Rouben Mamoulian | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / 1931

residual echoes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Percy Heath (screenplay, based on Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Rouben Mamoulian (director) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / 1931

 

The by-now quite elderly readers of The Pall Mall Gazette finally almost got the work they thought they were reading back in 1885, along with a nice girl that the good Doctor Henry Jekyll might have settled down with and married if he hadn’t gotten caught up in his heinous experimentations, in Rouben Mamoulian’s well-filmed remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1931.

      The Doctor (Fredric March) is just as curious about scientific exploration to which friend Dr. John Lanyon (Holmes Herbert) is similarly opposed, and is once again involved in the community through his lectures and his work at the charity ward which leads him to miss the dinner portion of his fiancée’s party just as he had in Robertson’s retelling of the Stevenson story. But this beautiful girl, now named Muriel Carew (Rose Hobart) is far less passive about her relationship to him, and he far more expressive of his love. And her over-protective father, now titled Brigadier-General Danvers Carew (Halliwell Hobbes), having none of the charm of the gay cad that Sir George had, offers only a befuddled arch conservative Victorian who stands in the way of the couple’s desired early wedding every chance he has. The handsome and debonair Doctor, no matter what his credentials be, is perceived as a young radical in his eyes, and even his desire to marry early, he tells him, “is yet another evidence of your eccentricity.” His attempt to argue the point is “positively indecent.”

     We already know from Jekyll’s public lecture early in the film that this radical thinker fully believes that “man is truly two beings,” the one we call the good one, who strives for nobility, while the other “seeks an expression of impulses which bind him to the animal nature of the earth.”

     “These two selves are chained to one another, causing repression,” he argues—scandalously from his friend’s Lanyon’s point of view. Jekyll even admits that it is the “the things one can’t do that tempt me most.”

      Having broken up his bachelor’s club on which he was so dependent in both the fiction and in the 1920 film, Mamoulian leaves him with only the conservative Lanyon—Utterson, the narrator of Stevenson’s tale is such a minor figure in this film that he is not even mentioned in the credits—as a supporting friend. March’s Jekyll is such a solitary figure that when—having begun his experiments in separating the two selves of his own being he becomes frightened about the possibilities of the direction in which Hyde might take him—he dares to once again bring up the necessity for an early marriage with Muriel (he begs of Muriel, “Marry me now. I can’t wait.”; making it clear that only in marriage can he get her into bed so that he might relieve his sexual desires), whereupon he again is denied that possibility. The film veers dangerously close to the shoals of the completely neutered 1941 revision by Victor Fleming in which Jekyll’s transformation into Edward Hyde is simply a product of his sexual frustration instead of a self-willed voyage into an unknown land of depraved desires.

      Fortunately, Jekyll has already come to the rescue of the bar-singer / prostitute (a word which even the 1931 cusp-of-code film could not utter) Ivy Pierson (Miriam Hopkins), who not only entices Jekyll but literally strips for him, tossing her garters over his turned away body as she gets naked for bed, and dangling her naked leg as a token of her desire that he return to her for sex as soon as possible. 

     In the 1936 re-release, Joseph Breen and his committee demanded the entire scene be cut—ironically reiterating the demands of Muriel’s father, that Jekyll remain celibate, permitting only his monster self the ability to have sex with a woman. The footage was lost for decades, forcing audiences apparently to fill in the gaps of the cinematic logic of how Jekyll has become so very nervous about his ability to wait out the time while Ivy and her father go traveling across the continent before their marriage and why Hyde shows up at Ivy’s nightclub. But in 1931, March’s Jekyll clearly took his cue from Ivy’s delightful invitation, visiting her as Hyde at the dive of a nightclub in which she nightly performs.

     The trouble is that being locked away in Wally Westmore’s excessive make-up, turning him into a hairy simian being with large and crooked canine teeth of Edward Hyde—very much the way Victorian taxonomists portrayed mad, syphilitic, and deviant human beings as well often as those who were non-Caucasians—it is hard to imagine any woman, even a prostitute willing to go to bed with Edward Hyde. While Robertson’s Hyde may have been unattractive, he still showed the remnants of being Barrymore’s Jekyll. Here he is simply a beast who, as those British housewives who read the daily exploits about child prostitution might have imagined, whips, beats, and runs his long nails across the back of his lover Ivy. At last we know what depravities Hyde committed, but alas we have lost all interest in them.

