Son of Dr Jekyll (1951)

Yet another offspring of Dr Jekyll, it has to be said that Son of Dr Jekyll (1951) is a good deal less entertaining than his sister, featured in Daughter of Dr Jekyll (1957), although the two films share many plot points and concepts.  Whilst Seymour Friedman's direction is, in places, reasonably atmospheric, overall the film feels slow and ponderous, taking an age to establish every plot point as it lumbers to an obvious conclusion that mirrors its opening.  Visually, it lacks any of the off-beat directorial touches that Edgar G Ulmer was to bring to Daughter of Dr Jekyll six years later, despite, being a studio production, having better production values.  The script does, at least, retain a few of the supporting characters from the Robert Louis Stevenson original, giving Son of Dr Jekyll a sheen of false verisimilitude, despite departing radically from the premise of the novella.  As with Daughter of Dr Jekyll, we have a child of the late doctor, having been brought up by adoptive parents (in this case Utterson) under an assumed name following his parents' deaths, (the prologue shows Hyde murdering his wife, before being chased by a mob to Dr Jekyll's house, which is set ablaze with the fiend inside and Dr Jekyll emerging from an upstairs window to fall to his death), being appraised of his true name and heritage.  This offspring of Jekyll is already a scientist - kicked out of one institution for his unusual experiments into human nature - and decides, against the advice of his father's executor, Dr Lanyon, to clear his father's reviled name.  Predictably, a series of murders ensue, with the short-tempered Jekyll Junior implicated in all of them. 

At this point, the script becomes highly confusing, apparently unclear as to whether young Jekyll is the victim of hereditary, in that he has inherited the violent tendencies of the Hyde part of his parentage, or the ability to transform into a monster of the Jekyll part.  Add to that he does actually replicate his father's formula, which apparently briefly turns him into a Hyde-like figure, although the formula has, in fact, been sabotaged by Lanyon, (who is after the Jekyll fortune, which he will retain control of if the son dies or is declared insane), implying that Jekyll senior's original, unadulterated, serum wouldn't have transformed him, and the confusion is complete.  The scenario now seems to be moving toward that of Daughter of Dr Jekyll, with a seemingly benign guardian turning out to be the real monster, with the implication seemingly being that, like his equivalent in the later film, it was Lanyon who created a serum which turned him into Hyde back in the day, (which further implies that far from being Jekyll's son, the son of Dr Jekyll is actually the Son of Dr Lanyon/Mr Hyde).  But there's a further twist, with Lanyon, during the final confrontation with Jekyll junior, stating that while he was the one who murdered his mother and father, he did so in disguise as Hyde, using make up to change his appearance!  So was there ever really a Mr Hyde?  Was it Lanyon all the time?  In which case Dr Jekyll's work was a complete failure and the central idea of the source novel, that the good and evil sides of human nature could be chemically separated, is completely obviated.  In this respect, the film shares Daughter of Dr Jekyll's apparent ambition to completely write Mr Hyde out of the picture, (there the late Dr Jekyll was accused of being a werewolf, but actually wasn't, his friend and colleague Dr Lomas having been the werewolf all along).

The obsession with eliminating Mr Hyde, reframing Jekyll as a benign scientist trying to help mankind but being undermined by a jealous colleague, along with the strange implication that a transformation effected by a serum might become hereditary, are common to both films.  Which is hardly surprising, as they share a writer in Jack Pollexfen, who, perhaps unhappy with his ideas' treatment in Son of Dr Jekyll, remade his script as Daughter of Dr Jekyll.  While Son of Dr Jekyll isn't a bad film - it has some decent production values and surprisingly strong cast headed by Louis Hayward and Alexander Knox - it simply isn't a very interesting film, bogged down by too much exposition, too much screen time devoted to a complicated and unlikely conspiracy sub-plot and a script so confusing that it loses all sense of direction.  Daughter of Dr Jekyll, by contrast, covers much the same ground plot-wise and even has a similarly muddled script, but, via the aching low-budget Allied Artists production values and Edgar G Ulmer's typically off-kilter direction, transforms it all into a much faster paced and utterly lunatic film which, at times, feels like a hallucinatory experience.  Consequently, with its more conventional approach to the same subject matter, Son of Dr Jekyll, unfortunately, comes over as a far less enjoyable viewing experience.