Jekyll and Hyde: That Henry Jekyll is one mean mother—

As part of my proposal to McFarland for a Jekyll and Hyde movie book, I’m giving them a sample chapter looking at the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As I wrote last year, the part of the film where Hyde (Fredric March) abuses and gaslights Ivy (Miriam Hopkins) is not only horrifying to watch but makes Jekyll much less sympathetic.Hyde, after all, is Jekyll’s way of acting out his more sinful desires without getting caught. He’s sexually frustrated not being able to sleep with his fiancee Muriel (Rose Hobart) but he doesn’t want to risk the scandal of taking a lover. By becoming Hyde he’s free, but he also free other impulses too. Hyde like hurting people with little provocation; he’s Jekyll’s lizard brain, his id, completely stripped off inhibitions. As the film progresses, Hyde’s apish form becomes more bestial; so it seems is his conduct.

This is in keeping with the Victorian view that criminal, violent behavior represented a lower level of evolution than the middle and upper class Victorian white men; a career criminal was an evolutionary throwback to the level of an African savage (blacks are not, of course, a lower evolutionary level, nor are they more brutal or criminal than white people). In mutated form, the idea that our rationality is at war with our more animalistic side is still around. The point in the film is not that Jekyll’s a monster but that we’ve all got the capacity for evil and inhumanity; when Hyde is Jekyll those impulses are in check. Rose is not at risk.

Rewatching the film, I don’t think that absolves Jekyll. The film wants us to have sympathy for him: Mamoulian cut one scene from the script, showing Jekyll paying off the father of a girl Hyde trampled on, because it makes him look bad. Maybe he wouldn’t ever do that as himself but he’s not too troubled by having done it as Hyde. The same is true of the abuse: he’s willing to keep turning into Hyde so he can have sex with Ivy, even though he knows what Hyde’s doing to her. The movie avoids making Jekyll look like a villain because we don’t see him from his first seduction of Ivy through the moment Muriel, absent with her father, returns to town. When Ivy come to him shortly afterwards, he’s troubled by her suffering but he obviously wasn’t troubled enough to stop as long as he needed a sexual outlet. I wondered if maybe he’d stayed Hyde but Poole (Edgar Norton), his butler, references seeing his master occasionally so Jekyll did change back and forth.

I don’t think there’s any way not to see Jekyll as a villain rather than a tragic figure, though even if unintended, thgat fits with the shallow hypocrite of Stevenson’s novel.

The movie’s critique of Victorian stuffiness and hypocrisy is also off. Jekyll’s friend Lanyon (Holmes Herbert) is a stuffy conformist who doesn’t approve of Jekyll spending so much time on charity work and doesn’t see any need for science to advance the human condition. At the end, he comes off as the voice of reason: Jekyll’s non-conformity, his pushing back against the era’s mores, his reluctance to rein in his passions, are flaws; there’s no distinction between the good side (his impassioned desire for Rose) and the evil side that manifests in Hyde. Like so many other mad scientists, Jekyll’s positive aspects (by today’s standards) are tinged with folly because they led to him, as he says at one point, trespassing in God’s domain.

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.