DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE (1941)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*


Wikipedia calls the 1941 Victor Fleming adaptation of the venerable Robert Louis Stevenson classic to be a "remake" of the 1931 Paramount film, directed by Rouben Mamoulian. There are naturally many points the two films have in common, not least in that both take a major motif from a Victorian-era theatrical version: that of giving Henry Jekyll a leading-lady and/or fiancee (called variously Agnes, Muriel, and Beatrice). I don't propose to make a point-by-point comparison between the two major American movies, especially since I haven't yet reviewed the Mamoulian film. But certain scenes, respectively at the beginning and at the end of the Fleming film, bear scrutiny.

One of the biggest differences is that Fleming's Jekyll comes off as more fatuously noble than Mamoulian's, as essayed by Fredric March. John Lee Mahin, adapting the earlier script by two other writers, opens the film very differently, showing Jekyll, his fiancee Beatrice, and Beatrice's father Sir Charles all attending church. The minister's sermon is interrupted when a rowdy fellow, identified as a mine-worker, starts ranting about the foolishness of morality. When the bobbies show up to eject the source of disturbance, Jekyll asks them to send the man to his clinic for study. The mine-worker's wife reveals that her husband suffered an accident that warped his normal sense of ethics, which just happens to coincide with Jekyll's own experiments with separating the good and evil sides of the human soul. The mine-worker soon expires, but he's apparently injected just so that the movie can present its audience with an anticipation of Hydes to come.

In the 1931 film, Jekyll's fiancee is jealously guarded by her father, and the sense of sexual frustration that Jekyll feels for his beloved is clearly devised to portray him as a victim of Victorian repression. But Fleming's Jekyll shows little passion, even for his own theories when he defends them against Sir Charles and other stiff figures of authority. Similarly, Sir Charles is far less of a "heavy father," for he shows little possessiveness toward Beatrice and seems relatively friendly toward Jekyll as a prospective son-in-law, if only he wouldn't delve into the secrets of Heaven. Thus Fleming's Jekyll has less in common with either the neurotic Stevenson character or the sexually repressed figure of the 1931 film. If anything, as played by Spenser Tracy, Jekyll brings to mind the way Henry Frankenstein, protagonist of the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, validates his own status as a seeker of ultimate truth. However, whereas the script of Whale's FRANKENSTEIN doesn't entirely validate the hero's opinion of himself, the John Lee Mahin script sells Jekyll as just such a seeker.

Even Jekyll's meeting with the low-class "bad woman" Ivy, closely modeled on scenes in the 1931 film, de-emphasizes the possibility that Jekyll can really be tempted by the mere possibility of sexual intercourse. When he does at last concoct his transformative serum and use it on himself, he still seems more motivated by a fierce desire to prove his theories, not to purge the demons in his breast. Further, Spencer Tracy's ostensible desire to play Hyde with barely any makeup assistance remains one of the great mistakes in horror cinema. As Hyde, Tracy bugs his eyes and bares his teeth, but at no time does he succeed in portraying "the face of evil."

Once Fleming and Mahin finish rewriting the early part of the Mamoulian film, the middle portion of the film follows the 1931 flick for the most part. Sir Charles catches his daughter committing the unforgivable offense of visiting Jekyll at his house, and it reminds the lord that he's supposed to be a much heavier father. So he takes Beatrice abroad. Separated from his "good girl," Jekyll doses himself again and goes in search of a good "bad girl," namely Ivy-- who, like everyone else, does not recognize Hyde as Jekyll even though his basic physical features are unchanged. This is the closest the film comes to incarnating Hyde's evil, as he wins over Ivy with a display of money, and then proceeds to terrorize the poor woman, keeping her confined to her own apartment.

When Hyde reverts to Jekyll, the aggrieved scientist attempts to put his nastier side away from him. But Ivy, remembering Jekyll from their previous encounter, asks him for help, not realizing that she's just betrayed her lord and master to his face-- just not the face with the bug-eyes and bared teeth. Hyde callously murders Ivy, but this action brings the police down upon him (resulting in a not very exciting chase scene, and later, to his reversion to Jekyll in front of one of his friends). The film ends, not with Mamoulian's image of a pot of repression steadily boiling over, but with an incongruous Christian choir that implicitly forgives Jekyll his transgressions-- a forgiveness that this superficial version of Jekyll does not really earn.