So, this weekend TCM has got it into its corporate head to screen the 1953 comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In case you didn’t already know, this is one of the lesser-regarded, least-loved entries in the already rather shopworn and degraded pile of B-movie fodder that is the Abbott and Costello oeuvre. I know I’m misusing several words there—both oeuvre and B-movie, at least—but I do so advisedly. I’m a sucker for Golden Age Hollywood comedies, and comedy teams, and slapstick, so I have a soft spot for old Lou and Bud, but seriously it’s hard to defend their Universal films as anything more than programmatic filler recycling some vaudeville schtick well past its sell-by date. That being said, Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is substantially better than its reputation suggests, and definitely worth the time of anyone who bothers to read my weekly rantings here. Just go in with sufficiently lowered, realistic expectations, and let the isolated bright spots of this thing impress and surprise you.
But that’s not what I wanted to write about this week. I’m more interested in the movie TCM won’t be screening, because it doesn’t exist. The movie that might have been, in some alternate universe, where the original ideas for this film didn’t get curtailed and redirected into stale formula. Because at one point, this movie was set to be called Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde. And boy, what a difference that extra letter makes.
Say what you will about Abbott and Costello, when they were on their game they were outstanding. Audiences loved them for a reason, their classic routines have stood the test of time, and they have left a lasting influence on American comedy that can be measured in the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. They were also lazy wastrels given to unseemly petty in-fighting. My first insight into how dysfunctional they were came in off-handed and back-handed comments by the likes of Groucho Marx or Buster Keaton. Eventually I came to understand what Groucho and Buster were hinting at—here were a pair of movie stars who had the clout to force Hollywood to their will. They could have demanded and received a level of creative autonomy that Groucho and Buster could only dream of, but instead they could barely be bothered to show up to their own set on time and deliver their lines semi-competently. They put the minimum amount of effort into making their films, while indulging the most pointless and fractious grudges against one another. Watching their films is an exercise in squandered opportunities: it’s like discovering that yes, Superman landed on Earth from Krypton, but that instead of becoming either a crusading journalist or a planet-saving superhero, he was content to become a pretty good bowler, but never even won a municipal tournament.
And then there’s Charles Lamont, director of a huge number of Abbott and Costello programmers. Lamont was a prodigious comedy director whose prior experience included Mack Sennett, Al Christie, Buster Keaton, Charley Chase, and the Three Stooges. So, just gnaw on that CV for a while—this guy knew his stuff. However, one those things he knew when we say he knew his stuff was that he had had his fill of slapstick, and wanted to pursue the exciting new direction offered by screwball comedy to make character-driven situation comedies. I’ve spent much of my time in this blog talking about how screwball comedy represented the evolutionary progress from slapstick, and how many of its finest and most important practitioners came from a slapstick background. Lamont could have done amazing things had he pursued this direction—but he was denied the chance. The studio system in those days meant the company bosses could decide your fate for you, and those bosses needed Lamont to take over Abbott and Costello’s Hit the Ice when they had to fire Erle C. Kenton. Lamont did his job too well—Hit the Ice was a hit, and that only convinced the front office to keep him on the assignment. He never escaped that assignment, even as the ambitions dwindled, the formula became threadbare, and the quality plummeted.
By the time 1953 rolled around, everything was an autopilot. There was no reason for Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to be anything other than exactly what you would expect it to be once you hear the title. So what were screenwriters Grant Garrett and Sid Fields doing writing a gender-swapping variant? Sadly, it’s hard to tell exactly—we know the title Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde, and we can see vestiges of that alternate version peeking through the edges of the finished film. For example, after the first killing, there’s a weird bit of dialogue where, for no reason whatsoever, a gravedigger bothers to emphasize that nobody knows for sure that the killer is a man, and might just as well be a woman. Well, sure, fella, but why bother calling that out, if the killer is going to turn out to be a man and no women are ever treated as suspects?
