“All of my experiments are directed towards finding the creature within!”

After Hammer had ripped up and eaten Shelley and Stoker’s most famous works and then barfed up Curse Of Frankenstein and Dracula to huge success, it stood to reason that they’d take a crack at pretty much every other gothic tome or half-remembered Universal property they could get their grubby mitts on.
So a quick succession of iconic creations got the lurid Eastmancolour treatment - The Mummy, The Phantom Of The Opera, Dracula again, Frankenstein again, the Wolfman, you name it, they had multiple cracks at it. And of course, the same was true for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And like all the others, they had to turn the whole thing on its head, because the more you look at ‘em, the more you realise that this was what Hammer did. Not for them a po-faced straight-up sumptuous period piece a-la the BBC, oh no. “Up yours, Stevenson, we’re doing this our way!” (they probably said)
And along came The Two Faces Of Dr Jekyll. Which sees an overwrought, beardy Doctor Henry Jekyll spend his time bemoaning his lot, saying “who am I?” and staring out of windows at the rain like some kind of emo Richard Stilgoe, while his better looking alter-ego magically loses the beard and eyebrows and proceeds to smarm it up around the fleshpots of Olde London Towne.
In fact, neither of the two alter-egos are particularly nice - and the film is almost entirely peopled with horrible characters, only Henry’s ineffectual friend Ernst offering any moral compass. It comes to something when Oliver Reed (in his first role for Hammer) is the only vaguely heroic person on-screen, and he lasts approximately two minutes before Jekyll stoves his melon in with a candlestick.
You can tell Henry’s a wrong ‘un in the opening scene, when observing the disabled children he allows to play in his unrealistically-realised back yard-cum-playground, he describes them as “dumb human animals” and then lays out his manifesto, which has absolutely nothing to do with said children.
“All of my experiments are directed towards finding the creature within,” he whinges, in his strange, slowed-down voice (done, one presumes, to add another difference between him and the normal-speaking Hyde). “Every personality’s two faces struggle for supremacy.”
It’s not surprising he’s a tad peed off, to be honest - he was laughed out of his last lecture and since then all his experiments have managed to achieve is an injection which makes monkeys angry, which let’s face it, could probably be achieved by just sticking a needle into them, without the need for the clever chemical part.
Meanwhile, his unfaithful wife Kitty is carrying on with his best mate Paul (Christopher Lee playing very much against type as a drunken libertine). So it’s time for Jekyll himself to take the monkey maddening medicine and enjoy a night on the town.
He turns into suave Hyde, and happens to run into Paul and Kitty, and although the two men hit it off, Kitty riles Hyde when she spurns his advances, telling him she actually loves Paul. Keeping up? You’re right - this film does have a remarkably mature attitude to relationships. It a strangely grown-up project all round, in fact.
The next day, Jekyll gets some bad news - if he was planning to market his new invention as “Beard Be-Gone” or “Anti-Hipster Juice”, it’s not going to work, cos the chin hair, brows and barnet are back. What’s more his doctor mate Ernst diagnoses that his metabolism appears to be speeding up, e.g. he is ageing rapidly.
Hyde regains control and he and Paul go off on a bender that makes the shenanigans in The Hangover look tame - bare knuckle fighting, cockernee singalongs and opium dens, nothing is off the menu for this pair. Paul taps Hyde for some money, and Hyde asks for the loan of his lover, Kitty as collateral, who in reality is his own adulterous wife, who he’s been ignoring (as Jekyll) for the last six years. Still keeping up? Good.
Hyde’s doings eventually lead to him getting beaten up in an alley by a pimp. He wakes up as Jekyll grasping a Dear John letter from Kitty, who has left him for Paul. He resolves to destroy his life’s work, but once again Hyde regains control and goes on a complicated revenge spree that involves snakes, rape, murder, forced suicide and fire (this is, after all, a Hammer film).
By this time the police are closing in, and Jekyll gets the blame for everything, with Hyde looking like he’s got away with it all. But he’s reckoned without the forceful nature of Jekyll’s personality, and the good(ish) doctor regains control one last time, now looking like an elderly Thunderbirds puppet and showing everyone who’s left exactly what has been going on.
The Two Faces Of Doctor Jekyll bombed at the cinemas - I have my own theories about why (this is one of those stories everyone knows, not only that but it’s a bit of a boring one, and familiarity tends to breed both contempt and poor box office). This is a shame because it really is a very good film - it’s mature, complicated and well-made and when the shocks come, they are done very well indeed (particularly Kitty’s astonishing death - no-one does a body hitting the floor like a sack of spuds quite as well as Hammer). Perhaps the audiences of 1960 weren’t ready for such an adult approach to a horror film.