TIM LUCAS: Kim Newman has reviewed Warner Home Video's DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE double feature (pairing the Fredric March and Spencer Tracy versions) for VIDEO WATCHDOG #106, and suggested it as a topic for our fifth RTD. This seems a solid choice to me since, whether we have the disc or not, we're all likely to have seen one or both of these films and to hold some opinions about them. So who feels like getting the ball rolling?

         Some topics we might cover: Is the Tracy version underrated? Are the sexual double entendres in the Mamoulian version a bit overstated?
         Is March's portrayal definitive or risible by today's compass? How do these two films compare to other versions of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, and how do they compare to the it?

         Anyway, lots of meat here to chew over. Let's dig in!

RICHARD HARLAND SMITH: I think March's performance more than withstands the test of time. His yeti-domed Mr. Hyde is an intelligent, lucid yet completely feral character (if that even makes sense). There have been Hydes and Hyde-like characters who have been more violent, more sexually aggressive, even more cruel (and I say this as a fan of the John Barrymore silent)... but March remains unmatched as the definitive Victorian throwback. His performance ("I'll show you what horror means!") still unnerves, almost 80 years later.

         Spencer Tracy is miscast in the remake and I think in this one role he breaks his own learn-your-lines-and-don't-bump-into-the-furniture rule and tries too hard to act. While the Mamoulian version seemed to me to want to transcend the source story's bookishness, the Fleming version tries too hard to be classy. Unfortunately, I think the March version does suffer from its literary pedigree... even though FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA are derived from novels, the films don't suffer the same backlash that DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE does. For all the lip service paid the Mamoulian film, it's under-valued, to me. Fans don't go on about it the way they do the Universal films.

         There are good things about almost all of the subsequent Jekylls & Hydes, even if they can't compare ultimately to March's definitive performance. Michael Rennie's live-TV version was interesting, albeit more for Gore Vidal's take on the story as a meditation on personal responsibility (an interesting slant for the '50s) than for Rennie's sweaty performance. Jack Palance wasn't as ugly as March, but there was something creepy about his Punch-like features. I barely remember the Kirk Douglas musical version, apart from him throwing a prostitute into the Thames at one point (or was that Palance?). David Hemmings was fairly forgettable-his Jekyll was more interesting, played (as Paul Massie did for Hammer) as a stodgy old geezer. Who was the last Jekyll & Hyde... John Hannah? That was just awful, as if the filmmakers said "Let's make Hyde a crashing bore... that's never been done before!"

SHANE M. DALLMANN: I never saw [the John Hannah] version... but I believe the latest Jekyll/Hyde to turn up on film was Jason Flemying and the CGI monster from THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN... perhaps that isn't quite what we're going for here, though?

It's been a while since I've seen either one, but the Spencer Tracy J&H was the first adaptation I ever saw, and the initial enthrallment never quite wore off.

         Meanwhile, while I'd read all about the Fredric March version, I was never presented with an opportunity to actually see it before its first VHS restoration. And by then, I'd read so many reports on what to look for, what was originally cut, etc. that it wasn't quite as fresh a discovery as it could have been. I still enjoyed it tremendously, however, and I agree that March's performance remains award-worthy and exciting.

         As for the novel? It could never be faithfully adapted and still work as a film. We're all spoiled-even those who have never read the book (small children excepted, I suppose) know that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same. But THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE was written as a mystery with a surprise ending!

KIM NEWMAN: I've recently watched the John Hannah version, which is essentially a scrambling of MARY REILLY and EDGE OF SANITY. In it, Jekyll doesn't physically transform but just becomes uninhibited. He is mixed up with Mr. Hyde, who is a real character-a lunatic supposedly due in the Jekyll household to be a human guinea pig but who commits suicide offscreen, leading those who only glimpse the drugged Jekyll or see evidence of his presence to mistake the good doctor for the mad mister. It's a vaguely radical idea, but also feels a bit like Ed Begley Jr.'s non-invisible "Son of the Invisible Man" (in AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON).

