Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)

The 1941 version is a true remake; it was not based on Stevenson's novella but on the script for the 1931 movie. (To me, a remake is based on another movie; a new version is based on the property an earlier movie was based on. But your mileage may vary.)

This wasn't intended as a horror movie, really, but one of MGM's long series of plush, lavish adaptations of classic novels. The sets are even more extensive than in the 1931 movie; there's a lot of fog, and a huge cast full of talented character actors. It was directed by Victor Fleming of "Gone with the Wind" and "Wizard of Oz" fame. Fleming was a good, but staid, director, handling actors well but not showing a mastery of inventive film technique.

Spencer Tracy was a big star at the time, and regarded as one of the best actors in movies (which was true). But while his performance as Hyde here is inventive, it's also essentially uninteresting. The transformation is not extreme; Somerset Maugham visited the set, and after watching a scene being shot, asked, "Which one is he playing now?" In the 1931 version, it's easy to see why no one recognized Hyde as Jekyll; in the 1941 version, is hard do understand why anyone DOESN'T. Also, Hyde here isn't like March's vigorous, lusty, brutal young animal; Tracy's Hyde is a libertine and a brute rather than an animal or an embodiment of evil. Aside from his sneering torment of Ingrid Bergman's Ivy, about the worst thing he does is to spit grape skins at her.

The cast is excellent, and Bergman gives one of her best performances of the period as the tender, ignorant Ivy, tortured by the sadistic Hyde. Lana Turner makes a rather mild "good girl" (here called Beatrix), but Donald Crisp is authoritarian as usual as her conservative father. The script, from that of the 1931 version, is credited to John Lee Mahin, and the handsome cinematography is by Joseph Ruttenberg. It's excellent, but doesn't measure up to the creativity of Struss' work on the earlier film.

The 1941 "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is a good movie, but oddly a minor one, especially when compared to the daring and exciting Rouben Mamoulain-Fredric March classic. (Bill Warren, AVRev)