Last year I started the tradition of reviewing one horror film each week in the lead-up to Halloween. While I prepare my next crop of reviews, I thought I would re-post my first five.
To kick things off is my all-time favorite horror film: the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Fredric March in the title roles and directed by Rouben Mamoulian. The film follows the familiar story pretty faithfully: saintly Dr. Jekyll experiments with a drug to separate man’s evil and good halves and unleashes the evil Mr. Hyde (as a side note, this is the only adaptation in which Jekyll’s name is pronounced – correctly – as “Jee-kyl” as opposed to “Jeh-kyl”). This, incidentally, is the familiar story, but it is not really the story of the book, in which Dr. Jekyll was no saint and Hyde is implied to have been the result of the Doctor’s selfish intentions more than the actual effect of the drug. But no matter. Like most adaptations this film gives us a much younger Jekyll as the story’s protagonist and gives him two female co-stars, one his bride-to-be, the other a prostitute (to simplify: one good, one bad, see?).
From this familiar framework, however, Mamoulian and March give us a startlingly original take on the story, delving deep into the material to dig up some remarkable – and frightening – interpretations.
The film opens with an extended, nearly two-minute POV shot from Jekyll’s perspective. We see through his eyes as he plays organ, prepares for his lecture (thus our first view of Jekyll is in a mirror, as will be our first view of Hyde). At the university, Jekyll lectures to a packed auditorium on the duality of man. During all this we quickly come to know Jekyll as a good, even saintly man. He is polite and friendly to his servants and he blows off wealthy old duchesses (“give her some castor oil”) to work on the impoverished patients in the hospital’s free ward. Even when he cheerfully admits that “it’s the things one can’t do that always tempt me” he’s referring to his charity work (or at least, he’s partially referring to his charity work).
From there we meet Jekyll’s devoted fiancée, Muriel Carew, and her bluff old buffer of a father. Muriel quickly shows herself to be a fine match for the witty, charitable Jekyll, cheerfully flirting with him when he shows up late to dinner from his work in the free ward (which she declares she loves him for), and passionately kissing him in the garden against all propriety. The problem comes when Jekyll tries to convince her father to an immediate marriage, while the old man insists their already-lengthy engagement be dragged out for nearly another year.
The film is frank here that Jekyll’s impatience is largely due to his intense sexual desire for Muriel (“I’m not marrying to sober,” he says. “I’m marrying to be drunk!”). Following his argument with the old general (which, of course, he loses) he crosses paths with a prostitute named Ivy Pierson whom he rescues from an angry customer. She makes a quick pass at him (clearly seeing pound-signs the instant she lays eyes on him) and soon has him in a not-exactly willing, but not exactly resisted kiss.
And it’s after this scene that we get Jekyll’s first transformation (filmed entirely first person in one of the most remarkable film scenes in history) and our first glimpse of Hyde, who announces his presence with the words “Free! Free at last!”
This first experiment is cut short when Jekyll’s butler arrives, but soon Jekyll learns that, not only can he not expect to be married any time soon but Muriel will, in fact, be leaving for another month or two. Bored and frustrated, his patience finally expires and he unleashes Hyde again. And it’s here that the film enters its strongest and most disturbing section, because it turns out Hyde remembers Ivy Pierson too…
First I want to make one thing clear: most horror films of the 1930s, the first Golden Age of horror, are not all that scary to most viewers today. Oh, they have their moments and can certainly be chilling enough (see the opening scene of The Mummy for instance), but they usually require a fair amount of good-will from modern audiences to be really effective. This movie, on the other hand, is scary. Really, honestly scary by pretty much any standard. And it’s scary because of Hyde.
There is a line in the book where Jekyll notes that “Hyde, alone of the ranks of mankind, is pure evil.” Here we have one of the few works of fiction that has a clear idea what pure evil would look like if you met it (the film is better in this regard than the book even, in which Hyde doesn’t really get enough stage-time to hammer home his pure evilness). To accomplish this they dressed Hyde up in the trappings of an all-too real horror and stepped on the accelerator.
You see, once Hyde gets Ivy in his clutches, he proceeds to turn her life into a living hell. This Hyde is, basically, the worst kind of domestic abuser. He not only beats Ivy (including with a whip), he tortures her psychologically, holding the threat of further abuse or murder constantly over her head to force her to do his bidding: to beg him not to leave her, to say she loves him, to sing for him… It is partially the way the film grounds its vision of evil in something that is all too familiar to its audience that gives it its power. Even more, not only does the film show us how evil Hyde can be, it never glorifies Hyde at all. When Hyde first appears there’s some question of whether he will be a kind of anti-hero; a free spirit amid the stuffy, self-righteousness of Victorian Society. By the time Hyde has his first meeting with Ivy, however, we are in no doubt. However bad the repression and hypocrisy of Victorian era London society is, Hyde and what he represents is infinitely worse.