         I assume initial readers of the novel would have been told that there was a "twist ending you won't see coming" and went through the bulk of the story trying to guess. It seems to me that the average Victorian was supposed to think that Stevenson was going to come up with a revelation that would have been impossible to publish (that the distinguished researcher and the shabby little thug are lovers) then amazed to be given another, even more incredible finale. I love the moment in MARY REILLY where Hyde admits his secret as if it were obvious and Mary responds "How could a person guess that?" Stephen King once expressed his admiration for the plot of the novella by saying that it's put together like a Swiss watch-indeed, it is: not a word wasted, with every tiny detail fit into the scheme of things and in prose that still reads fresh a century on.

         I think Alan Moore does some interesting things with Jekyll and Hyde in LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, especially in the second volume of the comic (where he sadly realizes that the reason Mina Harker isn't afraid of him is that she's met someone worse than he is). However, the Jason Flemyng version is one of the least effective depictions of the character on film-questions like who makes those big top hats rank alongside why there are freestanding tables in a submarine and why Tom Sawyer shoots a minion rather than the head villain in his first scene. It also (like the comic) makes Hyde a hulking (or Hulk-like) giant, whereas Stevenson's Hyde is a smaller man than Jekyll-I think that's what makes Mr. Hyde such a marvelous character; after the famous incident when he tramples the child, we meet the monster and he's a shirty little bully, whining and arrogant at the same time, casually cruel to the helpless but terrified of anyone who might give him a beating. Oddly, I don't think anyone has ever taken this route in playing the role-though there's something in the Chaplinesque reading of the part by Jean-Louis Barrault in Le Testament du Dr. Cordelier (review forthcoming in VW).

         It seems that Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-whether considered a dual role or one complicated part-is one of those plum jobs all actors want to tackle. Though a few horror stars (Karloff, Lee, Naschy) have made tentative stabs at it, the tendency has been to haul in people with "great actor" reputations-John Barrymore, March, Tracy, John Malkovich. Other interesting readings come from Paul Massie, Jack Palance, David Hemmings, Anthony Perkins and, of course, Jerry Lewis. Weakest turns: Kirk Douglas, Michael Caine.

BILL COOKE: The 1931 JEKYLL & HYDE is certainly among the best horror films of the golden age. Nevertheless, its most celebrated aspect-the dual performance by Fredric March-is only half a success. March's turn as Mr. Hyde is nothing short of genius; unlike Dracula and Frankenstein's monster of the same year, he truly frightens the viewer. The first time I saw the film, I felt a flood of dread when Hyde entered Ivy's apartment for the last time. Of course, a lot of credit must go to Miriam Hopkins and her amazing ability to realistically convey revulsion and terror. On the other hand, March's performance as Jekyll has not withstood the test of time. It is much too over-the-top and flamboyant--even for 1931.

         Mamoulian's film is filled with wildly experimental gestures. Film historians go on and on about Welles' elaborate POV shot that opens TOUCH OF EVIL (and to a lesser extent, John Carpenter's similar approach to HALLOWEEN), but rarely mention the same concept utilized so strikingly in PEEPING TOM and even earlier-much earlier-in Mamoulian's DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. Mamoulian's moving camera may be stiff and shaky, but the director's ground-breaking vision can't be denied. I particularly like the moment where the egomaniacal Jekyll stands to admire his own reflection in a mirror (actually a hole cut in the set wall with March playing his own reflection). This moment is "mirrored" in the first transformation scene when our very first view of Hyde is an almost identical POV shot.

         There are other gestures to admire: the split-screens that subtextually comment not only on the dual nature of Jekyll, but his double love life and the friction between the two social classes; the fire-and-brimstone hell imagery of Jekyll's expressionistic laboratory; and those wonderful lingering lap-dissolves. Jekyll may be discussing work with his friend Lanyon as they walk down a foggy London street, but Mamoulian uses the art of cinema-the translucent image of Ivy's dangling bare leg that refuses to dissolve completely away-to show us where his mind truly is.

         I went on a limb and showed this film to students in a Previsualization class. They were very impressed by the transformation scenes that showed the makeup evolving without any camera cuts, and wanted to know how it was accomplished.