Also, the early reels spin around a subplot of Dr. Jekyll’s ward being a suffragette. There’s a suffragette rally, and dialogue about women’s rights, none of which pay off as the film goes on and quickly forgets these ideas. I suppose that in an earlier draft, Jekyll might have ended up with a female alter ego as a way of playing into this suffragette subplot.
Having Dr. Jekyll morph into a lady Hyde might have been impossible in a Production Code environment, even if done in a slapsticky manner, so it’s tough to imagine what was going through Garrett and Fields’ minds when they started down this road, but there’s no question that a gender-bending Jekyll and Hyde story in 1953 would have been distinctive and original. It also would have been in keeping with some of the forgotten subtext of the original novel.
The Doctor Jekyll of Robert Louis Stevenson’s book was inspired to create his dual identity because he feared indulging his vices openly would open him up to scandal—whereas letting Mr. Hyde get his freak on didn’t threaten Dr. Jekyll’s veneer of public respectability. Exactly what it was he hungered after was left unspecified, but the most straightforward reading of the text would be that Jekyll was horny, and let Hyde pursue dance hall girls in his stead.
The 1932 film version handles similar themes, in that we are first introduced to a Jekyll who is very eager to marry Muriel Carew, but is told he must be patient to wait. With the only sexual outlet that Victorian society would consider acceptable closed off, he then meets dance hall girl Ivy, and only then gets around to chemically inducing his Hyde persona. The suggestion is that Hyde is an outgrowth of a repressed sexuality.
The thing is, these ideas all deal with the consequences of repressing male sexuality, and there is no consideration of what horrors result from the Victorian suppression of female sexuality. Whatever Garrett and Fields were fumbling with in 1953, the fact that they were ginning it up in a context of a suffragette subplot suggests they were leaning into this idea somehow—women’s liberation is inevitably both a political and sexual revolution, the two go hand in hand.
The first gender-bending Jekyll and Hyde iteration I know of is the 1971 Hammer film Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde by Brian Clemens and Roy Ward Baker, two of the co-creators of TV’s The Avengers. It’s a hot mess of a movie, in which a dozen or so incompatible and disjointed ideas were thrown together with little thought about how they all fit. It is, naturally enough, one of my very favorite Hammer films—whatever else it might be, it is never boring.
One of the striking and interesting aspects of Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is its depiction of the gender transformation. I don’t mean the way the transformation is realized as a special effect (although let me take a quick detour to mention that this is indeed excellent. Whereas previous Jekyll and Hyde films generally had the toplining star play both roles, and special effects were used to transition from one appearance to the other. I say “generally” because in the Abbott and Costello version, Boris Karloff only plays Jekyll, and Hyde was a stunt double in a mask. But Hammer’s 1971 film casts Ralph Bates as Jekyll and Martine Beswick as Hyde. Although the casting had been done without taking this factor into account, and all parties were surprised to discover later just how much these two looked like one another. The first transformation scene is a single take which uses a fake mirror and a body double for Bates to sell the illusion, in which it appears that the man turns into a woman before our very eyes without the expected trickery of optical effects.)
No, when I say I’m impressed by the depiction, I mean the narrative aspect. Jekyll is a timid man, obsessed by work and socially withdrawn, but flirting awkwardly with the teenage girl who lives above him. And then he turns into a sexually aggressive woman who pursues that girl’s brother. There’s certainly a rivalry between the two personas, and each one conspires to destroy the other, but there’s no sense either persona is unnerved by the other’s sexual tastes.
It’s not clear if the filmmakers simply forgot to think through how a person might react if they occasionally changed back and forth into a different gender, or if they couldn’t figure out a way to explore those reactions within the context of what would be acceptable in a 1971 movie, or if they realized how empowering and progressive such a matter-of-fact approach to shifting gender identities could be. The makers of this silly, low-budget drive-in exploitation movie were mostly focused on it as an excuse to show Martine Bewsick in the nude; that the finished film reaches beyond its limits was an unexpected bonus. While there is no reason to expect the team behind Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to have cooked up anything especially thoughtful, but the bar was set so low it almost certainly would have been fascinating.