       And it is totally impossible to imagine any rational friendship or sexual camaraderie between Jekyll and Westmore’s version of Hyde. Except for his busy athletic monkey-like jumps and leaps, Hyde becomes uninteresting and totally unbelievable. Our and the film’s interest now focuses solely on the brooding and very lonely Jekyll, without any of his bachelor friends to even offer a shoulder to cry upon. What now becomes important is Jekyll’s attempt to go sober, to resist the temptations of the drug which makes him so very loathsome; and, after he transforms into Hyde even without the potion, his belief that there is still some possibility that he can correct his ways and overcome his addiction is severely diminished. If you have noticed that I am using the terms of alcoholism and a drug addiction I think it is quite appropriate to describe how this film superficially portrays the situation.

      Although they exist as one in the same body, we might argue that Jekyll and Hyde have now truly become two separate beings, the good man overcome with guilt for attacking Ivy, sending her a £50 note and when she mistakenly comes to Jekyll seeking protection from her tormentor Hyde. But of course, he can no longer control the “other,” Hyde soon after returning to Ivy’s room to murder her, and in so doing dooming Hyde and his creator Jekyll to death—and, I might add, in the process ending our interest in any further events other than a shiver of curiosity perhaps of how they will track him, either Jekyll or Hyde, down and kill him.

         Mamoulian is too intelligent of a director to let his film go at that, and postpones the inevitable by restoring the important scene from the original work where Jekyll, trapped in Hyde’s visage, sends for Lanyon to bring his chemicals so that he might return to his own being. But unlike the original, where the tension between Hyde and Lanyon exists as a frisson of sexual fear, here it is a matter simply of transactional violence as Lanyon pulls a gun on Hyde demanding that he take him to Jekyll, forcing the monster to take the drink in front of the skeptic of all things supernatural to watch him turn into his former friend; Lanyon is bound by his doctor’s oath of patient confidentiality cannot even attempt to tell others of what he has just witnessed.

     Realizing that Hyde has been now separated forever from his female tempter, Jekyll is still convinced that he can control the situation for himself by cutting of his ties with Muriel. In the process, however, he is once more transformed beyond his will into Hyde, beating and killing her father. We may even feel it is the old man’s well-deserved punishment for refusing youth its natural pleasures, but the act obviously means the end for Jekyll as well.

       As Elaine Showalter has observed in her essay I quoted in the first section of this collation, Jekyll does not even imagine killing himself, since as a heterosexual transgressor he suffers no real guilt for having transgressed against a woman or even having killed his would-be lover’s father for standing in their way.

       When Hyde again returns to overcome Jekyll, Lanyon and the police show up at his door, the police finally shooting him dead for his criminal acts. But even then Hyde is not allowed his reward of surviving his progenitor; the last scene of the film shows one final transformation, as the terrible face of Hyde disappears to be replaced by Jekyll’s handsome visage. As I noted above the even the remnants of a potentially queer figure must be wiped away from the film without further evidence, as if he never truly existed.

      Despite the director having utterly altered Stevenson’s dark tale of the sexual desire for the “other” that perhaps lies outside of normative heterosexual desire, and, by so doing, literalizing the work in such a way that it becomes basically a story about a thoroughly frustrated man’s lust for a woman outside of his social status not so very different, in fact, from a fiction such as Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy—despite this and numerous other failures, there are many excellent moments in Mamoulian’s film which take it a notch above Robertson’s earlier version.

      The entire first scene, in which we view Jekyll’s world only from his eyes as he narrowly envisions it—a society created to facilitate his efforts, a butler to remind him of his lecture and fetch his cape, a hackney drive to take him to the event, friends to great him and a friendly worker to whom he can toss his coat as he passes, along with a full room of desirous young students as well as carping skeptics attending to his every word—devastatingly reveals the central figure’s fatuousness, his utter faith in himself at the expense of anyone else. It is only when, as preparing to leave, he peers into a mirror to check on his appearance that we catch a glimpse of the being behind the camera’s movements, a handsome man who cannot truly see beyond the pleasant image that faces him in the glass. The rest of the movie will, in fact, take him into that mirror to explore who he truly is.