TIM LUCAS: It's not common knowledge, but I should mention here-it's described in detail in my Mario Bava book-that Bava once copied this opening subjective shot idea of Karl Struss in the opening minutes of Mario Costa's I Pagliacci (amore tragico), a film not commonly seen in English-speaking countries. Bava's subjective take is actually longer and took no advantage of cutting trickery, as Struss' does. The shot apparently impressed his colleagues and, on every film Bava photographed thereafter, his name was followed by A.I.C. (Association of Italian Cinematographers, it would be in English). The Struss/Bava connection is also interesting because Bava also adopted Struss' then-Top Secret red-and-green lighting/makeup methods of onscreen transformation for Riccardo Freda's I vampiri in 1957. How the transformation was achieved was not revealed by Struss until a decade later, so Bava either worked it out by studying his footage-or perhaps the explanation was given to him by his father Eugenio, who may have been present when Struss first used this method to cure the lepers in BEN HUR - A TALE OF THE CHRIST, which was partly made in Rome in 1925.

         One of the great things about Stevenson's novel is how infinitely adaptable it seems to be. It provides not only the inspiration for the films that adapted it nominally, but also the germ of the personalities that occupy films like THE WOLF MAN, THE HAUNTED STRANGLER, PSYCHO and last month's RTD title, HULK. I admire the Mamoulian film greatly, though I agree that March's Jekyll performance is too florid to be enduring; his Hyde, which I find initially humorous in an unpleasant way... He looks and acts like one of those apoplectic, hopped-up drummers in blackface you see in old minstrel show footage.

RICHARD HARLAND SMITH: I think where March's performance trumps the others is the-what's the best way to put this...? The Third Worldishness of his interpretation of Hyde. I don't mean Third World as African or Black so much as I do Third World as racial Other... and for primarily white audiences of 1932, I suppose Italian or Spanish would have fit the bill just as well. The whole second act of the Mamoulian film, where Hyde meets Ivy at the music hall and brutalizes her ("I'm no beauty... but I've got money") and sets her up in the apartment reminds me of Paul Muni in SCARFACE, although Hyde's dependence on his drugs actually brings the Pacino remake to mind (I can imagine March spitting "Say good night to the baaaaad man" through his prosthetic Hyde teeth). The end of the March film even finds Hyde foolishly facing down a squadron of police, just as Tony Camonte did. SCARFACE was released only two months after the general release of DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE.

TIM LUCAS: March's Hyde also goes through this weird deterioration with each transformation, as if it's somehow sapping the life out of him, was later adopted (consciously or not) by Stephen King in his novel THE DEAD ZONE, which had John Smith age slightly from the stress of his physical contact-generated psychic visions.

BILL COOKE: I can think of an even earlier instance of this idea: the sorcerer Koura (Tom Baker) from THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD. Every time he uses black magic, he ages.

TIM LUCAS: There's an earlier example still: In Wally Wood's 1960s comic book T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS there was a FLASH rip-off character called Lightning who could move at tremendous speeds, but each time he used this power it shortened his own lifespan. It's an interesting concept: the gift with a mortal price tag-and, come to think of it, it goes even further back to Dorian Gray, doesn't it?

         But back to the Mamoulian film... I first saw it theatrically when it was reissued to theaters in the early 1980s. No other horror film from the 1930s had ever staged a scene that left me so thrilled as the one Bill mentions: the lingering shot of Ivy's rocking leg. Just as the extended subjective opening shot puts us inside Jekyll's skull for a period, transforming us so to speak, this slow-to-fade image helps us to feel the heat of Jekyll's sexual frustrations and to better understand why he wants to rush his wedding plans. His prospective father-in-law seems to understand that he's motivated more by lust than love, finding the suggestion brazen and unseemly, so it makes sense that, as the libido-liberated Hyde, he would seek the company of equally uninhibited women. Had the film been able to follow this premise to its logical conclusion, Jekyll would surely have raped his fiancée, as Hyde does with Jekyll's wife in Hammer's THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL.

         Speaking of the Hammer film, which is perhaps my favorite interpretation of the story, does anyone think we'll ever see a truly uncut version of it? I must confess that part of the reason I am drawn to it so much is that the censored lines-"Darn you, Jekyll! Darn you!" "I told you to go to Hades!" etc. -and its elliptic eroticism suggest that something much bolder was shot than could be shown to the public at that time. Someone needs to go back to Wolf Mankowitz's original script and refilm it with all the freedom now available to the screen.

