Do we walk the fine line we’d all cross if we could? Jekyll and Hyde in 1932 and 1941

(A special post as part of a classic literature blogathon at Silver Screen Classics. Title borrows from the lyrics to Facade from the Jekyll and Hyde stage musical).

Like Dracula and Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a landmark horror tale that’s inspired multiple screen adaptations. The transformation of respectable Henry Jekyll into villainous Edward Hyde works both as horror and as a metaphor for how a seemingly good person can hide a rotting soul.

As with Dracula and Frankenstein, screen adaptations rarely follow Stevenson’s plot. That’s wise because the novel isn’t cinematic; the most faithful adaptation, I, Monster (1973), plods despite casting Christopher Lee in the lead. Rather than show us Hyde, the novel shows us characters who talk about seeing or meeting Hyde, distancing us from the events. Stevenson tells us Hyde is the devil incarnate but gives us few details about his crimes. The core cast are all middle-aged men. Wisely the 1932 and 1941 screen adaptations (Paramount and MGM respectively), like the 1920 John Barrymore silent version, jazz things up with a sexual element, giving Jekyll a good woman to love and Hyde a bad one to sleep with (credit Thomas Russell Sullivan’s 1887 stage adaptation for introducing this angle).

Robert Mamoulian’s 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (also listed as 1931, the date of its New York premiere) is my favorite adaptation, nailing the spirit of Stevenson’s story. In the novel, Jekyll vs. Hyde isn’t “good vs. evil” but “mixed good and evil vs. pure evil.” Every sin Hyde commits is something Jekyll wants to do. He refrains because he values his reputation as a paragon of virtue; when becoming Hyde lets him indulge without hurting his social standing, Jekyll jumps at the chance. His real crime, as Stevenson said, is hypocrisy. It’s quite possible that rather than a split personality, Hyde is still Jekyll, but completely off the leash

As Jekyll, Fredric March is passionately in love and in lust with his fiancee, Muriel Carew (Rose Hobart). Victorian prudery won’t let them sleep together before marriage and Muriel’s overbearing father (Halliwell Hobbes) insists on all the premarital formalities and rituals, stretching out the timeline before their wedding night by months.

After Jekyll rescues sex worker/music-hall singer Ivy (Miriam Hopkins) from an attacker, she none too subtly offers him a solution to his sexual frustration. Jekyll’s tempted, and taking a mistress wouldn’t raise Victorian eyebrows like premarital sex. Still, he can’t bring himself to cheat on his true love. Then his research shows him another path. Jekyll believes science can separate the two sides of man’s nature, freeing our enlightened higher selves from the brutish, animal half that drags us down. Of course this would also free our brute side of any inhibition or restraint but like other movie mad scientists, Jekyll doesn’t think his work through.

Jekyll succeeds in manifesting his brutish side as Hyde, an evolutionary throwback in Victorian dress, but that doesn’t purify Jekyll or make him a better person. The opposite, really: Jekyll uses his new identity to give in to the impulses he’s been fighting. After a few innocent moments of delight at the rain falling on his face, Hyde gets down to the business of seducing Ivy.Winning her proves easy. Hyde has Jekyll’s wealth to spend on her, a swaggering arrogance that intrigues her, and before long she’s his kept woman. As Hyde’s dark side grows stronger, however, he begins to abuse and gaslight her; when we see her again, she’s broken emotionally. Hopkins does an amazing job in those scenes but the abuse is so grimly realistic it’s unpleasant to watch.

It also makes Jekyll come off much more sinister. As Hyde’s evil is Jekyll’s evil, would Jekyll have abused Muriel the same way? While the doctor eventually tries to save Ivy from his alter ego, he could have done that at any time by giving up his life as Hyde; what does it say that he chose not to? I don’t think the movie means to raise those questions but it does.

Regardless of the answers, this is a first-rate film. It looks great, boasts a terrific cast (though like a lot of Good Girl role, Hobart’s Muriel isn’t memorable) and being a pre-Code film, it can get quite erotic. It’s ironic that the studio got March as a consolation prize, after they failed to sell Barrymore on reprising the leading role. At the time March was primarily a light comic actor and Paramount couldn’t see him in such a dark, dramatic part. They learned better when he won the Oscar, the only horror performance to do so until Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs.

When MGM cast Spencer Tracy as Dr. Jekyll a decade later, Tracy pitched the studio on dropping the mad-science angle. No formula, no physical transformation: Jekyll’s a normal guy who goes on a bender, then takes up with a mistress under an assumed name. MGM balked and remade the 1931 film instead, which kept the March version locked away for years to avoid unfavorable comparisons.

Where the earlier movie implied Victorian morality was a hollow shell, the remake opens with a clergyman (C. Aubrey Smith) celebrating Victorian England’s triumph over “gross sensuality.” That fits with MGM’s sensibility — they liked their sensuality elegant, not gross — and probably satisfied the Production Code better than the March film’s critique of hypocrisy would have. Jekyll’s future father-in-law Emery (Donald Crisp) is no longer the overbearing face of Victorian repression; he’s simply an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy embarrassed his daughter Beatrix (Lana Turner) and Jekyll are so publicly affectionate.

Jekyll’s initial issue isn’t sexual frustration or hypocrisy but the mad-science blues. He wants to research the boundaries of good and evil within the human soul itself; Emery and the others in his circle think subjecting the soul to science defies almighty God. Jekyll therefore says nothing when his research gives birth to Hyde. Then the Emerys leave town for a while and Jekyll realizes his alter ego can give him access to barmaid Ivy (Ingrid Bergman) without causing a scandal. In a famous fantasy scene he imagines himself as a coachman with both Ivy and Beatrix as horses under his whip. Hyde lets him have both women without consequences, so why not?

Spoiler: there will be consequences.

There’s no physical change between Jekyll and Hyde, only Tracy’s performance. He’s effective playing two separate people, with Hyde slipping into an ominous, intimidating whisper when threatening someone. However it’s puzzling why nobody notices that Jekyll and Hyde look identical. The abuse is less overt than the 1932 film but Ivy’s fear of Hyde is even more chilling. When a friend invites her out for some fun, she freezes: what if Hyde sees me? What if Hyde is angry? Her panic tells us everything we need to know about the relationship. Bergman comes off too well-bred for Ivy in most of her scenes but here she sells it completely.

The glossier, less racy film isn’t as good as the March version but it’s still worth seeing.

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