I really can’t praise March’s acting enough. Prior to this picture he had been mostly known as a wooden romantic lead and light comedian, a situation that nearly drove him to quit acting in disgust before he was offered this role. His early scenes as Jekyll are sometimes a little stiff (more the fault of the transition to sound, we suspect, than March’s), but he manages some excellent little moments, such as when he smiles wryly at the skeleton in his lab right before drinking the formula for the first time, or his rueful laughter after Ivy steals a kiss (“I’ll take that as my fee” he says). Later, after Hyde has entered the scene, his performance becomes even better: emotional, thoughtful, and richly detailed. Note the shock and fear in his face when he looks in the mirror after his first, abortive transformation: how badly shaken he is as he realizes what is lurking within him. Or the irritable jerk of his head when he decides to unleash Hyde again in frustration, or the horrible shame on his face when he looks over the pile of letters from Muriel which he had neglected during his time as Hyde.
As Hyde…well, if you didn’t know better you might think they used a different actor for Hyde. Not only are March’s face and voice rendered unrecognizable under his makeup and prosthetics, but his whole performance is so utterly different in every way that you never wonder no one connected Hyde to Jekyll. March’s Hyde is, first of all, an astoundingly physical creation: he bounds, leaps, and stretches, he runs practically everywhere, and the muscles in his face constantly work and twitch (probably due more to the uncomfortable prosthetics than any conscious choice, but still giving the impression that Hyde has just so much energy to burn that he can’t even keep his face still). He responds to sleights with immediate shows of force: a man pushing past gets a shove and a snarl, a rude waiter gets tripped and caned, a rival client of Ivy’s nearly gets stabbed. What makes Hyde all the more alarming is the automatic nature of these assaults; Hyde is like a hornet: once you annoy him, he lashes out immediately and relentlessly.
But it’s not just the physical. March shows us that Hyde has a fiendish intellect to back up his violence. As noted he plays cruel mind-games with Ivy, speaking always in a mock-loving voice as he demands she tell him that she loves him, chides her for wishing him gone (“Quite unworthy of our great love”), and finally drives her to hysterics before taking her in his arms (foreshadowing the next horror movie to win an Oscar, Hyde several times refers to Ivy as “it”). It’s not just that Hyde is cruel or a murderer (though there are murders in this film and they are indeed horrifying), it’s that he’s so playful about it. He doesn’t just whip and beat Ivy, he toys with her and is clearly delighted all the time he’s tormenting her, grinning and laughing as he does so. He calls to mind Lewis’s “Unman,” which was described as “taking satisfaction from the smallest cruelty, as love is satisfied with the smallest kindness.” Here indeed is a man we have no trouble believing is pure evil. March richly deserved his Best Actor Oscar, the first (and, for the next sixty years, only) such awarded for a horror movie.
Miriam Hopkins as poor Ivy Pierson gives a performance to match March’s: she’s fairly generic when we first meet her as the brash, merry prostitute, but she becomes truly heartbreaking once she falls into Hyde’s clutches. The way she jumps at the slightest noise, the way she goes stiff and rigid when Hyde caresses her (note also that Hyde acts like he doesn’t notice a thing: another sign that he enjoys what’s he’s done to her), the tentative hope in her voice when she asks Hyde meekly if he’ll be going straight away all serve to drive home to the audience the extent of her sufferings and, consequently, of Hyde’s evil. She also shows (in her interactions with her landlady, for instance) that despite her unsavory profession she really is a good person at heart. That’s the thing: at no point does the film indicate that she ‘deserved’ anything that happens to her, or that she was ‘asking for it.’ As other reviewers have noted, the tragedy is precisely that she doesn’t deserve what happens to her.
Ivy’s best scene comes when she ends up going to Jekyll for help, begging to be saved by the very man who put her through all this in the first place. She throws herself at Jekyll, begging him to help her get away from Hyde, tearfully describing her ordeal and offering him anything in return (“I’ll work for you! I’ll slave for you! I’ll love you!”). This is one of March’s best ‘Jekyll’ scenes as well, as he expresses simultaneous horror at what he has done, concern for the poor woman at his feet, and, throughout it all, barely-concealed fear that he’ll be discovered. It’s another blot on the Academy’s notoriously-spotty record that Hopkins wasn’t at least nominated for her performance, as it’s as strong and moving as any you’re likely to see (and quite a bit more so than many actresses who have taken home the statue).
Rose Hobart as Muriel, the third player in this triangle, is unfortunately given much less to work with than the others. Nevertheless she manages to give a solid performance in a rather thankless role, showing that she’s makes a good match for Jekyll; she flirts cheerfully with him when he shows up late, then follows him out into the garden for some passionate kissing with only a few semi-serious words of protests. She’s also the one who, in two different scenes, shows up just how much of a hypocrite Jekyll is: when he begs her to force an early marriage, she chides him “Don’t you love me enough to wait just a little while?” Then again, when she returns from Paris after Jekyll unleashed Hyde’s reign of terror, she makes it clear that she also suffered from their separation (and from Jekyll’s neglect of her letters), but that she, unlike him, was committed enough to wait.