         The Jack Palance version is another favorite. His Hyde is so ripely handsome that it becomes a different kind of ugliness, and one expects him to have cloven hooves when he removes his shoes. Dick Smith once told me that his makeup was inspired by an ancient artifact of a satyr that he found, and that it was hellish to apply because Palance's own face is as flat as a pancake -- so it all had to be built up on him.

         And scoff as you may, the Andy Milligan adaptation THE MAN WITH TWO HEADS has some interesting qualities of its own. As with Hammer's adaptation, one gets the sense it went too far-in all directions-and had to be censored in extremis.

         The frightening thrill of what we don't see-exactly why the camera's aversion from Hyde's last beating of Ivy makes it such an untoppable scene.

BILL COOKE: Stevenson's tale has inspired some pretty weird variations. In addition to THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL, which dared to flip-flop our pre-conceived notions and present Hyde as a devilishly handsome man, there were...

         DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE - an amusing commentary on feminism and the sexual revolution. The trailer never fails to delight the students of my Horror Films class.

         DR. BLACK, MR. HYDE - Another Seventies trend, the blaxploitation genre, is mixed with gothic tradition. The Watts neighborhoods of L.A. make an interesting change of pace from the slums of Victorian London. It might have been a brilliantly bizarre comment on racial disharmony had the filmmakers carried through totally on the concept and presented Hyde as a white man instead of a grey-pigmented creature out of THE OMEGA MAN. Of course, if that had been the case, Casey wouldn't have been able to play both roles.

         THE ADULT VERSION OF JEKYLL & HYDE - Actually this is very close in concept to DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE with less script and more soft-core sex.

RICHARD HARLAND SMITH: Well, while we're bandying about obscure versions of the Stevenson story, what about JEKYLL & HYDE: TOGETHER AGAIN and Cannon's DR. HECKYL AND MR. HYPE? (Laugh all you want, but we never again had Oliver Reed, Mel Welles, Jackie Coogan and Dan Sturkie together in the same movie!) I also admit a fondness for the 1974 cheapie TWISTED BRAIN (aka HORROR HIGH), with Pat Cardi as a nerdy high school student who cooks up a potion in Chem 101 to help him cope with his pimply antagonists. Death by paper cutter, death by track shoe and DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT's Rosie Holotik as the female lead.

KIM NEWMAN: I just looked at Walerian Borowczyk's Dr. Jekyll et les Femmes (aka DR. JEKYLL AND MRS. OSBOURNE)-in which Udo Kier plays Dr. Jekyll but someone else [FACELESS's Gerard Zalcberg] is Hyde. Though dubbed-quite sensitively, with literate Victorian melodrama dialogue and Patrick Magee doing his own voice-the film has an interesting take on Jekyll as a timid, addicted hypocrite trying to put into practice his windy theories about transcendental medicine. His Hyde is also among the screen's most brutal bastards but given to horribly honest ranting as he exposes the corruptions of Jekyll's houseguests, and even has a happy ending as Jekyll's fiancée takes the potion (actually a plunge into a bathtub) and transforms to be with him. Plus it has Howard Vernon as the sneering rationalist and fine use of Victorian bric-a-brac between all the rapes and murders.

TIM LUCAS: I'm grateful to Kim for mentioning the Borowczyk adaptation, which is another favorite that slipped my mind. It has such a sensual agent of transformation: the agent is processed in the form of bath salts, and the transformee must get into the tub, clothed or nude, and thrash around until the change is complete-like a rebirth. And the Hyde in that film, I think, comes closer to my own nightmare idea of Hyde than any other; I find the mere look of Zalcberg in that movie upsetting. I've never seen a completely uncut version of the film, and as with the other examples mentioned before, this excites my imagination about what a powerful experience that might be. The digitized Japanese version at least gives a shadowy impression of Hyde's curving, tusk-like phallus that makes him seem all the more demonic.

