First, the good: Gore Vidal, who wrote the script, has done justice to Robert Louis Stevenson's brilliantly structured and written novella, which does not boil down to good (Jekyll) vs. Evil (Hyde), as people who've heard the names but never read the original seem to think. (NB: upcoming quotes are from Stevenson.)
Vidal conveys the relentless cruelty of Hyde without giving us an angelic Jekyll, because he wasn't. Far from it. Jekyll was an ordinary man who craved beastly pleasures. He brews a drug that concentrates those "primitive" cravings into a reduction of his physical self, the "pale and dwarfish" Hyde, a creature of "complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil," a man "who was without bowels of mercy." The drug works too well. After many doses, it takes control: "I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde." The book gives me chills; no movie has equalled that yet.
Second, the acceptable: Michael Rennie is good in the dual role, though I doubt anyone will ever be better than John Barrymore was in 1920: he achieved part of the Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation without the use of make-up.
Third, the regrettable: The one-hour production from 1955 is minimal, to say the least. There are just a few stage sets with deplorable lighting and clunky sound-- well, with every technical drawback in plain sight. You can see for yourself on YouTube.
Vidal conveys the relentless cruelty of Hyde without giving us an angelic Jekyll, because he wasn't. Far from it. Jekyll was an ordinary man who craved beastly pleasures. He brews a drug that concentrates those "primitive" cravings into a reduction of his physical self, the "pale and dwarfish" Hyde, a creature of "complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil," a man "who was without bowels of mercy." The drug works too well. After many doses, it takes control: "I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde." The book gives me chills; no movie has equalled that yet.
Second, the acceptable: Michael Rennie is good in the dual role, though I doubt anyone will ever be better than John Barrymore was in 1920: he achieved part of the Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation without the use of make-up.
Third, the regrettable: The one-hour production from 1955 is minimal, to say the least. There are just a few stage sets with deplorable lighting and clunky sound-- well, with every technical drawback in plain sight. You can see for yourself on YouTube.