THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

How can you go wrong with Jack Palance as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

As Dan Curtis was rising to fame with daytime’s Dark Shadows, he produced this television version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella. Few fictions have been told so many times as this tale. What makes this one stand out is Palance’s enthusiastic portrayal and the fact that it runs two full hours, which is much longer than other renditions.

While this isn’t as entertaining as Hammer’s “The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll” from eight years prior IMHO, it’s at least as good as Christopher Lee’s “I, Monster,” which came out three years later. But this runs a whole forty minutes longer and so there’s more drama as it takes its time to flesh out the characters. There are similarities to Curtis’ later “The Night Strangler.”

You might remember petite Billie Whitelaw from eight years earlier in “The Flesh and the Fiends.” Later the same year that she did this movie she played the sultry mother of Hayley Mill’s character in “Twisted Nerve,” which is sort of a “Psycho” knockoff. I enjoy her unique look and manner.

One flaw is that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde look too similar for characters in the story to say they didn't resemble each other at all, especially when they’re the same height and body type, not to mention wear a similar style of black Victorian apparel. The make-up department basically just added a unibrow, black hair, and gobs of extra facial make-up for Mr. Hyde. As with Christopher Lee in “I, Monster,” you pretty much have to pretend that Hyde looks distinctly different than the movie actually shows.

It was shot in 1967 in Toronto at Distillery District (standing in for Victorian London) and Allan Gardens Conservatory.

GRADE: B-