Last night’s San Diego Vintage Sci-Fi film screening in Golden Hill (http://sdvsf.org/) was an odd double bill of two stories about human transformation, the 1941 MGM version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and John Frankenheimer’s chilling 1966 film Seconds. The program also included the very first film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — a 1911 two-reeler from the Thanhouser studio featuring James Cruze, later a director who did the first big epic Western, The Covered Wagon, for Paramount in 1923. (In 1928 Cruze directed a quite good late silent called The Mating Call for producer Howard Hughes; in 1938 he made the first version of Herbert Asbury’s novel Gangs of New York for Republic; and later Martin Scorsese did a far more elaborate remake of Gangs of New York and subsequently directed a biopic of Howard Hughes, The Aviator.) The effects of Jekyll changing into Hyde in the Thanhouser version were either crude cuts or scenes in which Cruze buried his head in his hands so he could do a quick real-time application of his Hyde makeup, but this film probably wowed audiences in 1911. In between there were several adaptations of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, including a 1915 three-reeler for Carl Laemmle’s IMP (Independent Motion Pictures, later Universal); a major-studio feature from Paramount in 1920 with John S. Robertson directing and John Barrymore as star; a quickly produced rival version from Louis B. Mayer pre-MGM with Sheldon Lewis in the title role(s); and a 1932 Paramount film directed (stunningly) by Rouben Mamoulian featuring Fredric March. Mamoulian’s film began with a 15-minute sequence in which the camera takes Jekyll’s point of view, and the movie was not only hailed as a masterpiece by the critics, it won March an Academy Award (which he had to share with Wallace Beery for The Champ, since in those days if contestants came within three votes of each other the Academy considered it a “tie” and gave the award to both of them).
Later MGM bought the remake rights to Mamoulian’s version, including the script by Samuel Hoffenstein (Mamoulian’s favorite writer) and Percy Heath, and in 1941 they produced an elaborate version with major talent both behind and in front of the cameras: Victor Fleming as director, John Lee Mahin as screenwriter (though he used enough of Hoffenstein’s and Heath’s material that under current Writers’ Guild of America rules MGM would have had to credit them — instead they listed Mahin as sole screenwriter and Stevenson as story source, as if Mahin had worked directly from the novel without any intervening adaptations) and Spencer Tracy, Lana Turner and Ingrid Bergman as stars. Tracy’s performance was much criticized when the film came out — so many reviewers blasted him as inferior to Fredric March in the role that March himself wrote an open letter to the Hollywood trade papers defending Tracy — and it’s had its knocks since, but though off the beaten path for him this was a deeply personal project. As a boy Tracy had seen the American stage actor Richard Mansfield in his pioneering adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (written for him by playwright T. R. Sullivan). The promotion for this play claimed that Mansfield would transform from Jekyll to Hyde and back on stage, right in full view of the audience, just by contorting his facial muscles without the aid of makeup. Tracy was so impressed by Mansfield’s accomplishment he decided then and there to make acting his life’s work, and for years he dreamed of playing Jekyll and Hyde the way Mansfield had, with no character makeup, just by contorting his facial muscles. Then writer W. Somerset Maugham visited the MGM lot, saw Tracy rehearsing and heard the MGM promo man he was with explain that Tracy was going to play the part without makeup because he was such a skilled actor he could make the transformations without it. “I see,” said Maugham. “And just which one is he supposed to be now?”
After Somerset Maugham pointed out to the folks at MGM that
Spencer Tracy really didn’t look that
different as Mr. Hyde than he did as Dr. Jekyll, they started making him up at
least a bit — they didn’t put him through the extreme transformations
Paramount’s makeup people had done with John Barrymore and Fredric March, but
they darkened his hair and put lines on each side of his eyes. The result is
that you wonder why more people — especially Ivy Peterson (Ingrid Bergman), the
only person who has major interactions with him in both identities — don’t
recognize Jekyll and Hyde as the same person before Hyde mixes his drugs in
front of his friend Dr. John Lanyon (Ian Hunter) and changes to Jekyll on the
spot. This is one of the few scenes in the film taken directly from Stevenson’s
novel — Mahin, like Hoffenstein, Heath and Clara Beranger (who wrote the 1920
version with Barrymore), uses little more from Stevenson than the basic premise
and the character names. It was apparently T. R. Sullivan’s idea, in the play
version he adapted for Mansfield, to create female interests for both Jekyll
and Hyde: Jekyll’s upper-class fiancée Beatrix Emery (Lana Turner, who in what
passes for her big emotional moments stares right into the camera with that
bovine look that served her for decades), daughter of Jekyll’s upper-class
sponsor Sir Charles Emery (Donald Crisp); and Ivy Peterson (Ingrid Bergman),
the lower-class woman (she was a prostitute when Miriam Hopkins played her in
the “pre-Code” Mamoulian version with March but a barmaid and chorus girl here)
whom Jekyll saves from being raped, treats her twisted knee and wards off her
seduction attempt; and who later becomes Hyde’s mistress and abuse victim.
