Horror Is Universal: DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE (1931)
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains discussion of sexual assault, domestic abuse and attempted suicide. Reader discretion is advised.
I know you must have several questions. What are we doing here? Why am I breaking one of my cardinal rules for this series so early on? After all, this is not a Universal film. So why take a detour to discuss it?
There are, in fact, a number of good reasons for us to discuss 1931’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Such as…
It’s among the most famous unofficial entries in the Universal Horror canon. Out of all the attempts by rival Hollywood studios to imitate Universal’s early horror projects, this film was the most successful at the time and the one with the most lasting pop culture impact.
It was the first horror film to be recognized by the Academy Awards. While Dracula and Frankenstein were both overlooked, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde received three nominations and one win.
Universal itself would later make multiple attempts to create its own version of Jekyll & Hyde, with varying levels of success.
It will be important to keep this film in our minds as we start looking at Universal’s werewolf films. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is not a werewolf film in the literal sense, but I think that its DNA can be seen in a lot of early werewolf/“transformed monster” films, especially a particular film we’re going to discuss later.
I attempted to keep all this in mind as I settled in to watch the film. And while it did offer food for thought on all these subjects, it also gave me a lot more to process than I’d anticipated. I was expecting a film that would be creepy, but ultimately tame by modern standards. What I got instead was a legitimately disturbing and depraved shocker. It may have an extraordinary premise, but it’s at its greatest when focusing on ordinary horrors in graphic, brutal detail.
The Plot: In Victorian London, the eminent Dr. Henry Jekyll (Frederic March) proposes a bold theory at one of his lectures. The human soul, he believes, is split into a “good” self that strives for nobility and a “bad” self that acts on base impulses. Furthermore, he believes that it is possible to separate the “bad” self from the “good” self by consuming a certain mixture of chemicals. If humanity could quell its evil impulses using this method, everyone would be better off. Jekyll himself has good reason for wanting his “bad” half under control. He desperately wants to marry his fiancée Muriel Carew (Rose Hobart) but is at odds with her father Danvers Carew (Halliwell Hobbes), who disapproves of Jekyll’s flighty nature. Jekyll also harbors feelings for Ivy Pierson (Miriam Hopkins), an impoverished singer/prostitute that he rescues and escorts home one evening. Driven by these personal issues and his obsession with scientific advancements, Jekyll creates and drinks the potion that will prove his theories correct. But when he does so, his “bad” self takes over and transforms him into Edward Hyde (also Frederic March), a cruel, vicious and hideous man with no qualms about indulging in his worst vices. Though initially frightened by Hyde, Jekyll soon begins to revel in the freedom that his alter ego gives him. But how long can he stay in control of Hyde, and what would happen to his friends and loved ones if Hyde were to be unleashed permanently?
In the wake of Universal’s success with Dracula and Frankenstein, the other film studios around Hollywood suddenly wanted a piece of the horror pie. One such studio was Paramount Pictures, headed at that time by its co-founder Adolph Zukor. And like the Laemmles, Zukor decided to base his horror film on a popular work of Gothic literature. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was a natural choice for this project; the 1886 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson already had multiple successful adaptations for stage and film. There had been a play in 1887 by Thomas Russell Sullivan, as well as a 1920 film starring John Barrymore. While Paramount’s film does not directly adapt either of these prior works, it does borrow and expand on multiple plotlines that these adaptations introduced to the story.
Like most adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein, adaptations of the Jekyll & Hyde story rarely stay faithful to the original novella. This is because the novella is primarily a work of mystery rather than horror; the true nature of the title characters is meant to be a twist ending revealed only in the last two chapters. Pretty much every famous adaptation does away with this conceit and focuses on Jekyll/Hyde, allowing the audience to spend more time with both the protagonist and the antagonist. With the perspective flipped in this way, the story becomes more of a character piece, as well as a talent showcase for whoever is playing the two leads. Some adaptations will have Hyde portrayed by a second actor, but the traditional approach is to have one person play both roles.
