Spotlight
Spotlight Date: 21-September-08
Spoiler Rating: High
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932, 1941)
The reason Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has remained in the popular imagination is not that it is a great yarn but that it opens so many doors. The idea that all socialized people have a bestial, subjugated personality alongside a more or less decent one gives rise to innumerable conversations of a religious, philosophical, or psychological nature. It is not surprising, therefore, that a Jekyll and Hyde movie might vary substantially from the published tale. Indeed the 1932 film is built around Stevenson's idea rather than his details. It itself forms the core for another movie made nine years later.
The earlier picture is all about sex. Released before the moral strictures of the Hays Code took effect, it boldly features a woman forcing a man's hand between her legs, then getting naked and trying to pull him into bed. This angle is a logical means to explore the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic, since sex is the most obvious arena where externally imposed rules about what is right clash with instinctual drives that are deemed wrong. This angle also allows for the introduction of women into the mix (the original having none), which is a cinematic requirement in general and a horror-movie requirement in particular.
Fredric March stars as the unfortunate protagonist, a young doctor desperate to marry his beloved (Rose Hobart) and frustrated by her father's insistence that they wait for many months. The implication is clear that he cannot possess her before marriage due to a propriety which he respects, since she is the kind of well-bred lady that a gentleman wants to wed. Yet what is a lusty fellow to do when respectability gets him nowhere? A solution to this dilemma appears in the doctor's research. Against the advice of colleagues, he has been seeking a way to separate man's dual personalities so that the good can be freed of the bad. In a bout of anguish he releases his inner Hyde, who looks like a refugee from the Planet of the Apes (a nod to Darwin, apparently, and an interpretation of our evil side as something evolution might conquer). In this incarnation he sets out to get as much animalistic sex as possible, at least until his nuptials take place.
How Hyde accomplishes his debauchery is the most fascinating and disturbing part of the film. His victim is a ripe, lower-class beauty named Ivy (Miriam Hopkins), who unsuccessfully tried to seduce Jekyll after he saved her from a sidewalk brawl. Hyde makes Ivy his terrified slave through both physical and mental abuse, and she is a most pitiable character who meets a horrifying end. The tragedy then rebounds upon the good doctor, who, having achieved a wedding date and vowing never to release Hyde again, discovers that he can no longer control his sinister half. Hyde will emerge when he wants to, growing more vicious every time.
The 1941 picture is more polished but less raw, and it is essentially a rehash of its predecessor. (More polished and more in accord with modern cinematic tastes, to which old-timey things like March's lipstick look wrong.) This movie includes a religious overtone and is not as overtly sexual, although there are a couple eyebrow-raising scenes suggesting threesomes and S&M. Once again Dr. Jekyll (Spencer Tracy) is betrothed and thwarted by his fiancée's father. His research is given practical purpose in the form of a mental patient whom he would like to cure. Again he uses his scientific experiments to call up Hyde (not as simian as before) and dominate poor Ivy, who is played by Ingrid Bergman with a dramatic poise less moving than Hopkins' earthiness. Again he finds that Hyde will not go away when his beloved (Lana Turner) is finally put within his reach.
This is a highly moralistic story which warns that opening yourself to the dark side, even a little and from noble motivations, is a dangerous path. The moral is reflected in the movies' female characters: one who is sympathetic but pays grievously for being a hussy, and one who is virtuous and retains life and honor despite grief, perhaps learning to love with a tamer passion. Other explorations of Jekyll and Hyde might do without these women. The movies discussed here use them to focus the ill-spent energy of the world's most famous schizophrenic.
Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.