Barred by the Production Code from showing much of Hyde’s evil, Fleming and
Mahin made his treatment of Ivy the nastiest thing we see him do; it’s a
portrayal of battered-woman syndrome far in advance of virtually anything else
on screen (at least on U.S. screens) to its time, and the sheer eloquence with
which Bergman acts the plight of a beaten-down woman who knows she deserves
better than she’s getting but also feels helpless (especially with Hyde, like
Julia Roberts’ evil husband in Sleeping with the Enemy 46 years later, threatening that if she tries to get
away from him he’ll just track him down and kill her) is amazing and shows why,
though this film was a box-office disappointment and the critics slammed it, it
helped her career. (Her very next
film was Casablanca.) Bergman had
to fight for the role of Ivy; originally David O. Selznick, who held her
contract, loaned her to MGM to play Beatrix Emery, but she had utterly no
interest in the one-dimensional part of Jekyll’s good-girl fiancée. She begged
Fleming to switch the two women’s roles, palm off the good-girl role on Turner
and let her play Ivy — and though Bergman has trouble with her accent (she
tries to sound like a Cockney but it just overlays rather uncomfortably on her
real-life Swedish accent), she makes the role deep and vivid and makes her
character a figure of real pathos instead of just a slatternly bitch. The 1941
MGM Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is
also noteworthy in that it tries to carry over some of the moral lessons Robert
Louis Stevenson worked into the story; in the original — particularly in the
final chapter, Jekyll’s own confession before he takes his own life because he
realizes he must kill himself to kill off Hyde as well — Jekyll states that had
he been in a better frame of mind when he first took his drug, it would have
turned him completely good instead of completely evil. Stevenson also states
that because Hyde contained only the evil parts of Jekyll, he was physically
smaller — which, when I first read that, suggested to me that the ideal casting
in 1941 would have been Boris Karloff as Jekyll and Peter Lorre as Hyde.
Karloff did get to play Jekyll,
with stunt double Edwin “Eddie” Parker as his Hyde, but only in a 1953 Abbott
and Costello spoof.
One interesting aspect about this version is the streak of
moralism appears, as far as I know, only in one other version of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on film: the 1920
Sheldon Lewis knockoff which Louis B. Mayer, following the strategy later used
by Asylum Pictures to do a quick ripoff of a public-domain story before the
major studio filming it at the same time can get theirs out, produced for his
independent company. So it may represent Mayer’s own input into the story. The
1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was
obviously a prestige production — it ran nearly two hours at a time when most
horror films were 75-minute programmers or 60-minute “B”’s, it featured a
superstar who’d already won two Academy Awards, it had a plush MGM production
(though there are some tacky background shots — when Jekyll crosses over from
his house to his secret laboratory, the buildings in the back are obviously
glass paintings — and the substitution of a stunt double for Tracy in Hyde’s
more athletic and acrobatic moments is also obvious) and some quite good
direction by Fleming. Victor Fleming is best known today for two troubled
productions he took over from other directors — The Wizard of Oz after Richard Thorpe and George Cukor, and Gone
With the Wind after Cukor again — but here
he turns in a quite remarkable directorial effort, moving the camera quite a
lot (Judy Garland’s recollection of his working method was that he always rode
atop a camera boom, from which he would yell down at Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and
Bert Lahr, “Would you three big hams move out of the way and give that poor
little girl a chance?”) and adding a sense of motion to the otherwise static
scenes taking place in people’s houses between the Big Moments (this film is
already over one-quarter through its running time before Jekyll finally changes into Hyde).
I also liked the symbolism of
drinking used throughout the film; the characters always seem to be imbibing some form of potable liquid, whether tea, wine, sherry,
harder spirits or Jekyll’s formula. I’ve long thought Stevenson’s tale was at
least partly a just-say-no-to-drugs message story; it was written at a time
when morphine, heroin and cocaine were not only legal but were being
mass-marketed, and the addictive potentials and horrible health effects of
these drugs were beginning to become known. (In the 1880’s and 1890’s
pharmaceutical companies were actually marketing heroin pills as treatments for
morphine addiction — much the way Purdue Pharmaceuticals claimed in the 1970’s
that their newly invented opiate drug, Oxycontin, was contained in a
timed-release pill and therefore could not become addictive. Wrong!) As a portrayal of the hazards of drug addiction —
and especially how in the throes of an addiction, a normally honest and
upstanding human being can lose all they morals and inhibitions and become so determined
to keep obtaining the drug they will literally do anything to get it — Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a surprisingly modern story, notwithstanding that
the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” has become part of the language to describe anyone
with wildly different codes of conduct, and senses of morals and ethics, in
different parts of their lives. This time around I found myself liking the 1941
MGM Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
better than I have before (as did Charles): it’s often ponderous and dull, but
it does wrestle with the moral
implications of the story better than some of the more obviously horrific and
“thrilling” versions on film.
