Another reminder you can’t step into the same river twice

Working on Jekyll and Hyde, I anticipate watching many of the films more than once, as happened with The Aliens Are Here. I miss details or plot points the first time, catch them the second. I have a better understanding how a given film fits its genre after I’ve watched more. And so it proved when watching the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and it’s 1941 remake (I previously reviewed them both here).

The first version, which stars Fredric March, came from Paramount which previously produced the John Barrymore 1920 version. Rewatching showed me how much it draws from the Barrymore though it also uses elements of the Richard Mansfield play such as Hyde watching Jekyll’s fiancee through a window.

Most significantly this takes the 1920 film’s idea to give Hyde a Bad Girl lover and expands it. Ivy has a much larger role than Nita in the 1920 film though it suffers from being a horrifically abusive relationship. Showing my point about missing stuff, I remembered it as turning abusive over time; in reality Hyde’s a brute to her from the first. This carries over into the 1941 Spencer Tracy version where Ingrid Bergman makes an enchanting Ivy despite having a terrible London accent.

Jekyll’s arguments about how denying your base impulses is futile — you have to acknowledge them to master them — also comes close to Sir George’s arguments in the 1920 that a man who doesn’t experience sin is weak rather than strong. In that film, Sir George was the voice of reason; here Jekyll’s similar thoughts prove tragically misguided.

Jekyll is much more a movie mad scientist here (and in the second film) than in Stevenson’s novel. There he sets about his experiments in creating an alter ego out of self-interest, to enable him to sin without being caught. Fredric March’s Jekyll is into the idea of splitting our good and evil sides apart before he ever sees any advantage to himself. Like so many mad scientists, he’s got a brilliant idea and never really imagines the consequences (e.g., if we separate ourselves into good and evil, won’t the evil start killing the good?).

And neither the March or the Tracy versions give Jekyll the useful hedonism he had in Stevenson (neither does the Barrymore). He’s the perfectly decent, respectable chap he appears to be until frustration over his love live drives him to take Bergman or Miriam Hopkins as his mistress.

The March is, I believe, the first film in which Jekyll neither commits suicide nor wakes up to find it was all a dream. The Hays Code strictly banned suicide on screen; while it wasn’t enforced in 1932, possibly it had an influence. It would definitely have prevented Spencer Tracy from killing himself.

More blogging about the gruesome twosome soon.

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