EL EXTRANO CASO DEL HOMBRE Y EL BESTIA (1951)
aka The Man and the Beast
Article 2459 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-26-2007
Posting Date: 5-6-2008
Directed by Mario Soffici
Featuring Martha Atoche, Ana Maria Campoy, Jose Cibrian
Country: Argentina

A bestial man is the focus of curiosity, and he has some relation to a respected physician known as Jekyll.

This Argentine movie is in unsubtitled Spanish, but given that it’s based on a famous story with many other film versions, it really wasn’t too difficult to piece together what was going on. Still, the first half of the movie mostly consists of talk, and it would have been nice to know better what was going on. The story was updated to the present, and there is a memorable sequence where the doctor transforms in a subway tunnel while the train passes by. It’s also one of those versions of the story that hones a little closer to the original novel than others. Outside of that, the main thing I noticed is that the Mr. Hyde character bears more than a passing resemblance to Erich Von Stroheim, and the odd fact that Jekyll actually loses most of his hair during his transformation.