 

    Unfortunately, one might argue, what that voyage is almost as predictable as he imagines the world is in this first scene. And that represents the film’s failure, whereas had it followed Stevenson’s story more closely it might have taken its hero and us into far more uncomfortable and revelatory territory.

    Strangely, however, even Mamoulian’s heterosexual Jekyll cannot entirely escape the language of Stevenson’s guilty gay outlaw who has experienced the pleasures of another world through the subterfuge of another man, Edward Hyde.

    As Jekyll begins to perceive what Hyde has done to him, his verbal responses are not those that one might expect of a heterosexual brute who’s had a few S&M sessions in bed with a pretty young woman, not even those of a relapsing alcoholic of drug addict desperate to just one more time to inject the substance which has allowed him to go places which he has never before experienced. Or let me just suggest that if his comments do share something in common with those beings, they more closely align, in my way of thinking, with the denials of a man having briefly left the sexual closet for an adventure that he is convinced he will never again need to explore, but is absolutely unable to without denying his own existence.

     I have chosen just a few of the words uttered by March supposedly coming from the mouth of his character Jekyll, who at times also speaks for Hyde.

     Early on it appears as a kind of bravado, a sense of release as when, having first swallowed the serum, he shouts “I’m free. Free at last,” and addressing the absent Lanyon, “If you could see me now!”

     He comments to others, “There are no bounds.” “We may control our actions, but not our impulses.”

     While waiting in total frustration after hearing of Muriel’s voyage, even Poole suggests he get out an enjoy himself, hinting at a world perhaps even outside of the music hall where he finds Ivy to which the plot confines him. Poole’s comment: “There are many amusements for a gentleman like you,” hint at a forbidden sexual territory that does only include loose women but perhaps other young men like himself.

      Once he has begun his outside adventures, he speaks to Muriel in a manner that suggests something far deeper than a man having nightly intercourse with a prostitute: “I’ve walked a strange and terrible road.” To several people he reports that he is not quite himself, that he has been “ill.”

      As the reliable Stevenson figure Poole comments about his master’s disappearance, “It’s very queer that he’s not here.”

    After he has revealed his true nature to Lanyon, the stunned observer comments: “You are in the power of that monster you have created.” It is no longer a man speaking of his nighttime “other self” indulging in cruel sexual relationships or even what a murderer might say when he responds: “I’ll fight, I’ll conquer it.”

      Predictably Lanyon answers: “It has conquered you.”

    But again, Jekyll answers neither like a heterosexual philanderer nor a man caught up in a web of murderous behavior: “No. No. No. I’ll fight it. I know it will not happen again. Help me.”

    And once more, Lanyon refuses to be involved: “This is preposterous and I’ll have nothing to do with it.”

     Jekyll’s words might indeed be those of an alcoholic or a drug attic, but we know that is not the case. His Hydean self may drink and smoke opium, but that’s not his problem. In fact, in this film we do not observe Hyde drinking or partaking of drugs. To me, his desperate utterances sound more like a gay man attempting to convince himself that he can give up his sexual desires, and that even for having participated in such behavior he is no longer worthy of Muriel’s love and must give her up as well.

      His final words are to Muriel are those of a fundamentalist who is convinced that his sexual actions have gotten the best of him but may still be possibly controlled, like one of the believers in “conversion therapy,” a solution we now realize is not only unnecessary but offers the patient little but demonizing. And even at this point Jekyll knows he cannot return to life without carrying Hyde with him. When Muriel offers to help him, he answers: I’m beyond help, you hear. I’m in Hell. I have no soul. I’m beyond the pale. I’m one of the living dead.”

       Today, could we possibly imagine someone like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, or Jeffrey Epstein—all heterosexual monsters—speaking words like these, especially if they lived in the utterly patriarchally controlled world of the Victorian era where girls of 12, 13, and 14 years of age might easily be purchased for sex?

        In Jekyll’s words, instead, I hear the echoes of a closeted gay man attempting to redeem a life which he knows deep within will no longer permit his existence. The movie offers the only solution that the heterosexual society of the day could offer these men: destroy the self you have hidden, Edward Hyde, and put on the face that we can remember you by now that you are dead. In short, hide the portrait of your real self in a hidden closet like Dorian Gray’s portrait.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2021