Review #221: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

This review was originally written in October 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #75: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

I'm really conflicted about this movie. On one hand, a lot of work clearly went into making it, and I'm sure the intent was to make the viewer uncomfortable, but looking at it today the actions taken by the main character in this film are VERY problematic.

Dr. Jekyll (pronounced "Jee-kal", wtf) is a well-respected doctor who has a radical hypothesis about the human soul: every person has two halves to their soul, a good half and a bad half. He seeks to use pharmaceuticals to allow a person to split these two halves apart (to what end I really don't understand, this part kind of lost me the more I thought about it) and so he develops a concoction that temporarily turns himself into an evil alter-ego, which he names Mr. Hyde. His main motivation behind doing this seems to be that he's really, really horny (I'm not kidding) and his fiancee's father wants him to wait a few months before they can get married, so when he becomes Mr. Hyde, he uses this opportunity to physically, mentally, and sexually abuse a nearby prostitute, eventually killing her when she tries to get help. After her death Jekyll feels incredible remorse and tries to break up with his fiancee, but Mr. Hyde takes over and causes havok, drawing attention from the town guards and getting Jekyll/Hyde killed. That's the movie.

First, I'll talk about the good. Fredric March knocks this role out of the park, putting on an outstanding performance as both halves of the character (to the point where I literally thought they had two different actors). Hyde is absolutely terrifying when he's on screen (for better and for worse, more on that later) and part of that comes from the makeup (which was inspired by the face of a neanderthal). The film uses several ingenious camera tricks and motifs to convey what the director wanted- several sequences of the movie are shot in first-person from Jekyll's perspective (even having him look directly into a mirror, done by having the actor stand in front of a window and mirror the cameraman's movements), and the transformation scenes employ a trick where we see Jekyll's skin changing color and pattern in real-time (done by having special colored makeup that looked uniform on black and white film while in normal lighting, but as the lighting was changed certain parts became more prominent than others). There was absolutely a good deal of skill and craftsmanship that went into making this film, and that can't be ignored.

However... the middle section of this film is VERY uncomfortable to watch. There's like a twenty-minute period where we watch a man threaten and browbeat a woman into sleeping with him (behavior which surely befits the villain that Hyde is suppose to be, but isn't fun for the viewer by any stretch of the imagination) and then we watch how terrified she is of this abusive partner who has forced himself into every facet of her life. It's just not enjoyable, and it really made me want to turn off the movie halfway through and call it a night. Again, I'm sure that's the point, but when they spend so much time showing this textbook example of domestic abuse, I can't help but feel like in some way the movie (or by extension, me, the viewer) is enabling something like this to happen. (And I highly doubt the film industry of 1931 was intending to start a version of the #MeToo movement, so I'm inclined to assume that this was at least partly meant to seem acceptable by the day's standards, if a bit rude.) Part of me feels the movie should be commended for this strong portrayal of evil, but at the end of the day, I just didn't enjoy any second of it, and to me, enjoyment is kind of the point.

Also, like I said earlier I just don't really understand what Jekyll's goal was in the first place. He was talking all about separating the good half from the bad half of a man, but is that really what happened? It seemed like all he actually did was give himself a disguise and an excuse to act out his base desires that he normally suppresses, and you don't need a mysterious concoction for that. It sounded like his goal was to remove the evil half so a man could be purely good, but nothing resembling that ever happens. Maybe that was his goal but he accidentally did the opposite (temporarily removed the good half so he could be purely evil) and then grew addicted to the rush of being evil without conscience, but I feel like I'm reading into something that isn't there. I also don't understand why sometimes he turned into Mr. Hyde without drinking the concoction. It seemed to do just whatever made the plot continue, and maybe this is better explained in Robert Louis Stevenson's novella, but in the film it felt like a plot contrivance.

Anyway, this feels like I should consider it a good movie but I just can't bring myself to give it a high rating when I spent so much of the movie wishing I were doing anything else.

Overall Rating: 4/10 Broken Canes

Casting Coincidence: Fredric March played Dr. Jekyll in this film, and ten years later Spencer Tracy played the same character in MGM's version of the film. In 1960, March and Spencer went on to play the two leads in Inherit the Wind!