Sat 14 Nov 2009
A Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1932).
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , Reviews1 Comment
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart, Holmes Herbert. Based on the story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Director: Rouben Mamoulian.
Continuing my pre-Halloween October odyssey in Monster Movie watching, then there was the 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, with Fredric March, a film that established the definitive “Hyde look” with simian features and form incongruously decked out in evening clothes and top hat.
Mamoulian and March, however, somehow make the tortured Jekyll a more interesting figure than the simplistic Hyde, who looks like somebody shaved an ape.
One other thing: according to IMDB, this story has been filmed more than 20 times, and not once to my knowledge, as Stevenson wrote it: a mystery gradually unfolding to a horrific conclusion.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Shaved ape was the look they wanted for Hyde by all accounts though Stevenson only describes him as small and somehow uncomfortable to look at. March won an Oscar for this one, which doesn’t happen often in horror films.
I prefer this to the overblown Spencer Tracy/Victor Fleming version, although there is nothing in it quite like the Freudian fantasy scene of Tracy’s Hyde driving a chariot pulled by Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner wearing nothing but wind blown scarves.
My own favorite version of the tale was the Dan Curtis Jack Palance version made for television, but as you say no one has ever exactly done the novel, which was famously described as the only mystery ever written where the solution was more horrible than the crime.
Legend has it the first version of the tale, based on a fevered dream of the authors, was so disturbing Mrs. Stevenson convinced her husband to burn it and rewrite the tale. If this is the tame version we can only wonder at what the original was like.