KIM NEWMAN: I have a DVD-R of Dr. Jekyll et les Femmes, fully uncut-with Dutch subs and a fuzzy, grainy look that really doesn't represent how beautiful the film was in theaters here; I saw the censored UK release on its trade show, but it was later given an arthouse re-release uncut. Some of the ellipses I assumed were censor cuts aren't (the film almost makes a point of losing some characters in all the depravity), but Hyde's Dirk Diggler prosthetic does have several big appearances. The casting of two actors is rarely done but seems to me a very sensible way of dealing with the parts as written-often, Hyde is depicted as someone who couldn't walk down the street unnoticed, but he is supposed to be a normal-looking man who somehow gives people an impression of deformity. One of the cleverest things Borowczyk does is cast another actor who looks a bit like Udo Kier, to establish the similarities between Jekyll and Hyde rather than the differences. But there isn't the problem of Jekyll and Hyde being so obviously the same actor that often crops up.

BILL COOKE: Bringing the discussion back to the 1931 version, one aspect that amazes me about March's performance is that I don't at any point feel it's the same actor playing both roles. That certainly can't be said of every other version I've seen featuring one actor in the part.

RICHARD HARLAND SMITH: People spend so much time evaluating the worth of a particular actor's work as Hyde when it seems that Jekyll is the trickier role.

KIM NEWMAN: I agree that Jekyll is the tougher role: among the actors who have done something with it are Jean-Louis Barrault, Jerry Lewis and John Malkovich. Oddly, Bernie Casey's doctor is more interesting than his monster; he's presented as an overachiever who has tried to deracinate himself (I think his character name is Dr. White) but whose Hyde side represents the sort of black stereotype gangster-pimp he has rejected. It's a shame the film isn't that interesting. I've not yet looked at the March/Tracy disc (I'll try to get it done tonight and the review written in the next few days), but my memory is that March's Jekyll works quite well-his incipient hysteria and eyeing of Hopkins' leg suggests why this man might want to be someone else though he appears to have everything. It's certainly a more complex reading than John Barrymore's-though Barrymore's Hyde is perhaps the screen's first great monster performance (as an aside on the VAMPIRE'S KISS commentary, Nicolas Cage pertinently comments that Max Schreck's Orlok seems to have been influenced by Barrymore's Hyde). Sadly, one of the weakest Jekylls was Boris Karloff in ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE, though he played the part closer to Stevenson's sketch than most: a distinguished, aging bachelor who can't admit to his own scoundrelly desires and so uses his secondary personality almost as a disguise so he can indulge his whims.

TIM LUCAS: I much prefer Karloff in THE HAUNTED STRANGLER, a variation-one could say-on the Stevenson concept. By the way, is Stevenson's book technically a novel? Bill Warren once took me to task for calling the Stevenson book a novella.

KIM NEWMAN: I think the book is technically a short novel rather than a novella, though there don't seem to be any hard and fast distinctions (except in the rules of several awards-bestowing bodies) between the categories. Incidentally, the true first edition title is STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, but that sounds so odd that a "THE" was added to all subsequent editions. The story goes that Stevenson dashed off a first draft inside a week, then burned it on the advice of his wife, who claimed he had neglected the moral implications of the tale, and started all over again. I wonder if that lost first draft contained more Milliganesque depravity-like Mr. Kurtz in Africa, Mr., Hyde is taken to be all manner of degenerate without any actual depiction of his habitual rottenness outside the odd trampling or murder-which was removed. That said, the book is surprisingly free of the heavy moralizing many film versions have added in... Wilde's PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, which you might think would be more sympathetic to Dorian's sins, is far more prissily judgmental.

TIM LUCAS: Having just watched the Spencer Tracy version for the first time since childhood, I found it very interesting-as all these films are, really-for what it says about the times in which it was made. The 1940s were a very conservative period and it's interesting that the film's sexuality is at once more decorous and buttoned-down, while the unyielding prospective father-in-law played by Donald Crisp is introduced as pious and inflexible, though the film also takes pains to present him as being not without humor or completely heartless. Even Jekyll's experiment, as he describes it at the dinner table to an entire dinner party, is characterized as a semi-holy pursuit in Jekyll's eyes, though the onlookers-being unable to understand his motives-think he's tampering in God's domain and promptly change the topic to something more wholesome-that new poem by the most wonderful writer (what's his name?)... Oscar Wilde!

