I’m a fan of classic Hollywood, but my pre-Code experience is limited. In a way, I’m glad of that: it means these films can still astonish me.
1931’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, and Rose Hobart, still packs a phenomenal punch. Its creamy, shadowy black-and-white cinematography and luminous, familiar stars act as the velvet glove, but what I feel is certainly the steel fist. This is uncompromising, a bleak look at violent, insatiable selfishness and the hypocrisy and lack of self-knowledge that so often aid and abet it. It’s smart, it’s scary, and it moves.
March stars–at first–as Jekyll, who has his worse instincts leashed but can’t help using science to poke almost idly around the idea that maybe he doesn’t have to. He’s impatient for wedding bells to finally ring for him and his devoted intended, Muriel (Hobart), and in short, he’s horny. But he’s neither self-denying enough to wait nor self-accepting enough to simply take a mistress. If he did that, he might have to feel guilty about it. Instead, he comes up with his famous solution.
The dream, as he espouses it to a raptly attentive class, is that this will allow his “good” half to triumph, free of every evil impulse. But that’s not what we see, and I have to conclude it’s not what he experiences–or even what he truly wants. Hyde may be the repository of Jekyll’s unrestrained id–a gleeful, capering, monstrous animal who freely indulges in every sensation that comes his way, whether it’s rain on his face or a vulnerable woman’s terror–but he spares Jekyll nothing. When the drug wears off, Jekyll becomes a full person again, not a “better half.” Hyde is tucked away, recontextualized, and hindered, but not gone. When he’s fully in control of himself, Jekyll would never do what Hyde does, but he makes the choice to become Hyde, again and again, even though he knows Hyde is a living horror to Ivy (Hopkins), the young woman he forcibly keeps as his “mistress.” Jekyll won’t sleep with Ivy, but he’ll allow himself, as Hyde, to rape and terrorize her; it’s fine, because he’s the gentleman who will courteously buy her off with fifty pounds after he decides to consign his alter ego to the grave. There’s no moral betterment, just compartmentalization and freedom from consequence.
The film observes this central drama of conscience as sharply as anything ever has, perfectly picking out Jekyll’s distress when Ivy comes to his door (to thank him and beg for his help, never knowing how intimately he’s aware of her troubles): Hyde, “learning” of the encounter, is simply full of hatred and possessive jealousy, but Jekyll is tense, his nerve endings revealing the complicity his mind has tried to deny. It’s never been easier to understand how Jekyll could start lapsing into Hyde without ever taking the drug. Gratification becomes a habit, and it’s a lot less demanding than a civilized man’s intellectual gymnastics. But if Jekyll was a moral coward who had to run and Hyde1, Hyde is a physical coward–he’s not smart enough to fear more than death and a trap–who ends by running to Jekyll. He tried to have what he wanted without either guilt or punishment, and in the end, he gets both.
But for all the moral clarity of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it’s more famous, and rightly so, for two particular cinematic and dramatic touches. The first is the incredible makeup work that transforms March’s mild, attractive face into Hyde’s simian sneer2, which looks like it’s straight out of The Big Book of British Smiles. Per TCM, red filters let the already-applied makeup slowly reveal itself through camerawork and lighting changes, so even now the transitions (especially the early ones) look almost flawlessly smooth, without the awkward pauses of stop-motion. If it’s remarkable to see such an accomplished effect in an “old” film, it’s even more jaw-dropping to see the frankness of Miriam Hopkins’s performance, from Ivy’s open, earnest sexuality–I audibly gasped at her baring her bruised thigh for Jekyll’s inspection–to the terrifying pathos she gains once in Hyde’s clutches. The violence he subjects her to is almost easier to take than the constant, obsessive demands that she perform the emotions he wants from her, forcing her to sing “for joy” and say she loves him and beg him to stay, watching her like a hawk so he can lash out at even the slightest hint of visible resentment or relief at his going. It’s easy to see the evil in a beating; Hopkins excels because, even more than March, she forces the audience to see it in the call for a song.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is streaming on Tubi, HBO Max, and Plex.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
Lauren James’s ProfileTags for this article
More articles by Lauren James
Anthologized
Opening: You’re looking at a tableau of reality, things of substance, of physical material: a desk, a window, a light. These things exist and have dimension. Now this is Arthur Curtis, age thirty-six, who also is real. He has flesh and blood, muscle and mind. But in just a moment we will see how thin […]
Anthologized
Arguably one of the best Twilight Zone episodes, and definitely one of the most Twilight Zone episodes.
