n 19th-century London, Dr. Henry Jekyll (Hannah) is a dedicated doctor and medical lecturer whose unconventional theories about man's baser impulses lose him the funding he needs to further his controversial research. But his friend, the distinguished Parliamentarian Sir Danvers Carew (Warner), whose daughter Sarah (Kendall) idolizes Jekyll, sees the many political advantages in being a patron of medical research—and therefore uses his influence to help Jekyll obtain a human guinea pig, Mr. Edward Hyde, from the nearby mental asylum.
Jekyll has his household staff prepare special quarters for Hyde in a gloomy attic room. But these quarters are barely ready when Jekyll receives word that Hyde will not be arriving after all: The madman has committed suicide. Bereft of a test subject, Jekyll tells his staff that Hyde has arrived and injects his mind-altering drugs into himself instead. He's soon experiencing blackouts and disturbing memory flashes that hint at nights spent in violent debauchery. His servant Ned (Jack Blumenau) knows exactly what's going on and wastes no time negotiating a pay raise, blaming a rash of household thefts on the sweet, devout new chambermaid, Mabel (Sherley).
Before long, Jekyll realizes that his blackouts coincide with the activities of a malevolent new personality named Hyde, after the madman supposedly being treated in the Jekyll attic. Hyde is a brute, a rapist and a murderer, whose savagery is soon directed against Jekyll's friends and servants.
Nastier living through chemistry
The dual roles of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have been tackled by an impressive array of acting talents since the days of silent film. They have been played with varying degrees of success by, among other folks, John Barrymore, Spencer Tracy, Frederic March, Kirk Douglas, Anthony Perkins, John Malkovich and (on Broadway, reportedly doing a fine job) the much-maligned David Hasselhoff. (Even Jerry Lewis and Eddie Murphy, if you include the two versions of the knockoff The Nutty Professor.)
It's safe to say that fidelity to the source material has varied widely. In many of the films and dramatizations, Jekyll experiences a transformation physical as well as mental; in some, Hyde's so monstrous he no longer qualifies as human. The cliched version of the scene features Jekyll drinking a bubbling potion from a test tube, collapsing behind a table while grasping his throat, and emerging with a face a mother could loathe.
This Bravo Network production takes a different tack, eliminating all fantasy elements to present a Jekyll whose unnamed potion is clearly just another mind-altering addictive drug—and which, to judge from the several scenes of Jekyll or his servants obtaining a necessary white powder from a source in the seamier parts of London, is likely cocaine. Jekyll never transforms physically. His voice and demeanor change utterly, but he is still clearly the same man, to both the audience and his circle of acquaintances—a point played for horror when the trusting and sympathetic Sarah Carew keeps a nighttime rendezvous with a man she believes to be the admirable Jekyll, but who is actually the fiendish, lusting Hyde. John Hannah, as Jekyll and Hyde, has no traditional transformation scene at all, but captures the difference between the two characters with ease: There is never any doubt who's talking.
The atmospheric and deliberately paced film is never very frightening, and is sometimes aggravating in its refusal to play any of this classically rollicking story for fun. It stumbles badly in scenes that take us inside Jekyll's fragmentation by putting both characters on-screen at the same time, and thus giving Hyde an opportunity to taunt his host directly. There is also a revelation involving the sweet chambermaid Mabel that arrives too late and doesn't add much of anything. But the film excels in several digs at the stratified British class structure of the time. There's a dinner party where one complacent partygoer makes an insulting comment about Mabel while Mabel stands invisibly beside her serving peas, and a scene in which Jekyll displays his shock that Mabel actually heard it. "You're not supposed to listen," he says. "You're here to serve. You don't exist." Mabel smiles sweetly and replies, "Then how did the peas get poured from the bowl?" It's the first moment in an interesting relationship that might have taken the script in an entirely different direction altogether—were Jekyll not on the fast road to hell, and Mabel not unknowingly sitting in the passenger seat beside him.
