Gentleman Jekyll and Driver Hyde
1950 · 8m · Canada
Directed by David Bairstow
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: provocative, tense
A truck driver warns that mild-mannered pedestrians can turn into reckless Hyde-like speeders behind the wheel. He takes viewers on a frightening ride to prove how the Jekyll-to-Hyde shift endangers everyone.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1950 PSA that weaponizes Jekyll-and-Hyde as a traffic safety sermon is exactly the kind of earnest, moralizing dreck I'd normally skip—except Bairstow's actually playing it straight, which somehow makes the absurdist premise weirder and more subversive than it has any right to be.
A formally inventive safety film that treats the dual-nature conceit with genuine dramatic weight, positioning itself in the lineage of both cautionary cinema and the psychological exploration that Jekyll-and-Hyde permits; the documentary-drama hybrid structure shows real curatorial intelligence about how to frame moral instruction.
The decision to use an actual hair-raising stunt-driving sequence as the proof rather than safer alternatives—that commitment to visceral evidence over sanitized messaging is what transforms a routine PSA into something that actually lands.