He's androgynously pretty in the Jekyll* part, the better to sell his essential harmlessness. Is he harmless, though? The doctor is a good man, doing pro bono work for indigent patients, passionately representing the world of science. His idealism has an obsessive edge, though, and in some ways may be misguided.
He's also a ticking time bomb of horniness. His fiancee's father won't let her marry him for another eight months and it's killing him. He also sets his eyes on Ivy, a music hall performer who might be augmenting her income by turning tricks.
And all this counts. The Jekyll-into-Hyde transformation consists of the exact same moves lampooned by Bugs Bunny when he took the potion. Initially, the goblinish Hyde seems endearing in the way he takes pleasure in little things like rain on his tongue. This doesn't last, and the horror of him is equal parts violent and sexual. As Ivy finds, he's an abusive and controlling lover no matter how much money he throws around. From what I've heard this movie could make an intriguing double feature with the recent feminist remake of The Invisible Man.
Early talkies don't have the best reputation as works of visual storytelling. Silents had gotten very fanciful, but the first synchronous sound cameras were heavy and hard to move. So while if you had the budget you could give the audience nice costumes and sets, the presentation would look static. But this movie is absolutely breathtaking in terms of both cinematography and editing. Whether Mamoulian was making advances or just making do, he and his crew did something right.
* Pronounced "gee-kill" throughout, which I found rather jarring.
2 comments:
This clip was a real find in showing how an effect was achieved long long before similar viewpoints became almost a norm in more recent films - so much so, in fact, that it was one I hadn't considered as a difficulty in cinematography.
It's definitely a movie we've seen and enjoyed albeit not recently. It's odd too to recall it came out around the same time as two other classics of horror - Dracula and Frankenstein. I wonder what that was about?
Your perspective on Fredric March's performance of the characters of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde is very much to the point of being exceedingly gentle on the one hand to ultimately aggressive and brutal on the other. The follies of putting off that marriage for no good reason, eh? The psychological impact is still resonant even after all these years.
While I don't know anything about the remake of The Invisible Man Mamoulian's Jeckyll and Hyde will continue to be remembered as something extraordinary.
Yes, again, it's a very visually inventive movie. And I don't just mean for its time. While black & white is a hard sell and has been hopelessly unfashionable my whole life, the images and cuts in this film are still arresting today.
I suppose early in the Depression people were eager to see their anxieties projected in a more concrete way, one that they could have a little fun with. The other two movies were from Universal, which was well-known for horror. This one was from Paramount, which wasn't really.
He has to accept the marriage being put off because of his would-be future father-in-law, but he's obviously not happy about it. His fiancee will certainly be upset, but at least unlike Hyde's mistress she's still alive.
The Invisible Man was one of the last movies to have any kind of box office success before the cinemas were forced to close. I haven't seen it, but it's interesting to me that the source produced something apparently in tune with the times.
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