DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941) B/W 114m dir: Victor Fleming

w/Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Ian Hunter, Donald Crisp, Ian Hunter, Barton MacLane, C. Aubrey Smith, Peter Godfrey, Sara Allgood, Frederick Worlock, William Tannen, Frances Robinson, Denis Green, Billy Bevan, Forrester Harvey, Lumsden Hare, Lawrence Grant, John Barclay

Robert Louis Stevenson's horror story, about a respected young doctor whose experiments uncover the monster within, is a classic doppelganger tale that's been filmed many times, including Rouben Mamoulian's excellent (and superior) 1932 version. This time around, it's brought to life by a solid cast, and the story has a psychological, rather than a horrific, emphasis.

From Variety's contemporary review of the film: "In the evident striving to make Jekyll a 'big' film, by elaborating the theme and introducing new characters and situations, some of the finer psychological points are dulled. John Lee Mahin's screenscript is overlength.

"Nevertheless, it has its highly effective moments, and Spencer Tracy plays the dual roles with conviction. His transformations from the young physician, bent on biological and mental research as an escape from his own moral weaknesses, to the demonic Mr. Hyde are brought about with considerably less alterations in face and stature than audiences might expect.

"Ingrid Bergman plays the enslaved victim of Hyde's debauches. In every scene in which the two appear, she is Tracy's equal as a strong screen personality."

FilmFrog note: Originally, MGM decreed that the two female stars would play the opposite roles from the ones they finally play in the film. In 1941 Hollywood, Bergman typically played the innocent and didn't want to continue being typecast by playing the "good girl" Beatrix. At the same time, Turner was rather inexperienced and unsure she could deliver the emotions necessary to play the "bad girl" Ivy. Bergman insisted on doing a secret screen test as Ivy for Fleming and convinced him (and later producer David Selznick) to let her play the role, which suited Turner just fine. The effect of this casting certainly shows in the women's performances, thus adding to the general level of the film's quality.

From the DVD Journal website (www.dvdjournal.com), this review by Mark Bourne of the release of a double DVD of both the 1932 and 1941 versions of the film:

"Like Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a thriller about a scientist's quest to cleave apart his twin 'good' and 'evil' natures, is an oft-filmed tale. Like Phantom it has even inspired a stage musical (starring David Hasselhoff, which should conjure thoughts of unrestrained evil all by itself). On this double-feature disc, we get two of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde's more notable screen adaptations. The first, from 1932, is one of the most entertaining classics from the heyday of Hollywood horror icons. The second, from 1941, is not nearly as much fun, but it comes with a director and cast of glossy fan mag caliber, and there's something to be said for the sheer pleasure of watching Ingrid Bergman just one year before she'd always have Paris.

"These two iterations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could hardly be more different, yet they bear some similarities worth noting (and that go beyond the fact that the 1941 film filched the screenplay from the '32).

"For all of Stevenson's probings into mankind's Janus-faced composition, in neither of these cinematic versions does Dr. Henry Jekyll come off as completely innocent of his own questionable surface-level motives and characteristics. In Fredric March's 1932 interpretation, Jekyll strives to release our virtuous higher selves from the bestial hedonists we all hide (get it?) within the high walls of civilized humanity. The product of his dabbling in Things Man Was Not Meant To Know is the loathsome Mr. Hyde, the personification of Jekyll's repressed dark nature. Yet while March's doctor is a kindly altruist, he is also shown to be innately cowardly and irresponsible. And he may be willfully naive. He claims that his goal is to release the Evil side so that it can sate itself and no longer weigh down the Good, which would be freed up to aspire to higher noble achievements; a lofty notion, but just how the hell did he expect that split to manifest? Then take Spencer Tracy's miscast approach to the role --- it so muddles the Jekyll/Hyde duality that we can, based on the screen evidence, wonder if his potion merely serves as a placebo with which the doctor gives himself permission to let loose the thuggish misogynist that's barely contained even on good days. ...

