how times have changed!) You can see how the idea would have been hilarious to a bunch of British blokes in 1970, but Hammer boss Michael Carreras reputedly took a quiet sip of his beer and said “That’s not a bad idea, you know. Come into my office on Monday with a draft.” I’d like to say that Carreras was a secret crusader for gender liberation and that’s why he overcame the default dismissiveness of his peers – but more likely it was the canny exploitation film-maker in him seeing the mouth-watering potential for the sort of sleazy kinkiness that was bound to put bums on seats down in Leicester Square. All tastefully presented in the Hammer idiom, of course.

So probably best not to get overexcited by how this film exposes sexual repression and fearlessly puts forward the idea that gender boundaries are more fluid in our psychological nature than the society of the day was willing to recognise. I may well be being unfair to them, but I really don’t think social reform was top of either Carreras’, Clemens’ or director Roy Ward Baker’s mind as they put this film together. But although their motives may not have been quite that noble, the fact is they hit on something very real. Their provocation might have been aimed at the prurient interest of an exploitation audience, but it’s still provocation, and it hits its targets with unerring precision. And I don’t think it detracts at all from a modern appreciation of the taboos this film was transgressing and the deeper psychological impact – in a positive way - it may just have had on some of its audience.

So there’s a deep seam of delicious irony and satire which this chance joke of a high concept opened up for Clemens and Baker, which they mine incredibly effectively. But putting all that to one side, this film sings because it’s just so damn well executed. The production design team achieve the minor miracle of turning Elstree studios into a time machine back to foggy period London – always one of my favourite film settings – and Baker shoots it beautifully. David Whitaker contributes one of the best Hammer scores ever. Clemens’ script is as witty and entertaining as they come, even managing to shoehorn Jack the Ripper and Burke & Hare sub-plots into the story in a way that doesn’t seem unwieldy.

But it’s the cast who really shine here. Ralph Bates is someone I have a lot of fondness for, because he just plays the cad so outrageously, unctuously well, but here he restrains that impulse and focuses instead on the intense inner turmoil of a man at war with his own nature. His serum is the cause of the transformation but, as in all Jekyll and Hyde stories including Robert Louis Stevenson’s original, we all know this is a metaphor for what is innate in all of us. Stevenson was exploring an all-encompassing concept of base savagery, but it’s so easy to update that into an expression of the id – not something necessarily immoral, just something which represents our primal desires, free of the strictures of social conditioning and the fear of censure.

Bates is great, but although she gets a lot less screen time, it’s Martine Beswick who casually pops up and steals the show - lock, stock and barrel. She doesn’t even get many lines, but those she does she purrs and sneers out like a human embodiment of all that is fearless and transgressive. Even her scenes of gratuitous nudity feel like her own statement of feminine power – more intimidating to the male characters than titillating (in truth, she’d faced up to Carreras and told him to fuck off as far as full frontal went and she’d disrobe as much as she felt appropriate for the story, so in a way what ended up in the film really is an expression of Beswick’s own strength of character). But that’s not to say that the sexual allure is neutered – far from it. There’s a scene where Lewis Fiander encounters her on the stairway and stumblingly tries to introduce himself to who he thinks is Jekyll’s sister (yes, that title works even better than you thought) and she just stares at him. It’s one of the most sexually powerful scenes in 70’s exploitation cinema - a whole industry and genre rife with tits and ass and sex and Beswick outdoes it all with a look. Honestly, she is legendary in this movie – this performance probably isn’t celebrated enough.

The supporting cast is outstanding as well – the sibling act between Fiander’s needling, prurient sticky-beak and Susan Brodrick’s prim Victorian ingenue. Ivor Dean and Tony Calvin are immense fun as Burke and Hare. Philip Madoc plays a morgue attendant who quite casually and obviously implies his predilection for necrophilia (just another example of the boldness of Clemens’ script). And Gerald Sim as Jekyll’s older and more esteemed medical colleague conjures one of the most gleefully horny characters in Hammer history.

Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde is confident, rebellious, funny and even manages to bring some decent fright and horror into the mix with some pretty gruesome murder and mutilation scenes for its era. First time I saw this I basically dismissed it, so I don’t know how this all went over my head. Maybe it’s the beautiful new presentation which finally caused me to take proper notice of what I was seeing (btw, these Studiocanal blu-ray releases of the Hammer stuff seem to produce so much better image quality than any others, they are really outstanding). I now consider this one of the best of all the Hammer horrors.