A nice opportunity to compare two classic early adaptations of Stevenson's tale. Fleming's pre-Hays code film is the more shocking and sensual of the two and is simply one of the finest adaptations of stevenson's tale. It also features brilliantly effective transformation scenes. In places, Mamoulian's version is a shot-for-shot recreation of the earlier film though the mood is more of melodrama with Tracy less than convincing. It also features a cockney Ingrid Bergman. Sort of.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of a divided personality is made for cinema, and Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version is one of its best adaptations. It’s innovative from the... more >
Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of a divided personality is made for cinema, and Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version is one of its best adaptations. It’s innovative from the off with the camera giving us a subjective shot from Dr Jekyll’s perspective, implicating us immediately in his world and his experiment. It’s surprisingly brazen too in its sexual subplot, leading to extraordinary scenes such as prostitute Ivy stripping her stockings and throwing her garters directly at the camera, which has again assumed Jekyll’s (and our) persective. All of this meant work for the censors of the day of course. Out went the early scene in which Jekyll is shown as a Christ figure persuading a lame girl to throw away her crutches; out went the stockings, and out went the scene with the cat and the nightingale that prefigures Ivy’s fate. This last one particularly irked Mamoulian - he always liked to have a cat in his films. Thankfully, 14 minutes of these cuts have been restored to this edition, making it pretty much the film the director intended.
Central to any cinematic adaptation of the Jekyll & Hyde story are the transformation scenes that turn man into monster, and these are handled brilliantly using an array of techniques. With each successive transformation Jekyll becomes more gruesome. He may begin his experiments as a spring-heeled simian, but by the end he is a truly wretched figure, with his facial make-up so extreme that it resulted in a 3-week hospital stay for Fredric March to prevent permanent disfigurement. March’s Oscar for his performance was well deserved. His Hyde is a genuinely unsettling creature with an edge of danger and brutality and to see him betray the promises he has made as Jekyll is a terrible, hollowing moment.
The 1941 version starring Spencer Tracy is in places a shot-for-shot remake of Mamoulian’s film. However, it replaces the genuine edginess of the earlier version with an atmosphere of staid melodrama inappropriate for the subject. It does however contain one notable fantasy sequence in which Tracy whips a pair of horses with the heads of Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner which is to say the least, surprising. MGM however bought up the prints of the superior 1931 version and suppressed it in favour of their own. Thankfully, cinema history has been righted and Mamoulian’s film is now firmly established as one of the great horror adaptations.
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