The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll | |
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Gloria Talbott and Arthur Shields in the film
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Directed by | Edgar G. Ulmer |
Screenplay by | Jack Pollexfen |
Starring |
Gloria Talbott John Agar Arthur Shields |
Production
company |
Film Venturers
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Distributed by | Allied Artists |
Release date
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Running time
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71 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll is a low-budget 1957 horror film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and released by Allied Artists. It was released in theaters in 1957 on a double bill with The Cyclops.
It features Gloria Talbott as Janet, the daughter of the infamous Dr. Henry Jekyll, and John Agar as her fiancé. Janet learns that she may have inherited her father's condition, and she begin to believe she may be guilty of murder when people are found horribly killed. However, all is not what it seems.
In the film's fight scene, the stuntman Ken Terrel stood in for Arthur Shields. The monster version of the girl was also played by a stunt double. To produce an unreal effect during this scene, the director set the action in a wooded region that had recently been burned by fire, then filmed it in ultraviolet light.
American film critic Andrew Sarris noted that the film had a "scenario so atrocious that it takes forty minutes to establish that the daughter of Dr. Jekyll is indeed the daughter of D. Jekyll". Yet film director Gary Don Rhodes suggests that the film "may be read as a critically significant text within the melodramatic crisis of female identity cinema of the 1950s". He describes the film as an identity quest set in a dark fairy tale.