         It's interesting to me that the film considers carnal misbehavior as "evil," a subject introduced when the Barton MacLane character disrupts the Sunday service. In a probable nod to wartime shellshocking, he is described as having suffered a blow to the head in a machine-shop explosion that has (in Jekyll's view) left the "good" side of his nature permanently unconscious. But the only evil MacLane admits to is having a good rowdy time once in awhile. And when Jekyll and fiancée Beatrix discuss his theories, he implicitly defends the passion they feel for one another because it will be sanctified by their vows of holy matrimony.

         I feel that Lana Turner gives the best performance in the picture, but I was surprised by her casting as the virginal fiancée when she was known at the time as such a hotcha sweater girl. Meanwhile, Ingrid Bergman (who as Ephram Katz's FILM ENCYCLOPEDIA points out was considered an almost saintly woman before leaving her dentist husband for Roberto Rossellini in 1949) plays the prostitute-so even here, in this unlikely vehicle, we see the filmmakers toying with the story structure, inverting it here and there. Bergman is every bit as good as Turner, and probably gives the better performance, but her instrument compromises her Ivy with a semi-Swedish-sounding Cockney.

         Tracy, as the nearly Americanized "Harry" Jekyll, does his best with what he has, but as with Bergman, I feel the role is essentially miscast; it's Tracy's instrument that gets in the way, as I can never quite buy that this rumpled, farm-fresh, hale-fellow-well-met is a scientist. And his most athletic scenes as Hyde (including some scenes of Hyde just walking down the street!) are spoiled by a most noticeable stand-in with a much svelter figure. If I consider the stand-in noticeable on a TV screen, how audiences must have howled in the 1940s when they saw this on the big screen! Even Hyde's fatal stumble down the staircase is doubled. Tom Weaver tells me that the stuntman in question was Gil Perkins, who also doubled for Bruce Cabot in KING KONG, Bela Lugosi in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN and played the title role of that great tragic story, TEENAGE MONSTER, among many other screen appearances.

         The transformation montages struck me as very artificial, and the arty way Bergman is used in them made me wonder if they influenced Hitchcock's concepts for the Daliesque dream sequences he intended to use in SPELLBOUND.

         There isn't an ounce of atmosphere in it, though, is there?

KIM NEWMAN: I also just saw the Tracy-Fleming J&H for the first time in decades; double-billing it with Jean Renoir's Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier. A DVD release of THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL would certainly fill out the filmography-and maybe a disc collecting the various non-Barrymore silent versions.

         Since I'm doing the VW reviews of the J&H disc [VW #106] and Le Testament... [review forthcoming], I won't go into much critical depth here-just make some notes.

         I've heard a story that the original casting for the MGM film was Turner as Ivy and Bergman as the fiancée, but Bergman persuaded her co-star that swapping roles would allow them both to show their range. The usual interpretation of this is that Bergman cannily landed the best role, but I was surprised on this viewing to note that Turner doesn't seem miscast and indeed manages a better English accent than, say, Tracy. Also, since MGM was the glamour studio, she and Bergman both get an equally loving treatment. I didn't have trouble with Bergman's Swedish cockney accent-it seems to me more believable than Miriam Hopkins's Yankee cockernee in the same role in that the character is given a surname (Petersen) that suggests she's an immigrant. I was reminded that Elizabeth Stride, one of Jack the Ripper's victims, was Swedish. The institution of the Hays Code doesn't seem to have prevented MGM from extreme imagery (like the fantasy of Turner and Bergman naked and reined to a coach like horses, being whipped by Tracy) though the script goes to elaborate lengths to insist that Ivy isn't a prostitute but a barmaid. This makes for a difference in tone: March's Hyde takes up with a cheerful whore and abuses her, while Tracy's seduces a respectable if jolly girl and degrades her. Actually, either reading works fine in establishing how rotten Hyde is.

         There's another odd Ripper connection in the film in the early dinner party scene as Jekyll's theory scandalizes the company, one of whom (Lawrence Grant as Dr. Courtland) is identified as Queen Victoria's physician-this was long before anyone tried to pin the Ripper killings on Dr Courtland's real-life counterpart William Gull. Between 1932 and 1941, the Victorian era had receded enough from memory to require the full period recreation, with an overwhelming chintziness of décor (there was a whole 1940s genre of period noir, including GASLIGHT, THE SUSPECT, PINK STRING AND SEALING WAX and the interestingly-titled IVY) and topical references to Halley's Comet, Queen Victoria's 1887 Golden Jubilee, Wilde and other nostalgia. For reference, the period of the film and that of its production are only as distant as in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL or PEARL HARBOR.

