Ulmer must have dug deep to find a script this simple. Behind the daffy dialog, he clutters up his frame with all manner of junk, diligently waded through by the admirably serious actors. The picture really drowns in brick a brac and set ornament: in tea cups, foam relief, fire places, fake gravestones, so on, infinitely. Most of this is shot from the hip, giving the strange impression that Agar and Talbot are furniture or hand- puppets, their secret hidden by a false bottom. Every so often great mists are rolled out, lap dissolves and wipes erase or shift figures in time, and people dash through pasteboard sets shot at frightening angles. All of these effects are sequenced in a mongoloid semi-plot which moves heedlessly and energetically along like a hypnotic piece of music from Mars. Two of the best ecstatic sequences: a murder, with a memorable use of the phone, boldly edited as if it were a Leger, and a chase over the moors at the hour of the wolf which marries tin pot Gothic to the feel of newsreel documentary. These haunting fits of grand mal guignol attack the ludicrous plot of the film, jarring the etiquette of the B- film programmer and loosing a manic poetic force on the gutter proceedings. At the end, we are told the whole Carrollian epic is a just a joke, in a sort of cheapie Pirandellan bookend which makes the unreal reality of Ulmer's ecstatic ride all the more inscrutable. He certainly chose to make films like this, subordinating plot, dialog, and anything else by then considered crucial to the whole film to the giddy trapeze of a perpetually moving modernism. Ulmer can't sit still. People talk about auteur films. 'Daughter of Dr. Jekyll' is far more auteur than any of them'. Ulmer accepts the necessity of whatever idiotic limitation the script and budget entails and wends his way around them, through them, burrowing into them. That is why he always had his say in the set design and lighting, often doing them all: the details excited him.... He sees the script as irrelevant, a too- literary artifact that would one day become extinct according to the essentially visual nature of cinema. He made films in Yiddish, a language he didn't understand, and also movies for a Black audience, both markets that were at the margins of the popular cinematic experience. And naturally, he embraced pulp horror and science fiction, a far more hospitable place for his expressionist art than the middle- brow armpit sweat of the heavy message movie or the sentimental big budget swirling romance. As a foreigner, here is where he was most at home. This Jekyll's kid film would make a fine double bill with 'Meshes of the Afternoon', another fantasy of objects and mirrors that unfolds in the lunacy of the broad daylight.
Review of Daughter of Dr. Jekyll