For the 1931 film, Zukor chose Rouben Mamoulian as the director. Though you may not know his name, his legacy as a director is a lot more lasting and influential than you might expect. Born in what is now the country of Georgia, he came to America in the 1920s and began directing Broadway shows. His first major success there was Porgy, the play that inspired George Gershwin’s opera Porgy & Bess — which Mamoulian would also direct when it premiered in 1935. The 1940s were an even better decade for him: on film he would direct The Mark of Zorro and Blood and Sand, while on stage, he would direct the original Broadway productions of Oklahoma! and Carousel. Those projects mostly lay in the future when he was hired for Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, but his talent as a director was already apparent in 1931. His first two films, 1929’s Applause and 1931’s City Streets, had made him a valuable asset to Paramount (Mank 8).
Paramount had originally hoped to get John Barrymore to reprise the roles of Jekyll and Hyde, but he was under contract at MGM and therefore unavailable. So, what do you do when you can’t get John Barrymore for your film? In this case, you get Discount John Barrymore. This is only sort of a joke: Frederic March was hired partially because he had portrayed a character loosely based on Barrymore in the play and film The Royal Family of Broadway a few years earlier. At that time, March was primarily known as a pretty-boy Broadway idol, and Paramount had reservations about casting him because of this. They were focused on getting an actor who could make the best possible Hyde. But Mamoulian had other priorities:
“I’m not worried about Hyde,” I said. “I’m worried about Jekyll. I want Jekyll to be young and handsome…” I wanted to use Freddy March, who at that time was a light comedian. He had just done a film called Laughter. They said, “You’re crazy. How can March play this part?” I told them if I couldn’t use Freddy March, I wouldn’t do the film. (Mank 10)
So March got the part, and Mamoulian then assembled the rest of his cast and crew. For the main female role, he chose Miriam Hopkins, a Broadway performer who had recently signed a contract with Paramount. Rose Hobart was another up-and-coming actress who at the time was best known for starring in Death Takes A Holiday onstage. The cinematographer for the film was Karl Struss, known for shooting the 1925 version of Ben-Hur and the F.W. Murnau film Sunrise. His work on the latter film earned him the very first Academy Award for Best Cinematography. The last important name you need to know is makeup artist Wally Westmore. He had never worked on a major film before this, but he came from a whole family of professional makeup artists. His father had worked with stars like Mary Pickford, while his five brothers all worked at different Hollywood studios. It would be Wally’s job to create the monstrous look of Mr. Hyde.
To those of us who have watched Universal Horror, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde begins in familiar territory. The opening credits play over a piece of classical music, just like in Dracula — this time we’ve swapped out the Swan Lake overture for Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Once the film properly begins, however, we quickly realize that this is not just a pale imitation of Dracula or Frankenstein: this is something stranger, more daring and experimental. The opening scene consists of several long first-person POV shots that let us see the world through Dr. Jekyll’s eyes as he gets ready for his day. The camera, and by extension the audience, is Jekyll here. We see him playing the organ, talk with his servants, look in the mirror as he preps to go give a university lecture. We are not passive observers watching from a safe distance, we are immersed in the action itself. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening, yet the camera angle makes this feel strange and startling.
I think there’s a lot to be said about this first scene and the one that follows it. You rarely see movies do camerawork like this right as they begin, especially in 1931. There is some precedent at this point for films pulling off unconventional shots like this — the famous tracking shot from 1927’s Wings, the many POV shots in the 1925 German film Variety — but Mamoulian and Struss were trying to take that idea further here. They want the audience to be inside Jekyll’s world, so as to better see how that world changes when Hyde enters the story. This opening scene is, I believe, the first half of the film’s thesis statement: this is a psychological story about internal thoughts, desires and conflicts, and we’re going to get to the heart of who Dr. Jekyll is.