         I also like the use of the song "You Should See Me Dance the Polka" to replace the 1932 film's rewrite of "Champagne Charlie" as "Champagne Ivy"-it represents the sillier side of Victorian popular entertainment and therefore seems more pathetic when Hyde forces Ivy to sing it as she's breaking down. This obviously lodged in Alan Moore's memory: he uses the same song as Hyde's theme in LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. I think the use of the song to signify Hyde coming through as Jekyll strolls in the park plays better, more pertinent and less pretentious, than the "Ode to a Nightingale" bird-and-cat business in the Mamoulian film (though elsewhere Fleming's film is certainly more pretentious). Another difference is that the park in 1932 looks a lot like Hyde Park (though the name is never mentioned), whereas the one in the 1941 film is a more fantasized, misty-foggy imagined London location-by shifting Jekyll's residence from Soho to Harley Street, MGM also lose another resonance in that the nearest park to Harley Street is Regent's Park.

         I was surprised to look up the dates and see that the film was made before Ingrid Bergman's Oscar turn in GASLIGHT in that several Hyde-torments-Ivy scenes are virtually recreated in the later picture; which isn't to say that they weren't modeled on the 1940 British version of the Patrick Hamilton play. It's odd that Barton MacLane gets such prominent billing for so tiny a part, but his presence is an interesting add-on to the tale-the John Hannah version reprises the bit of business of having Jekyll originally intend to experiment on a madman only for the proposed human guinea pig to die, forcing him to use his drug on himself. The fashion in J&H movies recently has been to have the potion administered by hypodermic injection like heroin-but I think the concocting of a foaming brew in a chemical beaker to be drained at a single quaff is one of the story's great images and Fleming does it as well as anyone.

         The Renoir version is fascinating, if limited by its multi-camera, made-for-TV-in-1959 technique. For a start, it omits any credit for Stevenson and relocates the story in contemporary Paris with all the character names changed (it's the Strange Case of Dr Cordelier and Monsieur Opale). I assume that on its first transmission, those who hadn't read the story might well not have tumbled to the fact that Cordelier is Opale. It's the most faithful transposition of the novel to film-with Stevenson's exact structure followed to the letter, withholding the revelation that Cordelier is Opale until the last act. Though both the stiff, upright Cordelier and the cane-twirling, shifty, comical-vicious Opale are recognizably the great mime Jean-Louis Barrault they aren't recognizable as versions of each other-which may make this eccentric reading of the roles the definitive film translations of the Stevenson characters.

         Tim's right in stating that Tracy's limitation is that all his performance is in his face-that Dwight Frye-Jimmy Cagney-LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT teeth-baring-and he is otherwise a stocky lump on the screen. March's scampering monkey, becoming more animal-like as the film progresses, is a far more effective reading-though it taps into Victorian misconceptions about the theory of evolution-but Barrault does the best Hyde body-language. I especially like the moment as he sees a portly gent walking with crutches, considers a moment, walks beside him imitating his gait, then experimentally kicks both crutches out and grins with glee as the fellow falls in the street.

TIM LUCAS: That Tracy's performance is "all in the face" lends some gunpowder to the climactic scene in which Jekyll returns to Bea's weeping after breaking off with her, and she looks up from an outburst of gratitude into the leering face of Hyde. This whole episode played better for me here than in the March version, as I remember it, with a dolorous Rose Hobart swooning heavily onto her piano keys.

         The Tracy Hyde makeup I found interesting in its subtlety: a dark wig, a putty nose, a bolder brow with heavier brows-and in his first appearance, it looked very much like Tracy was wearing contact lenses that changed the color of his eyes... but after a couple of scenes, his eye color began to register as lighter onscreen. There were some close-ups of Tracy as Hyde that I thought would make great VIDEO WATCHDOG covers... Somehow, Basil Gogos never got around to interpreting Spencer Tracy for the cover of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND!

         The makeup was not so skillful in the case of Poole, whose hair turns extraordinarily gray during Bea's absence. That "gout" trip of her father's must have lasted years!