Anthologized
A late night horror in an in-between kind of place.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Serial Experiments Lain, Episode Five, “Distortion”
This splits between two plots. The first is Lain apparently being seduced by the Wired (which is the internet). She has a series of conversations with objects that escalates into conversations with images of her mother and father (with her explicitly asking if they’re actually her parents or just taking their form; she is not answered). The conversations are essentially trying to steer her to anti-materialism – that the real world is simply a flawed expression of what is True in the Wired, which is aligning the technology with Plato over Aristotle. It’s presented as something spooky and mysterious and not entirely to be trusted, but you see why Lain finds it convincing.
(There’s also a very early conversation with a doll that has a very strong resonance with AI – it’s an artificial thing, and Lain asks for a story, to which the doll replies that it can’t create anything which doesn’t exist.)
Meanwhile, Lain’s older sister is being stalked in bizarre visions of text concerning a prophecy, meaning the show is delving into surreal horror – there’s a sequence where she hides in a dark toilet that completely unnerved me because I had no idea what was going to happen. It ends with her getting home, only to see a more casually dressed version of her already here. This ends up combining with the main story; Lain comes out to see the copy, asks what’s going on, and is told ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’. She then looks to the front door to see her sister, reduced to some digital imagery, apparently screaming but totally silent before fading away. Jesus fuck.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Season Eighteen, Episode Ten, “The Guys Have A Sleepover”
A classic theme for this show: stuff that was cool when the Gang were kids is insane for grown adults to do, and possibly never was cool (certainly, the vast majority of what the Gang does over the night was baffling and terrible to me as a kid), and is particularly insane for men around fifty. This is, so far, the best pay off of Rob Mac’s observation like twenty years ago that the Gang’s antics will only get funnier as they get older and sadder.
Biggest laugh: Frank getting the cookie in his mouth at the end. Every single time it momentarily appeared that Dee could see Frank was hilarious though.
Hacks S4 finale – Season could have been a bit longer – 13 episodes really was the perfect number for a cable TV season compared to 8 or 10 – but it ends on a promising way to kick off the last season, with Deborah naturally not wanting to be seen as a quitter in her (mistaken) obit. Hoping the final episodes follow up on Ava being told directly that she needs to get a life outside of Deborah.
Live Music – New England art-punks Perennial, my second time seeing them and another high-energy show, their songs are based around big fuzzy riffs, organ and punchy shouted vocals from both singers but their commitment to onstage theatrics is almost as fun as the music. Great live band, if they return for a third visit I’ll be first on the ticket list. Really enjoyed one of the local supports, witty kinda new-wave songwriting and great basslines. The opener were a less appealing proposition, they were clearly fans of bands like Idles and that kinda swaggering noise-punk but they didn’t quite pull it off and some of their lyrics struck me as unintentionally amusing.
Twilight Zone, “Long Live Walter Jameson” – mostly pretty solid with some clever FX work towards the end. I didn’t think it was the most compelling exploration of this premise, though.
Interestingly, apparently “Long Live Walter Jameson” used the same makeup strategy as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, filming in black and white but using red lights to hide red makeup and then slowly filtering it out. So it’s fun to have both of those come up this week.
I noticed that coincidence too! It’s a very cool effect.
Look, if I took this drug, the resulting creature would make even worse and more frequent puns.
I’m exasperated but I’m acknowledging this.
“I’m exasperated but I’m acknowledging this” should be another candidate for the MM motto!
FYI there is a Jekyll/Hyde musical and it is gloriously bad and overwrought to the extent that I admire it’s chutzpah. (Very clearly written to cash in on the same dark mega-musical energy as Phantom but it lost money even after running for 1000+ performances(!))
Even just on this, I already agree on admiring its chutzpah. Kind of impressed by it still losing money, too.
I would describe it as “possessing the same energy as Stop The Planet of The Apes but written and performed in absolute sincerity.”
Year of the Month updates:
Here’s all the movies, albums, books from 1998 you can sign up for this month.
Oct. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Who Moved My Cheese?
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown
And coming in November, get ready to write about anything from 1968! Here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
Nov. 8th: Tristan Nankervis: Night of the Living Dead
Nov. 22nd: Tristan Nankervis: Slouching Towards Bethlehem