Since the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the story has been adapted to the stage, screen, radio and television more than 120 times by American, British and European producers. Film historian Troy Howarth called it “the most filmed work of literature in the silent era,” and there have been nearly a dozen more versions since movies started talking at the end of the 1920s.
I’ve watched the well-known 1931 adaptation directed by Rouben Mamoulian two or three times over the last thirty years. Fredric March handles the dual title roles expertly, alternating between the dignified and proper Henry Jekyll and the predatory and ape-like Mr. Hyde with the help of theatrical makeup, facial prosthetics and some carefully engineered lighting. But this past week, as part of my effort to venture off the beaten path during the Halloween season, I took my first look at director Victor Fleming’s 1941 interpretation with Spencer Tracy in the title roles. Rather than a direct adaptation of the Stevenson novella, it’s a remake of Mamoulian’s 1931 film. (And at the risk of sounding pedantic, Mamoulian’s film is based on a four-act play written by Thomas Russell Sullivan and originally staged in 1887.)
I don’t know what the mainstream public perception of gothic horror movies was in the 1930s and ‘40s. I’m inclined to think they were considered a pulpy alternative to more highbrow fare like Gone with the Wind or Wuthering Heights, so I was surprised to see so many A-list actors in a 1941 horror film. Tracy’s supporting cast includes Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, and Donald Crisp – nearly all of whom would go on to win Academy Awards for subsequent films. (Turner never won an Oscar, but she was nominated for Best Actress in Peyton Place in 1957.)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a tale with which most people have at least a casual familiarity. Henry Jekyll is a physician and scientist obsessed with the duality of the human psyche. Experimenting with laboratory animals, he seeks to separate the creatures’ darker impulses from their higher and more noble characteristics. His community of family and friends – including his fiancé (Turner), her father (Crisp) and the local minister – dismiss his pursuits as preposterous and even forbidden. When a dinner conversation in a movie like this turns to the dangers of man tampering with the laws of nature, you know something bad is going to happen.
But before it does, Jekyll rescues a flirtatious barmaid named Ivy Peterson (Bergman) from an attacker in a dark alley. This is when the story’s undercurrent of sexual tension and innuendo kicks into gear. Immediately attracted to Jekyll after the attack, Ivy persuades him to escort her back to her apartment and puts up little resistance when he suggests that she remove her blouse so he can examine her injuries. He maintains a professional detachment – he’s a doctor after all, and he’s engaged to the more proper and demure Beatrix Emery – but he lets his guard down just long enough for a kiss at Ivy’s door before he leaves.
Later in the story, during a hallucination that’s part of Jekyll’s transformation into his sinister alter ego, he envisions Ivy’s face smiling back at him seductively from inside a champaign bottle. Disoriented by the effects of his serum, he watches with his mind’s eye as the cork on the imaginary bottle pops off and the contents explode outward. Paging Dr. Freud…
Separated from Beatrix by her disapproving father, Jekyll continues his experiments until the transformations are no longer triggered by his serum and are now spontaneous and uncontrollable. Hyde’s recurring late-night prowls become increasingly menacing and eventually deadly. When a manhunt for the fiend gets under way, his fate isn’t hard to predict, and Jekyll is collateral damage.
Already successful in both good-guy and bad-guy roles by the end of the 1930s, Tracy gets to enjoy the best of both worlds here. His Henry Jekyll is good-natured and sensible – even if his scientific theories are highly unorthodox – but his Hyde gives the actor room to explore much darker territory. Like March ten years earlier, Tracy relies on makeup and camera tricks to sell the sinister alter ego, but not to the same degree. The menace of his Hyde is just as much about projection as it is about prosthetics.
Bergman also puts in an excellent performance. Although best known for playing classy and elegant characters, her portrayal of a saucy barmaid in a rowdy beer hall is no less convincing.
At the time of the movie’s release, reviews were mixed. The New York Times was particularly unkind, but the reviewer’s decision to invoke the word “hokum” no less than five times leaves the reader wondering whether he was too infatuated with his own bombastic prose to present anything resembling a balanced assessment of the film.
Variety was much more favorable, noting the “conviction” with which Tracy plays the dual roles – although I found his American accent jarring in a story set in late 19th century London. (Even Lana Turner attempts an English accent, although it sounds uneven from one scene to the next.) The same review also predicted “more generous recognition of Ingrid Bergman as a screen actress of exceptional ability…In every scene in which the two appear, she is Tracy’s equal as a strong screen personality.”
The prediction was more than accurate. The following year, Bergman co-starred in Casablanca, one of the best and most iconic films of the 20th century. By the end of her career in the early 1980s, she was a three-time Academy Award winner.
For the longest time before I watched this film, the idea of Tracy in the role of Jekyll and Hyde struck me as an odd casting choice, but the actor did have a dark side of his own. In 1933, he separated from his wife of ten years but never divorced her, and his parade of extramarital affairs – including his famous longstanding liaison with Katharine Hepburn – is well documented in James Curtis’ comprehensive biography of Tracy published in 2011.
But the marital charade wasn’t the worst of it. Tracy waged an ongoing battle with alcoholism throughout his adult life that included periods of binge drinking. A mean drunk by all accounts, he was arrested on two occasions during episodes of intoxication. A combination of depression, anxiety and insomnia resulted in what his wife described as a “volatile disposition,” and he relied on a regimen of pills to help him sleep but also keep him on his game in front of the cameras in the daytime. From a distance, he was – and still is – a beloved Hollywood figure. To those who knew him, he was far more complex and challenging.
Victor Fleming’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is an underrated entry in the annals of 1940s horror films, but well worth a look. His leading man’s interpretation of the Jekyll/Hyde duality may not be the most famous version ever filmed, but of all the actors to take on the roles, Tracy may have had the best understanding of a man’s constant struggle with his inner demons.