Rouben Mamoulian (1931)
Fredric March gives a superb performance in this very impressive adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic. He strongly conveys Jekyll’s human qualities (including his sexuality), as well as his scientific hubris, so that the protagonist’s fate is genuinely tragic. In this treatment of the story (the screenplay is by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath), the bestiality unleashed by Jekyll when he drinks his potion is of an essentially carnal sort. Mr Hyde’s violent rapacity is focused on the two women of the story – his decent, loyal fiancée Muriel (Rose Hobart) and the music hall performer/prostitute Ivy (Miriam Hopkins, whose sensuality and coarseness are incredibly vivid). Hyde commits murders but the homicides seem to be consequential rather than primary deeds. The sexual content – in terms of both physical contact between Jekyll/Hyde and Ivy and some of the dialogue – is startling for a film of the early 1930s, even if the Hays Code wasn’t enforced until 1934.
The writing and direction are surprising in other ways too. The picture is dramatically highly concentrated – and this isn’t just a consequence of a lack of sub-plots. Key exchanges between major characters are extensive; while this may derive from the stage version of the story (which first opened in 1887, shortly after the publication of the Stevenson novella), the scenes in question certainly don’t play in a stagy way. The action is notably lacking in dependence on a musical score to heighten the tension. The chiaroscuro may seem an obviously expressionist visual scheme for Stevenson’s material but it’s unnervingly and often beautifully realised by Rouben Mamoulian and his cinematographer, Karl Struss. Within this Victorian London landscape, Mr Hyde is, alternately, an unsettlingly volatile presence and a grossly real and physically insistent one. The negroid details of Hyde’s appearance (particularly the wig) are shocking to a modern audience but the make-up is predominantly simian. If this seems relatively unimaginative and sometimes bathetic, it’s partly because Fredric March is extremely skilful and convincing playing the transitional sequences: the tension he transmits is so strong that it’s reduced by cutting from Jekyll’s contortions to the face of Hyde. There is nothing anti-climactic in March’s playing of Hyde: his athleticism resonates with the sense of suppressed physical energy that he suggests as Jekyll and March manages to reflect, through his eyes, a psychic connection between Jekyll and Hyde that is truly unsettling. In the first of only two acting ties in Academy Award history, both March and Wallace Beery (in The Champ) received the year’s Best Actor prize. (March received one more vote than Beery but the rules of the Academy in those days meant that a tie was called if one performer came within three votes of another.)
22 December 2008