The second half of that thesis statement is given by Dr. Jekyll himself, when he presents his controversial ideas before an audience of students. When he talks about man being “not truly one but truly two,” he does not make the distinction between man’s two halves by morality alone. This is what he says:
One of him strives for the nobilities of life. This we call his “good” self. The other seeks an expression of impulses that bind him to some dim animal relation with the earth. This we may call the “bad.” These two carry out an eternal struggle in the nature of man, yet they are chained together. And that chain spells repression to the evil, remorse to the good. Now, if these two selves could be separated from each other, how much freer the good in us would be, what heights it might scale! And the so-called evil, once liberated, would fulfill itself and trouble us no more.
The equivalent passage in Stevenson’s original text is not quite as nuanced:
If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. (Stevenson 322)
As we can see by this comparison, the idea of civilized instincts vs. animal instincts is one that was added for the film. Mamoulian later spoke about why he made this change to the story:
The original was about good and evil. Jekyll wanted to assume the different existence in order to commit acts of evil. I thought that was a very specific horror thing that the audience would hardly get involved with. I thought that if I changed that and made it a conflict not between good and evil but between the spiritual and the animal in man, that would be a part of every one of us. We have base instincts and high instincts…We have the flesh and the spirit…That would be much more interesting, because every person could identify with the dilemma of Jekyll and Hyde…
So what does this translate to in practice? A movie that is extremely, unabashedly sexual. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is the kind of Hollywood film that could not have been a few short years after its release. It takes advantage of the loose regulations that existed for film prior to the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (aka the Hays Code) in 1934. It falls right in the middle of the brief yet productive years when early Hollywood got away with using darker and more explicit (for the time) content and themes to tell stories about criminals, poverty, politics, sex, violence and more.
Let us begin with the character of Jekyll himself. Even prior to becoming Hyde, this man is…how shall I put this? Desperate for physical intimacy. Or, in layman’s terms, horny to an unhealthy degree. After the opening scenes establishing his scientific aspirations and charitable nature, he attends his own engagement party, and we start to see the more base desires central to his character. He and his fiancée are set to be married in eight months, in accordance with her father’s wishes. But Jekyll is adamant about wanting to be married now: he simply refuses to wait, and he resents his future father-in-law for not listening to him. This desperation is what draws him towards Ivy Pierson when they first meet.
The concept of Jekyll having a fiancée is not original to this film, having come from the 1887 play. The concept of having a different woman get involved with both Jekyll and Hyde, however, does originate here. Hyde has a relationship with a woman in the 1920 film, but she’s a minor character with no significant role to play. Ivy is an actual character, the most important besides Jekyll/Hyde himself. But in her first scene, she’s here to demonstrate the kind of temptations that Jekyll wishes he could remove but also indulge in. She playfully flirts with him as they arrive at her bedroom. The camera lingers on her bare legs as she slowly removes her garters and stockings. We see part of her breast as she lies naked under a blanket, dangling one leg off the side of the bed. And when she kisses Jekyll, he is more than happy to reciprocate. The intervention of his scandalized friend Dr. Lanyon is probably the only thing that stops him from cheating right then and there. He’s not the least bit ashamed about what he’s done, either. He justifies his conduct by dismissing it as “a matter of elementary instinct” which he can’t control. The only way for him to be “clean,” he claims, is to go through with his experiment and separate his animal desires from his civilized self.
All these experiences are still rattling around in Jekyll’s head as he creates and drinks the fateful potion. During his first transformation into Hyde, we are dropped into another long POV shot in which these memories flash before his eyes. It’s a weird and striking scene that neatly sets the tone for what sort of man Mr. Hyde is going to be. And when he finally appears…oh boy.
Stevenson’s physical description of Hyde is something that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to replicate on film. Hyde’s evil is not reflected in any single distinguishing feature of his body: because he is the flesh incarnation of a man’s evil, that evil radiates out from every part of him.
“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, though I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not for want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.” (Stevenson 286)
“There must be something else,” said the perplexed gentleman. “There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? Or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? Or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires though, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.” (Stevenson 291).
For the film, Mamoulian and Wally Westmore took a different approach to Hyde’s appearance, one that leaned into the script’s themes of devolution and human civility vs. animal degeneracy. This version of Hyde has a distinct simian look to him, with flared nostrils, jutting teeth and patterns of hair on his hands and cheeks. Mamoulian used the Neanderthal as visual inspiration and described Hyde as “this young animal released from the stifling manners and conventions of the Victorian period” (Mank 14). According to March, the application process alone took about four hours.
But the design and application of the makeup was only part of the challenge facing the filmmakers. They also had to depict the change from Jekyll to Hyde and back again. Transformation sequences are so often the bread and butter of horror films, especially those featuring the types of monsters which appear in Universal Horror. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde masterfully demonstrates a lot of the transformation sequence techniques that horror filmmakers would use for the next half century.
The most common technique we see used for transformations in these older films is the lap dissolve. It’s just a type of transition where one shot fades out as a new shot fades in, causing the two images to overlap and flow into each other. But the lap dissolve can also be used to create the illusion of a single image changing appearance, which is how it’s used to film the Jekyll/Hyde transformations. A frame of the character’s initial appearance is shot first, then the makeup team comes in and either adds or removes some of the monster makeup. Then another frame is shot, and the process repeats. The whole transformation is filmed frame by frame, a process that takes hours to complete. When you string all the frames together in the proper order, one image fades into the next and creates the illusion of a character rapidly changing form. Other transformations in the film were created using jump cuts, which were cleverly masked by precise camera movements. In the second transformation, for example, the camera starts on Frederic March’s face and pans down to his hand. During that movement, the shot changes: now we can see some of the false hair that’s been applied to March’s hand. The shot pans back up to March’s face, which is now in partial makeup. The pattern repeats two more times to film the whole transformation.
The most fascinating special effect, however, is one which seemingly causes March’s face to change color live on camera. Bold shadows appear on his cheeks and forehead, as though the simian-like patterns of Hyde’s hair are growing right before our eyes. How was that done? Mamoulian kept the technique a secret for decades. In 1971, he was interviewed for a book on Hollywood directors titled The Celluloid Muse. And in his chapter, he had this to say about the Jekyll to Hyde transformation:
The secret of the transformation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde in one continuous shot…lay in the use of colour transparencies which gradually revealed more and more of the actor’s makeup. As you know, a red filter will absorb red and reveal all the other colours, and a green filter will do the reverse. Working on that principle, we held graduating colour filters one by one before the camera thus allowing successive portions of March’s coloured makeup to register on film. It was all rather primitive — the filters were hand-made — but it worked. (Higham and Greenberg 152-153)
So red makeup was used to apply the patterns to March’s face, and the first part of the shot had a red filter over the camera lens to hide the makeup from view. But when you change the filter color from red to green, the red makeup becomes visible within the shot. It’s a trick that is designed for black-and-white film because when you’re working with black-and-white, red shows up as very dark and green shows up as a pale gray (hence why Frankenstein’s Monster has green skin). The red makeup contrasts with the green filter to make these bold shadows suddenly appear on Jekyll’s face. It’s simple in theory but astonishing in execution, especially when you see it for the first time.
Personally, I think this film has one of the less grotesque designs for Hyde. Audiences at the time apparently found the makeup comical rather than frightening, and they would laugh when Hyde first appeared onscreen. But the true horror of Hyde isn’t in how he looks, it’s in what he does.
Some Jekyll & Hyde adaptations like to make Hyde into this hulking, powerful monstrosity, and I think those adaptations miss the point of the character. Hyde is frightening because he is no more or less powerful than a normal human. What distinguishes him is his lack of a conscience: he is what Jekyll would be if Jekyll had no inhibitions on his behavior. So the evil acts that he commits are not beyond the realm of human comprehension. His is a recognizable evil, almost too close to home. And I think the film’s greatest triumph is depicting Hyde this way, primarily through the ways he destroys his central victim, Ivy.
Hyde and Ivy meet when Jekyll first decides to intentionally let out his alter ego. Muriel has left the city for a month, leaving Jekyll despondent. He is advised to “amuse himself” while his fiancée is away, but the type of amusement he seeks can’t be openly pursued by a man of his social standing. Hyde, on the other hand, can indulge in whatever amusements he likes. Subconsciously (or perhaps consciously) driven by the memory of Jekyll’s encounter with Ivy, Hyde tracks her down to the seedy bar she works at and coerces her into sharing a drink with him. The possessive behavior starts immediately: he becomes physically violent with another patron who wants Ivy’s attention, then with Ivy herself when she tries to leave the situation. “I hurt you because I love you,” he declares. And that’s just the start of what he does to her.
This whole plot is, in my opinion, what gives Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde the power to terrify the viewer so thoroughly. The film’s scariest aspect is not the gruesome transformation scenes, nor Hyde’s appearance. It’s Hyde finding this young woman who may not be well off but still enjoys life and then thoroughly breaking her spirit. The next time we see Hyde and Ivy together, it’s clear that Ivy is being forced to live as Hyde’s mistress. He has made her financially dependent on him, putting her in a lavish apartment where he comes to visit whenever he feels like using or abusing her. Ivy is aware that she’s a prisoner, and though she despises Hyde, she’s far too frightened to leave him — and for good reason.
Part of what makes this storyline so effective is Miriam Hopkins’s wonderful performance. Frederic March might be the main attraction, but Hopkins nearly steals the show from him. While some might decry her hysterical freakouts as too over-the-top, I think her tightly wound terror is appropriate for the situation the character has found herself in. There are moments when she seems so scared of Hyde that she can barely speak or breathe in his presence. These scenes are somewhat difficult to watch because they invoke such a visceral, familiar dread.
Familiar is the key word here. Beneath its fantastical sci-fi premise, the film presents us with a surprisingly stark and bleak portrait of domestic abuse, a situation that happens all too often in the real world. We witness plenty of verbal and physical abuse on Hyde’s part, and while the sexual abuse is kept out of frame, its presence is all but explicitly stated. Ivy eventually becomes so miserable that when she seeks out Jekyll for help — oh, the irony — she mentions that she has attempted suicide, seeing it as the only way to escape Hyde’s clutches. And indeed, death ends up being her way out. After Ivy asks Jekyll for help dealing with Hyde, to which Jekyll promises that she will never see Hyde again, Hyde retaliates against them both by taking control without needing the potion, then going to Ivy’s apartment and brutally murdering her. It’s a horrifying sequence where the violence is given sexual undertones. Hyde snarls in Ivy’s face that “I’ll give you a lover now…his name is death!” And the decisive strangling happens in the apartment’s bedroom, with Hyde and Ivy sinking out of view as he wraps his hands around her neck.
This tragic sequence of events could have been set in motion without any supernatural interference. Think about it — what did we witness that countless numbers of abuse victims haven’t been subjected to in real life? The walking on eggshells, the creation of dependence, the “I hurt you because I love you,” the escalation to physical violence. Even worse, what did we see Hyde do that Jekyll himself wasn’t capable of doing? Hyde’s hedonism and violent urges come directly from Jekyll. It’s easy to imagine a wealthy doctor keeping a woman on the side in his fiancée’s absence, then disposing of said woman once his marriage is imminent — it feels pertinent that Hyde takes over and does the murder while Jekyll is supposed to be at his own engagement party. Hyde is part of Jekyll, whether Jekyll wants to acknowledge that or not, and the Ivy subplot confirms that: Hyde pursued Ivy because Jekyll wanted her.
Using supernatural horror as a means to tell stories about abusers and victims is nothing new, especially for Gothic horror. It isn’t even new to this series, since we arguably saw parts of that in The Phantom of the Opera as well. But Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde tackles its subject matter with a dark, fearless attitude that is unique to this brief era of Hollywood history. Movies this stark and unyielding in their approach to adult subject matter wouldn’t come out of Hollywood again until the late 1960s, when the Hays Code lost its power and was phased out in favor of the modern rating system. And as we go through the Universal Horror films, it’ll be well into the 21st century before we encounter another film that depicts this kind of material and matches/exceeds this level of intensity.
After this point, Jekyll’s life — or what remains of it — falls apart around him pretty quickly. He reveals his secret to one of his colleagues, who is appropriately horrified and disgusted, and then he goes to break things off with Muriel for her own sake. The reunion and subsequent separation of the two lovers is the highlight of the film’s third act. It starts out as peak melodrama, full of wailing and falling to the floor and screaming to the heavens. And it’s great! It’s a very theatrical, over-the-top style of acting that we don’t see in film anymore. A scene like this would be out of place in a film that was slightly more grounded, but it feels right at home in this heightened, almost surreal Gothic space that the characters inhabit. But the real fascinating part is what happens next. After breaking Muriel’s heart, Jekyll tries to leave her house. Hyde, unfortunately, has other ideas. What we then get is the culmination of Jekyll’s repressed feelings towards his fiancée and her father. The film has established by this point that Hyde takes Jekyll’s wants and acts on those wants in extreme ways. So with Hyde in control, Jekyll’s desire to marry Muriel manifests as attempted assault. And when Danvers Carew rushes in to save his daughter, Hyde turns Jekyll’s simmering resentment into another brutal murder: he beats Carew to death with a cane, a detail taken from the novella.
There’s only a few minutes left in the film now, and with at least two dead bodies behind him, the story of Jekyll/Hyde can only end one way. The police chase Jekyll back to his house, witness him turning into Hyde and fatally shoot him in the ensuing scuffle. As he dies, Hyde turns back into Jekyll — a change from the novella, where Jekyll’s body remained in the form of Hyde after his death. The supporting characters all gather around his body, but Mamoulian doesn’t focus on them for the final shot. Instead, he places them in the background and focuses on an innocuous yet unsettling image: a pot of water boiling over. He had focused on the same image earlier in the film, as Jekyll was going off to intentionally become Hyde for the first time. In this story about the explosive expression of unstated emotions, it works as the perfect visual capstone.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde premiered in December 1931 and became a box office hit, ultimately grossing $1.3 million against a budget of $535,000. Those were big numbers at the time, especially for a horror film. Overall, it performed on about the same level as Dracula and Frankenstein. But it also received something that those films didn’t get: Oscars.
At the 5th Academy Awards, held in November 1932, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was nominated for Best Actor (Frederic March), Best Adaptation (Percy Heath and Samuel Hoffenstein) and Best Cinematography (Karl Struss). Of those three, only March would actually win, and he ended up having to share the Best Actor award with Wallace Beery. But it was a huge milestone for horror films nonetheless. The genre had not only been represented at Hollywood’s biggest awards show for the first time, but it won an award in a major category.
The question I want to ask here is not “did March deserve to win the Oscar?” Though his performance might seem corny and overdramatic to modern viewers, he did what the film required of him and did it well. His Jekyll is okay, but his sinister take on Hyde is where he really flourishes. Of the two leads, I was more impressed with Miriam Hopkins, but March was just as compelling to watch.
What I’m really interested in is comparing March’s performance here with Bela Lugosi in Dracula and Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. This film was certainly successful, and it certainly influenced future adaptations of the Jekyll & Hyde story. But it didn’t sink deep into the bones of pop culture the way that its competitors at Universal did. March had a fine film career, but this role didn’t immortalize him in the way that Lugosi and Karloff were immortalized by their films. So what’s the difference?
The simplest explanation is that for decades, this film was almost impossible to view at all, let alone in its original form. First came the censorship. Re-releases of the film had to cut material in order to be compliant with the Hays Code, resulting in incomplete versions which usually lacked the most interesting and praiseworthy scenes (i.e. the opening POV shot, Ivy’s introduction). And then there’s the fact that the whole film was nearly lost thanks to MGM trying to purposefully destroy it: they did a remake in 1941, bought the rights to both this version and the 1920 film and tried to recall every existing print of the former. An uncensored restoration of the 1931 film wouldn’t be made available until the 1990s. Compare this with Dracula and Frankenstein, which endured some censorship but never really went out of circulation, remaining popular through multiple re-releases.
But now, having seen and analyzed all three films, I do think there’s also something more timeless and enduring about the performances that Karloff and Lugosi give. As I hinted at before, March is doing a very big and theatrical style of acting. Performing on stage requires you to be super exaggerated, because subtle nuances and tics aren’t visible in a room filled with hundreds of people. But what’s believable on a stage isn’t necessarily believable on film, where you can hone in on small, deliberate acting choices.
So March is doing a mostly theatrical performance. Meanwhile, Lugosi’s performance in Dracula feels more like a hybrid of that theater style and something more appropriate for film. Obviously he had originated that role on Broadway, and he maintains some of that larger-than-life energy when he makes the jump to film. But there are times when Lugosi pulls back: a lot of his sinister behavior in that film is pulled off with just his eyes and his voice. Those smaller moments are what stick in your mind when you watch Dracula because he’s so good at making them scary. Karloff is also giving a performance that’s more suited for film. It’s a performance that relies heavily on pantomime because the Monster is mute, but again, the most memorable moments come from what you get out of the eyes and the face. Think of the scenes when he’s looking up through the skylight or playing with the little girl. Karloff instills the Monster with this quiet humanity that makes him an enduring, sympathetic character to audiences. Lugosi gives Dracula a quiet inhumanity that makes him even more scary. Compared to those two, March’s Jekyll/Hyde does fall through the cracks a bit. He doesn’t have enough warmth to make us sympathize with him, nor is he cold enough to instill a deep dread in our minds. He’s scary, yes, but not scary in that unique way. It’s a product of the acting style but also the script itself, which is written with that acting style in mind.
But all that said, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is still in a class all its own. There’s an experimental roughness to it that we don’t see in Dracula or Frankenstein, which makes it all the more compelling. It wields the camera with an ambitious energy, using innovative choices to drop the viewers into Jekyll and Hyde’s world. It’s not afraid to engage with adult themes and imagery, and a very real tension is baked into the film’s darkest sequences. Frederic March gives a wonderful performance and has great chemistry with both his leading ladies, especially Miriam Hopkins. The makeup design for Hyde is creative and iconic, as are the groundbreaking transformation scenes. Frankly, this is a remarkable accomplishment of a film. It captures the feel of a salacious penny dreadful, but it combines that with these gut-punch moments of real-world horror. It’s a bleak and brutal film that will stick with you long after you’ve finished watching it, and though it’s not as well remembered as its Universal counterparts, it’s more than worthy of being an honorary addition to that canon.
Final Rating: 4 Stars
Now it’s time to leave 1931 behind as we return to Universal Studios and move into the new year. High off their two major successes, the Laemmles are looking for a way to keep the horror train moving. But there are only so many Gothic novels you can adapt to film. The time has come for the studio to venture into unknown territory and tell a story that’s brand new…
UP NEXT: The Mummy (1932)
Works Cited & Further Reading
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror, New York, Sterling Publishing Co., 2016, pp. 282–333.
Landis, John. Monsters in the Movies: 100 Years of Cinematic Nightmares. Reprint, DK Publishing, 2016.
Mank, Gregory William. Hollywood Cauldron: Thirteen Horror Films from the Genre’s Golden Age. McFarland, 2001.
Higham, Charles, and Joel Greenberg. The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak. Regnery, 1971.
Reiter, Gershon. The Shadow Self in Film: Projecting the Unconscious Other. McFarland, 2014.
McElwee, John. “More on Jekyll and Hyde.” Greenbriar Picture Shows, 13 Feb. 2007, greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com/2007/02/more-on-jekyll-and-hyde-theres-nothing.html.