"Double-billing on this disc is 1941's less impressive, though still interesting on its own, retelling of Mamoulian's film (not Stevenson's novel). This neutered remake showboats an unlikely A-list cast: Spencer Tracy as Jekyll/Hyde, Lana Turner as Jekyll's 'good girl' fiancee, and Ingrid Bergman as the 'bad girl' Ivy. Directed by Victor Fleming, who had already helmed The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, this is certainly a good-looking, well-made MGM product. But watering the wine is the studio's reputation as a maker of slick prestige productions, plus the ongoing influence wrought by the God-botherers behind the Hays Office. So you bet this is a movie that's plush and polished and handsomely appointed to within an inch of its life. It's also a turgid and buttoned-down and artless melodrama that tries too hard to be respectable and not at all to be thrilling.

"Compared to the '32 version, Fleming's is more naturalistic and pious, which downplays the fantasy/thriller elements to no one's advantage except perhaps the lighting designer's. Mamoulian's sexual (sub)text is pushed so far to the back that it's hardly worth mentioning, though a crinkling of the brow is occasioned when, in one of this film's over-the-top transformation delirium sequences, Jekyll imagines both Bergman and Turner as charging carriage horses in a 'nude' head-and-shoulders shot with himself as the whipmaster driving them thundering on. Any Freudacious symbolism intended by these overlays is fairly undercut by the explosive giggles they inspire as we watch them.

"It's said that the studio pressganged Tracy into a role that he didn't want, and afterward he did his best to distance himself from it. Evidence comes in his unenthusiastic performance as Jekyll and his eschewing extensive makeup as Hyde. This renders the 'monster' as not an incredible hulking Id but as little more than mussed hair and a gruff disposition. Hyde's rather tepid 'evil' comes mostly as hints of offscreen badness. Unlike March's performance, Tracy's Jekyll and Hyde so obviously look like each other that it's ridiculous nobody recognizes the doctor when he's in his alternate mode. The adjustments to the earlier film's screenplay provide no help. Now Jekyll ambiguously seeks to cure 'insanity' rather than unchain human potential. And this time around we see him experimenting on rabbits and rats who then snap and snarl, scenes that coldcock any deep thinking into the nature of humanity's evolved 'good' and 'evil' selves. After all, most people don't need bubbling drafts in beakers to become pissy and unpleasant. Enough cheap scotch does the trick just fine. Reviewers at the time --- without the need for cheap scotch --- gave Tracy's turn in this film one of his few critical roastings. Said Howard Thomas in The New York Times, 'Mr. Tracy's portrait of Hyde is not so much evil incarnate as it is the ham rampant. When his eyes roll in a fine frenzy like loose marbles in his head he is more ludicrous than dreadful. When he blows grapeskins upon the fair cheek of Miss Bergman, the enchantress of his evil dreams, it is an affront to good taste rather than a serious, and thereby acceptable, study in sadism.'

"Lana Turner is such a generic love interest that she barely registers. She may be the woman Jekyll hopes to marry, but the absence of chemistry between Turner and Tracy makes her reason for being here utterly forgettable. Granted, her role is vapid and void of interest as written, but still.

"Instead, director Fleming's attention is on the person who really makes the movie worth a look. It's Ingrid Bergman as Ivy, now a barmaid instead of a prostitute. In this year before she appeared in Casablanca, Bergman is so luminous that she must be viewed in naught but soft-focus and shot with her every close-up composed like portraiture bound for the Louvre. Her role as Hyde's Cockney mistress isn't at all a perfect fit for the Swedish actress, but she gives a fine full-on performance that's the film's primary pleasure. It can be argued that she was just too beautiful for the role of Ivy, but that's a forgivable casting choice for those of us who consider Bergman in Casablanca too beautiful for planet Earth. The Feb. 17, 1955 issue of Daily Variety reported that the city of Memphis, Tennessee's 'film censor czar' Lloyd T. Binford banned the film because 'Miss Bergman is an immoral woman,' referring to the public hullabaloo about her relationship with Italian director Roberto Rossellini.

"The '41 Jekyll/Hyde lacks its predecessor's visceral dynamism and undercurrent of sexual energy. It's all surface and sluggishly paced to boot, but it's an interesting MGM surface with a fine Franz Waxman score, and given who's involved this one's a welcome extra on a disc that's really about the Mamoulian/March version."

The 1941 version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE was nominated for three Oscars: Best B & W Cinematography (Joseph Ruttenberg), Editing (Harold F. Kress), and Scoring of a Dramatic Picture (Franz Waxman).