WoodrowTruesmith 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.

Michael_Elliott Son of Dr. Jekyll, The (1951) * 1/2 (out of 4) Dr. Jekyll's son (Louis Hayward) goes back to the laboratory to try and prove his father wasn't a monster. This film actually gets off to a pretty good start but things quickly fall apart making this a rather poor film in the end. The performances from everyone in the cast are actually pretty good, which is shocking for this type of film. The first transformation scene is also very well effective but after this there isn't much here. The film seems to think that the viewers didn't want to see a monster but instead sit around and listen to bad dialogue. There's way too much talk going on in this film and this here makes it quite boring.

bensonmum2 What a lovely movie to look at. Wonderful costumes and sets make this movie a real treat to the eye. Some of the best I've seen in a period horror film. The acting is also quite good. It's just too bad that this is all The Son of Dr. Jekyll has to offer.It's easy to see why this film was titled The Son of Dr. Jekyll and not The Son of Mr. Hyde. Other than the opening scene where Hyde (I'm not entirely sure it was Hyde) has about five minutes of screen time, we see him for less than 10 seconds in the rest of the film. Very disappointing. Without Hyde, Dr. Jekyll has a tough time carrying a movie by himself.The movie is really more of a crime mystery than a horror regardless of how it is listed on IMDb. The "son" spends the majority of the movie tying to figure out who is framing him as mad killer. While it is a decent enough idea for a movie, the killer's true identity is given away so early that there are few dramatic or tense moments later on.

reve-2 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.