THAT DREADED NIGHT WHEN HER LOVER BECAME A MADMAN!
I’d like to invite you take a walk with me through the gaslight.
“Perhaps you prefer a gentleman. One of those fine-mannered and honorable gentlemen. Those panting hypocrites who like your legs but talk about your garters.”
Though some prefer Spencer Tracy turn in the 1941 version of the tale, for my money the best adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde was Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932 tour de force featuring Fredric March as gentle Dr. Henry Jekyll, whose experiments release his id, the completely unrestrained Hyde. Sophisticated camera & narrative technique by Mamoulian, who turned this classic horror tale into a testbed for groundbreaking technical resourcefulness and imagination. March won a well-deserved Oscar; Miriam Hopkins, as the prostitute, Ivy, is nearly as good. Her moments with Jekyll are sweet; with Hyde, terrifying. The denouement of the Ivy/Hyde relationship is profoundly upsetting today; I cannot begin to imagine how it affected audiences in 1932. Pleasing support by elegant Rose Hobart, as Jekyll’s patient and eventually tragic fianceé.
“Oh, God. This I did not intend. I saw a light but did not know where it was headed. I have tresspassed on your domain. I've gone further than man should go. Forgive me. Help me!”
NOTE: When MGM produced its not-bad version, with Spencer Tracy, in 1941, it made all prints of Paramount’s Fredric March version “disappear,” as it did not wish unfavorable comparisons. It was not until many years later that the March version was once again available for viewing.
