Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount-Publix, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the dueling versions in 1920 from Paramount with John Barrymore and from Louis B. Mayer’s pre-MGM independent studio with Sheldon Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde lay fallow as a movie property until 1932, when other studios were looking at the huge success Universal had had with Dracula and Frankenstein and realizing, as a trade-paper headline almost certainly put it at the time, “there’s gold in them thar chills.” MGM borrowed Frankenstein star Boris Karloff for The Mask of Fu Manchu and green-lighted one of the most bizarre movie projects of all time, Tod Browning’s Freaks. Paramount borrowed Dracula star Bela Lugosi for a key supporting role in a version of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (retitled The Island of Lost Souls and still the best of the three films of Wells’ story, though none of the movies really reflected the animal-rights propaganda agenda Wells had when he wrote the book), and they also decided to remake Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a full-dress talking horror picture.

This time they put a great director on the project, Rouben Mamoulian, who’d already made two quite compelling off-the-beaten-path movies, Applause (1929) – a relentlessly dark backstage musical starring Helen Morgan as an entertainer with Broadway ambitions who gets stuck in burlesque and gradually sinks under the weight of age, alcoholism and an absolutely wretched choice of man – and City Streets (1931), a gangster story by Dashiell Hammett which Mamoulian dressed up with symbolism and a subtle approach in which all the murders took place off-screen and Gary Cooper turned in an excellent against-type performance as a naïve young man who flirts with gangland life but ultimately rejects it. For his third film Paramount offered him Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Mamoulian grabbed it, but fought the studio on their choice of Irving Pichel, an actor “typed” as a villain, to play the title role(s). “I wanted someone who could play Jekyll, and Pichel could only play Hyde,” Mamoulian later recalled.

Mamoulian ultimately offered the part to Fredric March, then considered a talented but rather lightweight leading man – his first film was the unexpectedly good The Wild Party (1929), in which he played an anthropology professor seduced by one of his students (Clara Bow in her first talkie and the film for which director Dorothy Arzner invented the microphone boom to make sure the hyperactive Bow’s voice would record audibly no matter where she wandered to on set). Ironically, March remade John Barrymore’s role just two years after he’d starred in the comedy The Royal Family of Broadway, playing an actor character based on John Barrymore (and March would play a Barrymore-based character again in the 1937 version of A Star Is Born). Mamoulian remembered pleading with the Paramount bosses to give March the role: “He’s a natural Jekyll, he’s young, he’s handsome, his speech is fine, and I’m sure he can play Hyde.”

He also wanted Miriam Hopkins to play the music-hall entertainer Clara Beranger had written into the story as a lower-class love interest for both Jekyll and Hyde, whom Hyde sexually enslaves and terrorizes until he finally kills her. Hopkins, known as one of Hollywood’s greatest bitches off-screen as well as on (in later years Bette Davis said the worst co-stars she’d ever worked with were Hopkins and Faye Dunaway; asked, “What about Joan Crawford?,” Davis said, “We never got along, but at least she was professional. She showed up on time, she knew her lines, and she let Bob Aldrich direct the picture instead of trying to take it over from him”). The interview I’ve been quoting Mamoulian from was given to Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse, and he told them that for the first time in his life he was going to reveal how he had handled March’s transformations from Jekyll to Hyde and back. He tried to make the technique seem like some great secret he had personally invented, but it wasn’t. The trick was that the actor would wear colored makeup and there would be colored gels over the light, so with one color light the character makeup would be invisible and as the color of the lights changed it would appear. The technique was actually invented by Roy Pomeroy, who in the 1920’s had been in charge of Paramount’s special-effects department (though they called special effects “trick shots” then) and had been called on by Cecil B. DeMille to make Moses’ sister Miriam develop leprosy lesions on screen in the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments.

Mamoulian used a lot of unusual techniques in this film, shooting the opening few minutes entirely from Dr. Jekyll’s point of view (in addition to being a highly acclaimed doctor and medical lecturer, he’s also an amateur organist who practices on a tracking instrument in his living room and plays pieces by Schumann and Bach, including Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor) and using an almost totally synthetic sound effect during Jekyll’s first transition into Hyde: “We photographed light frequencies of varying intensity from a candle. I hit a gong and cut the impact off and ran the sound backwards, and, to give the sound a panting rhythm, I ran up and down a stairway while they recorded my speeded-up heartbeats. When I saw my heart was in Jekyll and Hyde, I mean that literally!” The sound would be a jolt in a modern movie and sounds especially intense in a film made just five years after the beginning of sound films! Mamoulian also commissioned a great script from Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath – I know little about Heath (except for the coincidence of his having the same name as the bassist for the Modern Jazz Quartet), but Hoffenstein was a major screenwriter and worked frequently with Mamoulian on a number of films, including the follow-up to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Love Me Tonight, the stunning 1932 musical with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald and to my mind the greatest musical film ever made.

