The Daughter of Mr. Jekyll

Edgar Ulmer's curious directorial career tests the so-called Auteur theory in film criticism.  Ulmer was a tough Jew from Berlin who migrated to Hollywood after participating in one of the signature works of the Weimar Republic, Menschen am Sontag (1928), a slice of life film that chronicles with wit and humility, the events of a single Sunday in the big city -- the movie is a semi-documentary, one of those works that seems far ahead of its time in its cinema verite account of casual love affairs and friendship among young people living in Berlin:  it's an unassuming movie that will always seem fresh, new and innovative, if, ultimately, inconsequential.  (In fairness, I should note that the movie also involved Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder -- with Ulmer, immigrants to Hollywood.)  In Tinsel-town, lightning seems to have struck twice for Ulmer -- Detour (1945) with Ann Savage is regarded as one of the best of all noir films;  working with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, Ulmer's The Black Cat  (1934) is wholly original, a spectral masterpiece that shows what the director could do with good actors and a decent budget.-- as incoherent as a dream, the film resonates on too many levels to count.  The existence of these three films, as well as some lesser movies that are stylish but not memorable (1947's Carnegie Hall is an example) have led critics the scour the rest of Ulmer's films seeking traces of the genius that he showed in his greatest pictures.  Often, an enterprising critic will cry out:  Ecce! and identify some supposed vestige of brilliance in the poverty-row trash assigned to Ulmer.and that represents the bulk of his work.  Unfortunately, I'm skeptical about critics that detect grandeur in Ulmer's more disreputable work -- in my estimation, a lot of this sort of analysis is just wishful thinking.  Film is intrinsically powerful and, if only by accident, most films will contain a few shots or sequences that induce reverie of a powerful sort or that seem strangely poetic. (During the end of her career at the New Yorker, I recall Pauline Kael writing whole reviews praising a single shot in a film that was otherwise deplorable or, on one occasion, if I recall correctly, lauding a sequence that wasn't exactly in the movie but could be imagined from the raw material on screen).

A test case for these observations is Ulmer's The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957) a picture made on such a microbudget as to inadvertently surreal -- different spaces in the film are shot in ways so discordant as to seem extracted from several wholly different movies.  The film juxtaposes four places filmed in different styles and with mismatched film stock.  First, we see a toy mansion, obviously a miniature, approached by a toy car (probably yanked on a string) shot in such dense fog as to blur the image (and conceal the deficiencies in the model).  The effect is so awful that one wonders why Ulmer bothered to contrive these scenes -- why not just start the movie with a rap on the door and the characters being ushered into the film's second space, a hard-edged, linear, and geometric group of well-lit interiors that are supposed to be Gothic but that are so bright and filled with knick-knacks as to be entirely without atmosphere or menace. (The set looks like what you might find in a Val Lewton horror film, although much less atmospherically lit.) These interiors, which feature an elaborate kitchen, a bedroom that can be locked from outside, and various comfortable-looking, wood-paneled sitting rooms.  Sculptures and tchotschkes are clearly visible, including a life-size bust of William Shakespeare that seems intended as some kind of derisive comment on the poorly written script.  Everything is in clear focus in the house and, therefore, not the least bit sinister.  The house contains an expressionistic mad scientist's laboratory -- a hidden room behind the obligatory rotating book-case:  this place is filled with alembics, beakers, and tubes of chemicals:  someone lamely observes "Why it seems to be a kind of chemistry laboratory!"  Indeed.  Finally, outside there is a little cardboard mausoleum with a grim-looking barred gate that descends into a sort of cistern where there are caskets containing the mortal remains of the Jekyll family -- this mausoleum is a geometric chimera, that is filmed like steps leading down into a subway that is brightly lit (how? this is unclear) in its sepulchral bowels.  Now and them, people read legends from the tombs, but the paper-mache tomb is so cheaply made that the camera never tilts to show us the graves or the caskets resting in the niches of the mausoleum.  The exteriors showing the toy mansion segue into what may be real exterior shots -- although the images are so congested with fog and drifting mist and so completely out of focus that it is hard to tell what we are seeing:  Ulmer shoots these blurry landscapes day-for-night and with such completely washed-out and low-contrast film that we can't see anything but a tree (or a panning shot of a grove of trees), what looks like a clay river-bank that someone slides down, or the cardboard mausoleum drowned in the drifting mist.  It's hard to know whether the exteriors, often featuring double and triple exposures, are supposed to be poetic or just confusing, that is sleight-of-hand to conceal the film's desperate poverty of means.  There are a couple of showy and reasonably effective dream sequences, one low-grade if genuine shock when a mirror distorts a pretty woman's face momentarily into something hideous, and curious images of a tiny dim moon (in one case two moons inexplicably rolling through the sky in tandem).  There's next to no action:  blood on fingers and forearms stands in for mayhem and a girl with a hickey on her neck is said to have had "her throat torn out."  Some of the film seems like a home-movie, a kind of riff on Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon" -- we see figures in profile as inert as insects simply brooding over the action (or lack of action). 