She also makes it clear why she can’t just give in to Jekyll’s entreaties: she is trying to balance her obligation to two different men in her life: her father and Jekyll. She makes it clear that she loves them both and wants to avoid hurting either as much as possible, even though her father is an unreasonable old buffer and Jekyll becomes increasingly unreliable and erratic in his behavior.
Outside of the three central performances, the acting ranges from generic to passable. Jekyll’s friend, Dr. Lanyon (Holmes Herbert) is basically just a stiff snob and nothing more (though he has a good scene where he faces down Hyde). Edgar Norton as Jekyll’s old butler Poole is pleasant and deferential, though he doesn’t play much a role beyond keeping us reminded of how Jekyll is admired and liked by his servants. My favorite performance outside the three leads is definitely Halliwell Hobbes as General Carew, who manages to express infuriating stuffiness and selfishness as well as real kindness and affection. He’s not a bad man, but he’s a very frustrating and petty man: the embodiment of Victorian snobbery (he at one point boasts of never having been late for dinner in forty years). His pettiness and stiff adherence to “propriety” are a large part of what drives Jekyll over the edge and Hobbes makes us understand just how infuriating this man can be. Still, the film balances this by showing that he really is a kind old gentleman who loves his daughter dearly and she him. Probably the General can be summed up in saying he represents Victorian society, both the good and the bad. It’s to the film’s credit that, while never fully supporting him, while casting him as the villain of the film’s first act, it ultimately sides with him when the old man comes face-to-face with Hyde…
One of the most startlingly original and creative aspects about this film is the direction. Already noted are the frequent uses of POV shots: the film opens with one, then the first transformation and Hyde’s introduction are likewise done in POV, as is Hyde’s entrapment of Ivy. The film also makes use of split-screen (appropriately enough for a film about duality) and holding fade-outs for up to a full minute over the next shot. There’s an energy and creativity to the movie’s camera work that is almost unheard of in such an early sound film (which were usually very clunky, awkwardly shot affairs due to the new equipment that had to be used: see the original Dracula for an example).
Another area where the film succeeds to an astounding degree is the effects. The first transformation, shot from Jekyll’s POV, is a tremendous achievement of creative artistry; an indescribable collage of images and sounds that surely stands as one of the first true masterpieces of cinematic craft in the sound era. The later transformations, meanwhile, are truly something to behold. These aren’t the “fade-transformations” used in Universal’s The Wolf-Man: we see the transformation happen in real-time. We watch as Jekyll’s face darkens, his features contort, his hands grow rough and hairy…It’s honestly not an exaggeration to say that even today with computer effects we could not make these transformations look more real or more effective. They are that good (I won’t reveal the secret of how they were achieved here, though the information is readily available. Suffice to say, it’s a remarkably simple, yet innovative technique).
The design of Hyde is, of course, crucial. Stevenson explicitly did not describe exactly what Hyde looked like, except that he was pale and dwarfish and that, while he didn’t have anything explicitly wrong with his appearance, he inspired revulsion in everyone who saw him. This, of course, while effective in literature, would be pretty much unfilmable. The tradition in depicting Hyde onscreen has been, most often, to give him a simian appearance, underlining the idea that he represents Jekyll’s more primitive instincts. I always felt the design in this film was excellent: Hyde is ugly and ape-like in appearance, but not to the extent of looking unnatural in a top-hat and cape. He’s just a shade the far side of human; enough that he attracts stares of revulsion, but not enough that he would be refused service. As time goes on, Hyde grows slowly uglier, but never to the point where he looks completely inhuman. The film always wants us to remember that yes, this is a man and not some kind of inhuman beast.
What makes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde such a frightening film are two factors: first, as noted, is the fact that it grounds its vision of evil in something the audience is familiar with, something it knows happens all too often in real life. Second is the knowledge in the audience’s mind that this is Jekyll: this is what was lurking inside that saintly, life-loving man we came to know and admire throughout the first act of the film. This is one of those movies that grows scarier the more you think about it: the more you remind yourself of Hyde’s true identity, the more you look for the seeds of Hyde’s actions in Jekyll’s, the more you analyze and consider the connection between them and what that must mean…The moral of this film, that every man, even the very best, has the potential to be a monster, is a very disturbing one. And it’s a lesson the movie hammers home relentlessly.
G.K. Chesterton once noted (I’m afraid I can’t remember where) that the moral of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was not that man is two but that man is one. Jekyll may split himself into two, but he cannot maintain the division; in the end he must become either all one thing or all the other.
As the film enters its final act, Jekyll discovers to his (and the audience’s) horror that he can’t shut Hyde down. Hyde has grown stronger and stronger the more Jekyll’s used him until now he’s no longer a tool for Jekyll to use to indulge his sinful desires; now Jekyll is a tool for Hyde to use to escape the consequences of his crimes. It’s Hyde’s life now.
Final Rating: 5/5. A must-see for any horror fan or any movie fan for that matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment