It's amazing, even revelatory, how fresh and modern the March-Mamoulian version seems even today, more than seventy years after it was made. What movies of 2003 will anyone still be watching seventy years hence? Mamoulian was an erratic movie director, but in the early thirties, he was a phenomenon, making "Applause," "City Streets" and "Love Me Tonight" in a few short years. He later directed "Becky Sharpe" (the first 3-strip Technicolor feature), "The Mark of Zorro" with Tyrone Power and "Blood and Sand." After that, he largely returned to the stage where his reputation was as great or even greater; he directed the Broadway debuts of "Porgy and Bess," "Oklahoma!" and "Carousel."
From literally the first shot onward, Mamoulian's direction seizes and holds the attention: the first few minutes of the film are shot with a "subjective" camera -- it takes the place of March, who isn't seen until Jekyll glances into a mirror. Still as Jekyll, the camera even boards a horse-drawn carriage and starts down a back-lot street. When Jekyll arrives at the medical school where he's to give a speech, there are a few closeups of audience members, then the camera turns to see March giving the speech. During the first transformation scene, the camera again becomes subjective, and our first sight of Mr. Hyde is also in a mirror.
Mamoulian uses carefully-timed dissolves, angled wipes and artificial and altered sound with immense creativity -- this is one of the few studio movies of the 1930s that's exciting to watch just because of the way it is made. The script by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath only roughly follows Stevenson's original story, but it's full of invention and imagination anyway. Jekyll is convinced that there are two sides to man's nature, the noble, human side, and the baser, animal side. (Most versions feature the division as Stevenson did, between good and evil. Not so here; Hyde is less evil than a rampaging, heedless animal.) His friend, Dr. Lanyon (Holmes Herbert), urges him to try other approaches. Jekyll is eager to marry his fiancee, Muriel Carew (Rose Hobart), but her staid, proper father, Gen. Danvers Carew (Halliwell Hobbes), wants them to wait for eight months.
One night, Jekyll completes his experiment -- the lab scenes here are more convincing than in the 1941 remake -- and downs his potion. Mamoulian and his brilliant cinematographer, Karl Struss, used an idea that Struss originated in the silent "King of Kings." March was made up as Hyde with red makeup, then shot through a red filter, making the red on his face invisible. While the camera rolled, the red filter was gradually replaced with a green one, and the Hyde makeup appears like magic. There's then a cut, and the full makeup (by Wally Westmore) is applied. Each time Hyde appears, he looks worse, more animalistic; in his last two transformations, he doesn't even seem able to talk. In this scene, Mamoulian also experimented with sound; the ring of a gong was played backward with the strike removed, Mamoulian rushed up and down stairs and recorded his own heartbeat, and some sounds were invented by flashing light onto the soundtrack. It's all of a piece, here, swirling and hypnotic, as the Neanderthal-like Hyde makes his appearance.
Jekyll tended to roughed-up prostitute Ivy (Miriam Hopkins), who's attracted to the handsome doctor (and few actors have been as handsome as the young Fredric March). There's a dissolve of her swinging leg, naked but for a garter, over the following shot of March and Herbert, the idea of Ivy lingering in both their minds. When Jekyll again becomes Hyde, he goes out into the rain, exultantly turning his face upward, and then finds Ivy singing in a pub....
Hyde's later brutal treatment of Ivy is shocking and disturbing, one of the few areas in which the 1941 movie is the equal of this one. Hyde loves having power over her, loves terrifying her. Jekyll is submerged, but we know he's there, and he's enjoying it, too. Here, Jekyll and Hyde are not two different people, but two aspects of the same person, controlled and uncontrolled. Hyde is so uncontrolled, so heedless of what anyone might think, that he's often very funny, but he'd just as soon cut the throat of anyone who laughs. At the apartment he's set up for Ivy, he stuffs a whole muffin into his mouth, and later preens in front of a mirror, combing his hair over his pointed head.
It's one of the most courageous performances any actor has ever given -- and at times damned near impossible to believe that March plays both roles. His Jekyll is a bit much, rather too virtuous, too enraptured with his love for Ivy, but it's an appropriate performance for the period. His Hyde is something else altogether; not only does March change everything about himself, his face, his stance, even the way he moves, but the technique is timeless. It may be the greatest performance in horror movie history, rivaling Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster.
Miriam Hopkins as the randy but sweet Ivy is also astonishing, with instantaneous changes of expression, and a haunting, quaking terror of Hyde. It's almost painful to watch her as he torments her.
Like a lot of films from the very early days of sound, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" does not really have a musical score; it opens as March plays Bach's Toccata and Fugue on Jekyll's pipe organ, and source music is heard occasionally. Only in the scene in which Jekyll, at last horrified by Hyde, gives up his love for the stunned Muriel, does any music creep in. It's from an earlier, happier scene with the two of them.
The sets are well-designed, particularly those in the slum where Ivy lives, and there's a creative use of shadows, and light and dark. The movie is practically a course in filmmaking. (Bill Warren, AVRev)
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