Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941) **
Casting the wrong actor can be fatal to any motion picture.

Take for instance the 1941 horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde directed by Victor Fleming (credited director for Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz) and starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Lana Turner, who are wrong for three of the four main roles.

Tracy (1900-67) could play the idealistic Dr. Jekyll in his sleep, but he’s simply not believable as the malevolent Mr. Hyde and that’s a major strike against the film because the duality of man theme flies right out the window without a convincing Mr. Hyde.

Bergman (1915-82) sought out the bad girl role Ivy Pearson and she’s plainly just wrong for a lower class trollop and saloon girl, even before Casablanca, Gaslight, and The Bells of St. Mary’s placed Bergman in the popular imagination as the ideal woman. Ironically, Bergman and Tracy dated during Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and director Fleming reportedly fell in love with her. Her image as the ideal woman cracked and her career in America ended for the better part of a decade circa 1949 after her affair with married Italian director Roberto Rossellini dominated headlines.

Turner (1921-95) plays against type as the good girl Beatrix Emery and she becomes such a nonentity during Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that we forget she’s even in the picture. Turner later made her enduring fame playing a femme fatale, a la The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Throughout cinematic history, more than 120 adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde exist, with seemingly a major one every decade.

I vote for the superiority of the 1931 version produced by Paramount, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, and starring Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins. It blows the MGM version made 10 years later right straight out of the water and it’s not even close. Ditto for March and Hopkins, as well as Mamoulian, in comparison against Tracy, Bergman, and Fleming.

The 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde benefited from being made before the Production Code that came into play around 1934 and being made at Paramount rather than MGM.

Hopkins’ Ivy showing March’s Jekyll her leg still stands up as one of the great erotic moments. March never fails to convince us as both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and he deserved to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance. Mamoulian’s creativity shines throughout.

In the early ’30s, Paramount released such films as Morocco, Unfaithful, Dishonored, Tarnished Lady, Tabu, Million Dollar Legs, Horse Feathers, Island of Lost Souls, She Done Him Wrong, Murders in the Zoo, I’m No Angel, Duck Soup, and Design for Living. Paramount also distributed Fritz Lang’s 1931 all-time classic M in March 1933.

By comparison with the wild-and-crazy Paramount, where the Marx Brothers and Mae West once held court, MGM seemed awful stodgy and strange films like Tod Browning’s Freaks, Mark of the Vampire, and The Devil-Doll feel like aberrations on the studio’s permanent record. The folks around MGM reportedly treated Freaks cast members like, well, freaks.

So, in essence, if you have a chance and you’ve not seen it before, please go find the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and watch it as soon as possible.