Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) |
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"Let me put it this way: good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul. Now, suppose we could break that chain...." |
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Director: Victor Fleming Starring: Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Donald Crisp, Ian Hunter Screenplay: John Lee Mahin, based upon the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson |
Synopsis: In London in 1887, a church service is interrupted by a man making suggestive remarks. The police wish to arrest him for being drunk and disorderly, but Dr Henry Jekyll (Spencer Tracy) intervenes. Believing the man to be suffering a mental affliction, he has him sent to his hospital. He intends to use the man as a subject for his research into the nature of good and evil in man. When he explains his theories at a dinner party attended by his fiancee, Beatrix Emery (Lana Turner), and her father, Sir Charles Emery (Donald Crisp), Sir Charles becomes disturbed by Jekyll’s theories. Walking home later that night with his friend, John Lanyon (Ian Hunter), Jekyll rescues barmaid Ivy Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) when she is attacked by her male companion. Jekyll and Lanyon take her home in a cab. Delighted to have attracted the attention of gentlemen, Ivy pretends to be injured. Jekyll plays along with her, and carries her up to her room. There, Ivy gives him one of her garters as a keepsake, and kisses him. The two are interrupted by Lanyon, who is concerned at Jekyll’s behaviour. Jekyll’s patient dies, leaving him with no subject for his experimentation. He decides to experiment upon himself, and takes the potion he has developed. Suffering excruciating pain, Jekyll is transformed into another person.... At the same time, Beatrix Emery awakens from a horrible dream. She is so frightened by it that she goes to Jekyll’s house to assure herself that he is all right. Jekyll has returned to normal, and tries to comfort her. Sir Charles discovers the two of them together, and is so appalled that he announces that he is taking Beatrix away for a trip on the Continent. Left to himself, Jekyll continues with his experiments. He releases his evil side, Hyde, who immediately seeks out Ivy Peterson.... Comments: Over the years, many reviewers have been very critical of Victor Fleming’s Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, and also of Spencer Tracy’s performance in it. While it is not up to Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932 production, which in my opinion is the best of the many renderings of the story, it’s still a good film. Its problems lie in when and where it was made: under the Production Code, and at MGM. It is not surprising that we are presented with a very polite version of the well-known story, one totally lacking the sexual frankness of Mamoulian’s interpretation. This weakens the central characterisation. It’s not that Tracy’s performance is bad, he just isn’t given strong enough material to work with. Jekyll the scientist is presented clearly enough, so that we accept him experimenting upon himself; but Jekyll the man is not. No groundwork is laid to explain the sexual violence that he exhibits once transformed into Hyde. In contrast, the opening sequences of Mamoulian’s film make clear the arrogance and conceit of Fredric March’s Jekyll, and also that he is so sexually frustrated that he is practically foaming at the mouth. His Hyde is thus believably a creature of sex and violence and cruelty. Tracy’s Jekyll, however, is so passionless in his scenes with his fiancee (it is actually she who seems the more eager of the two), that the viewer is left to wonder where Hyde the sexual pervert came from. Naturally, this version of the story would never have been permitted to match the explicitness of the earlier one, but you get the feeling that screenwriter John Lee Mahin wasn’t trying all that hard to push back the boundaries. What sexuality the film possesses is projected by Ingrid Bergman, who’s quite marvellous (as usual) as Ivy the barmaid (no prostitutes in this version), who is, as Jekyll puts it, "a little too generous". Watch her face throughout her first scene with Tracy: it expresses a thousand things that they would never have been allowed to put into words. Jekyll manages a little more enthusiasm with Ivy, but even then he’s mostly content to let his eyes do the walking; her pass at him is repulsed without too much of an effort. You could understand this a little better if his fiancee wasn’t so insipid, but Lana Turner’s Beatrix is so wishy-washy that you can’t help wondering what Jekyll sees in her (she doesn’t even get mad when he misses their engagement party). Once Beatrix has been packed off to Europe, and Jekyll becomes Hyde - accompanied by what is usually best remembered about this film, the extremely kinky hallucination sequence (Dr Freud, where are you when we need you?) - Bergman’s Ivy takes centre stage, and the film is all the better for it. The frozen second when Hyde enters their apartment while Ivy is toasting herself in the mirror is a moment of supreme horror, while their final confrontation, during which she realises who Hyde is, is distressing to watch. (Bowdlerised as the script is, I’m astonished that Hyde’s line about Jekyll being the kind of man that Ivy "could go down on her knees to" was allowed to remain.) Apart from Bergman’s performance, the best thing about this film is the scene which proceeds Jekyll’s spontaneous transformation into Hyde, when he tries to whistle an opera aria and it keeps turning into "Oh, You Should See Me Dance The Polka". Tracy is quite superb in this scene, which is one of my favourite moments not just in this film, but in horror films overall. For the rest, Tracy tries hard and gives a better performance than is usually allowed, but he is let down by a screenplay that includes too much evil cackling and too little evil action. The three central characters are supported by stock members of Hollywood’s British population, Donald Crisp, Ian Hunter and C. Aubrey Smith, all of whom project upper-class solidity without even trying. The film’s production values are excellent (a little too excellent: as was also the case with MGM’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray (1945), the supposed scenes of vice and degradation are rather too clean and tidy to be convincing), and so is Joseph Ruttenberg’s cinematography. Unfortunately, you’re unlikely to see this film these days except in the ghastly colourised version, in which both Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner end up with hair of a shade that can only be described as urine-yellow. |
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