This film starts with a prologue that contradicts the previous Dr. Jekyll movies as well as Robert Louis Stevenson's novel. It this incarnation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Doctor was married (he was engaged in the other films) and had a baby boy. After the Doc is killed by an enraged crowd, one of Jekyll's friends takes the tyke home to raise it as its own.The film now jumps forward many years. Jekyll's son is also experimenting on weird stuff and is possibly going to be dismissed from the local university. He also is almost of age--and about to inherit his father's estate (which, incidentally, sure appeared to be burned down as the film began).For much of the film, the press hounds the now adult son of Jekyll. In order to sell papers, they set up young Jekyll several times--making him look like a maniac. After a while, so much hysteria is created that his safety is a serious concern. Also of concern, however, is that Junior is a bit daft...as he begins trying to replicate Dad's work!! So, on one hand you feel sorry for him because the papers are often breaking the law in order to get a story. The things they do are amazingly sleazy and sick. But on the other, young Jekyll does appear to be a nutter! In the meantime, violent assaults begin to occur and Jekyll is blamed for them--especially because they seem to occur just when he COULD have done it. However, the viewer can see that it is NOT Jekyll doing this but a mysterious stranger. Who this is and why is something you'll just need to see for yourself. However, if you are looking for a monster film, you may be disappointed as the film really is more of a mystery movie. While no doubt this happened to some in the audience, I was happy to see it because at least it didn't make the film a predictable by-the-numbers film.Overall, it's better than the current IMDb score of 4.1, as this would indicate that this is a very poor movie--and it certainly is not. Decent acting and an unusual script make this worth a look. My only reservation about the film is that they really did not need have Jekyll Junior do any sort of experiments, as this did seem to cloud the issue a bit. Otherwise, a very good film.Now that I think about it, the plot of this film is a lot like PSYCHO II, as most of the film consists of a person trying to convince Norman that he is NOT cured (though I was NOT a fan of PSYCHO II because of its convoluted ending).

The story starts out talking about Hyde as if he were a true monster who had murdered his wife. It shows a furry-headed, heavy-browed Hyde running into a house which is then set ablaze by a pursuing mob. Jekyll, now looking like a normal human, steps out of an upper story window and falls to his death.But (SPOILER!) thirty years later, his old friend Dr. Lanyon is revealed to have falsified Jekyll's notes in a scheme to drive the Son of Dr. Jekyll mad, so Lanyon can steal the Jekyll estate...to replace his own fortune lost defending Jekyll Sr.Aside from the moral backflips Lanyon has to perform to go from valiant friend to chiseler and murderer, the movie never comes clean about who Mr. Hyde was. In order to make young Jekyll look insane, Lanyon fakes those notes and swaps "Acrostyn" for another chemical, so that Jekyll Jr. turns hairy and fanged - then faints - in the movie's only transformation scene. It's an odd medical breakthrough for Lanyon to have gone broke defending.Or is young Jekyll only hallucinating his transformation? Lanyon even boasts that he only needed mob hysteria to turn Edward Jekyll into a "monster." But a hallucination would be an even bigger cheat - because the audience sees an actual transformation after Edward is unconscious.Then the closing crawl smugly notes that both Jekyll's original notes and Lanyon's forgery are archived at Scotland Yard as a solution to the Jekyll/Hyde myth. Huh?? When did it become a myth? Opening crawl, meet end credits! The movie does get props for reusing Mamoulian's color-filter trick for revealing painted makeup in stages from the Fredric March 1932 version (actually, first used to "cleanse the lepers" in DeMille's 1927 King of Kings.) And Holmes Herbert from that film shows up here as a policeman. Lester Matthews (the hero of "The Werewolf of London") plays lawyer Utterson, a character from Stevenson's novella usually omitted in screen adaptations. Alexander Knox, the model of rectitude as "Wilson", is wonderfully manipulative as Lanyon.Apparently, the idea was to make a monster movie with a minimum of expensive makeup sessions, and the script seems to have had numerous contradictory revisions. The production values are fairly threadbare, not many steps up from a 3 Stooges short of the era; at one point, Jekyll's "1890" home is clearly a modern 1951 house with flagstone facing. But the studio cleverly reuses the big fire scene from the opening to close the picture with a bang.But that bang is still not loud enough to make you forget all the illogical and dishonest tricks the story plays on the viewer.

This movie had all the promise of being a good, old fashioned thriller, but unfortunately, the premise was wasted.Louis Hayward plays Edward Jekyll, the son of the late Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. Most of his time on the screen is spent trying to prove that his father was not the crazed killer, Dr. Hyde, but instead just the brilliant but misunderstood Dr. Jekyll. This movie was billed as a horror movie, but there is no horror. There are just a few very brief glimpses of the mad Mr. Hyde. This movie had good actors and it could have been so much more had they spent more time with the scary element of the Jekyll and Hyde story. By the end I was just bored with the whole thing. I thought Edward Ulmer's 1957 movie entitled "The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll", starring Gloria Talbot and John Agar, was a much better film. Even though it was cheesy in parts, it was not boring. This one will put you to sleep.

I realise that my one-line summary is faint praise indeed but it does reflect the quality of this film. Overall it's at best, a slightly below average story but, it does indeed get better and picks up the pace in the last one/third of the film. The black and white photography of this period piece is done very well with the street sets looking very authentic. Louis Hayward does his usual competent job and is assisted especially well by Alexander Knox and Rhys Williams. Jody Lawrence is pretty to look at but her character adds very little to the story. The identity of the real killer is divulged rather early so this film is not a whodunnit. If you start watching this movie and find yourself starting to get bored, try to stay with it for a while longer. You will eventually be rewarded with about 30 minutes of good action.