Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde *** (1971, Ralph Bates, Martine Beswick, Gerald Sim) – Classic Movie Review 2891

Director Roy Ward Baker’s 1971 Hammer horror movie is the third of three Hammer Films adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, following The Ugly Duckling (1959) and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960).

Brian Clemens’s screenplay offers an unusual, intriguing and gory take on the familiar Robert Louis Stevenson tale that turns the well-meaning but misguided Dr Jekyll (Ralph Bates) into evil female lookalike Sister Hyde (Martine Beswick).

Dr Jekyll is trying to create an elixir of life using female hormones taken from fresh corpses. Jekyll drinks the serum and transforms into a gorgeous but evil woman. But then he needs more female hormones so London women start meeting bloody deaths.

Neatly directed by Baker, this is an interesting excursion into terror that touches on a Freudian subtext. Sometimes hammy but more often convincing, it comes complete with effective, if obviously clichéd, foggy Victorian England atmosphere, believable transformations, and tense scenes when Beswick stalks her human prey. Bates brings zest to the film with his stylish delivery of Clemens’s dialogue.

Also in the cast are Gerald Sim, Lewis Fiander, Dorothy Alison, Susan Broderick, Neil Wilson, Ivor Dean, Paul Whitsun-Jones, Philip Madoc, Dan Meaden, Virginia Wetherell, Irene Bradshaw, Tony Calvin, Geoffrey Kenton, Anna Brett, Jackie Poole, Rosemary Lord, Petula Portell, Pat Brackenbury, Liz Romanoff, Will Stampe, Roy Evans, Derek Steen, John Lyons, Jeanette Wild, Bobby Parr and Julia Wright.

Bates and Wetherell became husband and wife, and first met as they prepared to shoot the scene in which Dr Jekyll kills the prostitute played by Wetherell.

For Hammer, Bates also played the demonic Lord Courtley in Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), followed by Baron Frankenstein in The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Giles Barton in Lust for a Vampire (1971). He died from cancer aged only 51 on 27th March 1991.

Caroline Munro turned down the part of Sister Hyde but because it required topless nudity.

The BBFC demanded cuts to remove the inter-cutting of a murder and a rabbit gutting, and to edit a bedroom murder and the stabbing of Professor Robertson.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2891

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