Victor Fleming | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / 1941

the end of the rainbow

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Lee Mahin, Percy Heath, and Samuel Hoffenstein (based on the fiction by Robert Louis Stevenson), Victor Fleming (director) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / 1941

 

Victor Fleming’s 1941 rendition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde finally succeeded when none of the others had in wiping away nearly all references or even residual hints of Stevenson’s carefully wrought queer story. No mentions here of even “odd,” “queer,” “gay,” the latter used just once squarely put into the traditional context, or even “strange.” Just to make sure that no one would even suspect Stevenson’s tale had queer goings on, they bought the rights to Mamoulian’s version, destroying most of the prints of the 1931 edition and disallowing the projection of any of those prints which might have survived. For years no one could know just how truly bad Fleming’s film was in comparison with Mamoulian’s far more interesting attempt.

     Spencer Tracy as Jekyll is completely in love, so their kisses announce, with Lana Turner’s Bea Emery, and even her conventional thinking father, Sir Charles Emery, seems just a little more flexible than Brigadier-General Danvers Carew, although in this case his refusal to permit Harry to marry Bea immediately is quite clearly responsible for his son-in-law’s experimentation with his “evil” chemical transformation. Old men should never stand in the way of young love seems to be the moral of this story. Certainly Poole (Peter Godfrey), Henry Jekyll’s always likeable butler, is more free-willing than Emery, suggesting that his master might try out the musical show at the Variety which is very comical and “very daring sir if you follow my meaning.” 

      Jekyll does indeed follow his meaning, hurrying immediately back into his laboratory to finish up his experiments so that he can become the bad guy Hyde and try out that daring show. But then who can blame him for preferring Ingrid Bergman as Ivy Pearson (spelled differently from the previous film) over Lana Turner. If I were a heterosexual you can believe I’d choose Bergman any day; besides her acting his always better, and the film’s creators gave her even something fun to sing instead of the church hymn Lana is forced to warble.

      But it’s slow going until the plot gets that far with very little to show for it. And once the script writers and Fleming have clearly established that this is utterly for heterosexuals only, the film even allows itself to play with a few early pop art pin- up images, revealing, as Harry begins to finish his potion that will turn him into Hyde, the image of Bergman’s heaving breast atop a  flowing mass of volcanic lava (foretelling Roberto Rossellini’s 1950 dropping of her into the landscape of Stromboli) and permitting the sexually impatient Jekyll of few licks of her spirit as he pops her out of champagne bottle. Frankly, these are among my favorite frames of this otherwise utterly boring movie.

 

     From then on Percy Heath’s old script kicks in, but without any of Jekyll’s insistence that he might be able to be cured when he discovers that a wild scratch of a romp in bed with Ivy is far more diverting than proper dinner party with Lana’s golden curls, her pappa, and fustian- pronouncing friends. In Fleming’s telling Jekyll, even though he knows he’s done wrong, doesn’t even feel he needs to admit to having been involved in Ivy and old man Emery’s murder. As he keeps repeating to reassure himself just before he transforms back into that horrible Hyde again, “I’m Henry Jekyll, I’m Henry Jekyll,” insisting to himself and the others that as a member in good standing in the heteronormative patriarchal club of Victorian society that he should be saved from the silver bullet of the gun held by that fuddy-duddy moral idiot John Lanyon (Ian Hunter). After all wasn’t it Sir Charles’s gout that kept him from fucking his girlfriend proper?; and who cares about a girl who goes about singing “you can see my bustle swaying when I turn my body round”?

 

     Fleming and his crew evidently felt so good about their cleaning up Stevenson’s little allegory that they could even spare a couple of jokes as Hyde first picks up Ivy to take her away to her as his S&M assistant. The first, when he jokes to her he’s on his way to the end of the rainbow is, of course, a reference to Fleming himself, who directed most of The Wizard of Oz before leaving it early to take over the direction of Gone with Wind, when, legend has it, Clark Gable complained about working with “that faggot” George Cukor.

     Little could Fleming have guessed nor anyone else involved with that plug what “following the rainbow” or even being a “friend of Dorothy’s” would mean by the end of the century. Without even their knowing it as a queer reference, accordingly, it nonetheless find its way into their otherwise sacrosanct text. And just for a good laugh presumably, a few seconds later they knowingly threw another such gay reference, as Hyde tells Ivy, “A botanist knows a lovely a flower when he sees one,” she replying, “O, are you one of them?” Any member of the good ‘ole boy’s club would have known that a “botanist,” someone who spent their time with flowers, meant that you were queer. But since he’s just picked up Ivy, even if she be an English Ivy which is a flowering plant, he’s clearly not a pansy. Obviously he wants a woman quick before the night is out.

      And Tracy always played along with the desires of the studios. Despite his regular enjoyment—if Hollywood sex wizard “Scotty” Bowers is to be believed—of a good male blow job, he grumblingly permitted studio publicists to hook him up in the public’s imagination with that badly complexioned lesbian Katherine Hepburn. It was enough to make a man drink, which apparently he did most nights when he wasn’t on the set. Perhaps in this case he should have drunk while acting; it certainly might have resulted in more fun, perhaps even some real terror.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).