Rouben Mamoulian's DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE is one of the truly great horror films of all time. The story has been filmed more than any other in the horror genre, but it is Mamoulian's approach to the material that makes this one stand out. Mamoulian explores the west's overrated belief in free sensuality. His version of Dr. Jekyll, (Frederic March) is a sexless, Victorian man of reason, who wants to run wild. And so he does, but only after he concocts a special scientific cocktail that unleashes his lower nature. Mamoulian depicts Hyde as a semineanderthal brute, and March delivers on that characterization.
When one takes the time to watch March's performance (his Jekyll is sacharine saintly, his Hyde moves like a lurching simian marionette), it's not hard to see why it won the Academy Award that year, while other milestones like James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN and Todd Browning's Dracula weren't even in the running. DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE is a work set apart. It's racy in ways that film in 1930s United States rarely got to explore, it's bold in it's portrayal of upper middle class society, and its opening sequences are dreamlike and surreal in a way that really suck the viewer in. The audience is asked to take in the world the way Jekyll sees it for the first ten minutes of the film, and the camera-work cements in place Jekyll's abstracted reference. The scene in which Jekyll persuades a charity ward girl that she can walk unassisted is eerie precisely because of the way the camera follows her stilted, semi-joyous gait and restrained happiness. The angle of the shoot tells us Jekyll is looking at the rest of us the same way an entomologist would look at an insect.
Mirian Hopkins as the ill-fated Ivy manages to break through every stereotypical interpretation of the East End floozy that cinema has been burdened with. She's a movie "bad girl", but not one with a heart of gold, rather, Ivy is opportunist and craven. She is not one of Charles Dicken's "noble poor", and that's why her character works. She is fleshy, sensual, sweet, what Jekyll wants, and what he certainly cannot obtain from his "finished" and equally alienated fiancée Muriel Carew, portrayed here by Rose Hobart. Being a man from the upper classes, however, he's not allowed to explore what he really wants, but only what is socially acceptable. Or, "it simply isn't done", as his fiancée's father, Sir Danvers Carew (Haliwell Hobbes) would say. Hence, the looming mayhem. The wild man and woman must be set loose,by hook or by crook. And so it is, armed with a club and an intelligence distorted through a funhouse mirror.
The novella of Robert Louis Stevenson is mutated, but that's the name of the game in film. Still, all the liberties taken by screenplay authors Percy Heath and Samuel Hoffenstein make sense. Is it scary? Yes, in its portrayal of the social traps we allow ourselves to be blocked into. That's some spookshow, and Stevenson knew it, and Rouben Mamoulian knew how to work with that observation, and that's why this film will hold its own decades from now.
When one takes the time to watch March's performance (his Jekyll is sacharine saintly, his Hyde moves like a lurching simian marionette), it's not hard to see why it won the Academy Award that year, while other milestones like James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN and Todd Browning's Dracula weren't even in the running. DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE is a work set apart. It's racy in ways that film in 1930s United States rarely got to explore, it's bold in it's portrayal of upper middle class society, and its opening sequences are dreamlike and surreal in a way that really suck the viewer in. The audience is asked to take in the world the way Jekyll sees it for the first ten minutes of the film, and the camera-work cements in place Jekyll's abstracted reference. The scene in which Jekyll persuades a charity ward girl that she can walk unassisted is eerie precisely because of the way the camera follows her stilted, semi-joyous gait and restrained happiness. The angle of the shoot tells us Jekyll is looking at the rest of us the same way an entomologist would look at an insect.
Mirian Hopkins as the ill-fated Ivy manages to break through every stereotypical interpretation of the East End floozy that cinema has been burdened with. She's a movie "bad girl", but not one with a heart of gold, rather, Ivy is opportunist and craven. She is not one of Charles Dicken's "noble poor", and that's why her character works. She is fleshy, sensual, sweet, what Jekyll wants, and what he certainly cannot obtain from his "finished" and equally alienated fiancée Muriel Carew, portrayed here by Rose Hobart. Being a man from the upper classes, however, he's not allowed to explore what he really wants, but only what is socially acceptable. Or, "it simply isn't done", as his fiancée's father, Sir Danvers Carew (Haliwell Hobbes) would say. Hence, the looming mayhem. The wild man and woman must be set loose,by hook or by crook. And so it is, armed with a club and an intelligence distorted through a funhouse mirror.
The novella of Robert Louis Stevenson is mutated, but that's the name of the game in film. Still, all the liberties taken by screenplay authors Percy Heath and Samuel Hoffenstein make sense. Is it scary? Yes, in its portrayal of the social traps we allow ourselves to be blocked into. That's some spookshow, and Stevenson knew it, and Rouben Mamoulian knew how to work with that observation, and that's why this film will hold its own decades from now.