Hoffenstein and Heath wrote a literate and finely honed adaptation that contained some of the moral contrasts Robert Louis Stevenson put in the story (though one thing they omitted is the confession Jekyll makes at the end to the effect that had he been in a better frame of mind when he took the drug for the first time, it might have turned him totally good instead of totally evil; when I read the book in the early 1970’s that reminded me that the early LSD experimenters had likewise said that the difference between a “good trip” and a “bad trip” lay in the frame of mind you were in when you took the drug, and so they would try to put you in a relaxed setting so it would have beneficial effects – a detail that of course got ignored when the drug went into the street market and became widely abused) and in particular they portrayed the relationship between Hyde and music-hall entertainer Ivy Pearson (Miriam Hopkins) as what we know now is a classic pattern of domestic abuse in which he not only brutalizes her but terrorizes her and threatens to track her down and kill her if she ever tries to leave him or report him to the police.

I love everything about the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde except for one major flaw: the makeup and characterization of Hyde. In a 1933 survey article on then-recent Hollywood films, Dwight Macdonald critiqued March’s makeup as Hyde and called it “physically far more repulsive than Mr. Barrymore’s, spiritually far less so.” Mamoulian said he wanted Hyde to look like a Neanderthal man, and he got his wish, but it’s hard to believe that Hyde could go about the streets and go to Ivy’s music hall without frightening passers-by and fellow customers. Fredric March actually won an Academy Award for his performance (the first actor to win for a horror role, and the only one until Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster both won for The Silence of the Lambs in 1985) and he’s great as the tortured Dr. Jekyll – but he’s fighting an overly “monstrous” concept of Hyde. It occurred to me that an alternate concept of this story might be to go the Faust route and make Jekyll a middle-aged man who becomes younger-looking and more attractive as Hyde.

It’s interesting how many later films were influenced by this one – even though it was out of circulation for years because MGM bought the remake rights in 1941 for a version with Spencer Tracy as Jekyll/Hyde and Ingrid Bergman as Ivy (bringing far more pathos to the role than Hopkins even though her director, Victor Fleming, and writer, John Lee Mahin, had to cut down on the domestic abuse to meet the stronger Production Code enforcement of 1941), it was obviously a film other directors saw and were influenced by. The scene at the end in which the mortally wounded Hyde reverts to Jekyll’s appearance as he dies was copied almost exactly the next year in James Whale’s The Invisible Man when Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) becomes visible again as he dies, and even though Universal’s effects photographer, John P. Fulton, used double exposures and dissolves instead of colored makeup and lights, the transformations of Lon Chaney, Jr. in the 1941 film The Wolf-Man are strikingly similar to those of March here, particularly when director George Waggner pans down from his star’s face to his arms and shows them acquiring more hair before he pans back to the face, as Mamoulian did with March in this film.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is also noteworthy for carrying over the symbolism Mamoulian had started with City Streets, in which he panned back and forth between two china cats (which Mamoulian brought in from his own large collection of porcelain statuettes) to symbolize a bitchy argument between two people. Here he fills room after room with weird little statues, including one of an idealized naked couple embracing in what was obviously a rather tacky knockoff of ancient Greek art as an ironic counterpoint while Hyde commits one of his murders. Also noteworthy is the performance of Rose Hobart as Jekyll’s upper-class fiancée Muriel Carew; she makes what could have been just another goody-two-shoes leading lady into a genuinely interesting character, torn between her love for Dr., Jekyll and her fear of what his addiction (and it is shown very much like a modern-day drug habit; apparently Mamoulian, Hoffenstein and Heath saw Stevenson’s story much like I do, as – among other things – an early “just say no to drugs” tale) is doing to him and their potential future together. Ironically, in 1944 Rose Hobart would return to Jekyll and Hyde territory when she made The Soul of a Monster, in which she plays an emissary from Satan who saves the life of a dying doctor (George Macready) but at the cost of turning him evil: not only an offtake on Jekyll and Hyde but a surprising attempt at another studio (Columbia) to copy Val Lewton’s shadowy less-is-more approach to horror.