The 71 minute film is a bit like a Scooby-Doo version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Scream-queen Gloria Talbot (features as sharp as a hypodermic needle) comes home to her ancestral manor where her guardian, Mr. Loomes, played by Arthur Shields, promises to deed over the estate to her.  Talbot is accompanied by a dull-witted, if stolidly handsome beaux (John Agar) who spends half the movie ambling about in what seem to be garishly striped pajama tops.  Loomes shows the young woman her father's laboratory, outlining the story from Robert Louis Stevenson, and, then, suggests that she is genetically predisposed to become a female version of Mr. Hyde -- an account that misses the whole science fiction point of the author's story, that is, the potion that is instrumental in facilitating the change from kindly Dr. Jekyll to the sexually perverse and brutish, Mr. Hyde.  Ulmer understands that half-clad women are a special effect that he can achieve on his next-to-nothing budget and he gets the heroine down to her tight corset and slip as soon as possible.  (Another comely blonde is brought into the picture so that she can take off her outer clothing and, then, be murdered in her bra and panties.)  In fact, Loomes, who is a classical werewolf (the full moon turns him into a lycanthrope), is "gaslighting" the young woman, hoping that she will be blamed for his depredations.  The plot makes sense according to the twisted logic of horror films, but the execution of the narrative is problematic: the acting is mostly wooden; when the heroine starts shrieking, which occurs three or four times, her screams seem out-of-proportion to any actual horror or menace that we see -- the picture, in fact, seems at times to be exploration of female hysteria:  confronted by the prospect of wedded bliss with her hunky, but dull, fiancee, Miss Jekyll seems all too willing to cancel her honeymoon, converting her sexual desire into murderous hysteria that strikes down other young woman much like herself -- her bizarre understanding of the family madness as genetic, as opposed to the potion prepared by her father, seems to confirm her ambivalence toward the marriage proposal made by Agar's character:  she uses the so-called genetic taint as a pretext for canceling the marriage.  The only way to escape this doom is to employ an obviously phallic stake to impale the mad man -- the stake-phallus is wielded by a Lurch-like butler who seems a sinister double of the heroine's fiancee. 

The movie has a completely bizarre and non-sequitur book-end opening and closing.  The werewolf in a fog of mist turns to the audience and cackles in a strangely high-pitched voice, essentially threatening the people in the audience with his demonic appearance when, after all, he is supposed to be dead.  This kind of disruption of the Fourth  Wall was common in low-budget films of the 40's and fifties.  In the Bowery Brothers picture, Feudin' Fools (1952), Huntz Hall (as "Sach") aims a shot gun at the fleeing Leo Gorcey ("Mahoney"):  he fires the gun and, then, turns to the camera to say:  "I hit him in... whereupon the words "The End" appear on screen.