Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Plot synopsis:
In London, in 1887, prominent physician Henry Jekyll incurs the ire of his older colleagues because of his experiments and views on the possibility of separating the good and evil aspects of man's nature. Hanry is deeply in love with Beatrix Emery, the daughter of Sir Charles Emery, who likes Henry, but is concerned over his radical ideas and open display of affection for Bea. Henry throws himself into his work and has enough success experimenting with rabbits and guinea pigs to make him confident that the serun he has developed will work for humans. Hoping to try the serum out on Sam Higgins, a man who went mad after being in a gas works explosion, Henry rushes to the hospital but discovers that Higgins has just died. Henry then decides to take the serum himself and is briefly transformed, in both thought and countenance, into an evil alter ego. After taking an antidote to turn himself back to normal, Henry tells his butler, Poole, that strange voice he heard was a "Mr. Hyde".Just then, Sir Charles, accompanied by Bea, comes for a visit and announces that he will be taking Bea to the Continent to give Henry time to consider his position. Despite his loneliness during Bea's absence, Henry refrains from further experimentation until he gets a letter from Bea explaining that their trip is being extended because of Sir Charles' health. After taking another dose of the serum, Henry again turns into Hyde and goes to a music hall, where hees a baramid Ivy Peterson, an beautiful, sensual young woman whom he rescued from an attacker some weeks before. When summoned to Hyde's table, Ivy does not recognize him as Henry, but becomes frightened and screams, causing a brawl to erupt among the customers. Hyde later secretly asks the proprietor to fire Ivy and, despite her reluctance, insists on taking her home in a carriage, where he forces himself on her.Some time later, Bea is concerned that Henry has not written to her in weeks, but hides her worries from her father, who decides that she and Henry may marry, after all.Meanwhile, Ivy, who has been set up in a flat by Hyde, lives in constant fear of him. Her friend Marcia is shocked when she accidentally sees welts on Ivy's back, and when Hyde suddenly comes to the flat, he behaves particularly cruelly toward Ivy. Soon Henry learns that Bea has just returned and determines never to take the serum again. He then sends an anonymous gift of fifty pounds to Ivy and melts down the key to the street entrance of his laboratory, which "Hyde" has been using. That afternoon, Henry meets Bea at a museum and is overjoyed that Sir Charles now agrees to their imminent marriage. When Henry returns home, Ivy is waiting in his patient's room because Marcia and her boyfriend had recommended him. Ivy recognizes Henry as the man who was once kind to her, but momentarily has an uneasy feeling about him. When she shows him her scars and he realizes what Hyde has done to her, Henry is ashamed and soothingly promises her that she will never see Hyde again.That night, as Henry happily strolls across the park toward Bea's house, he suddenly turns into Hyde, without having taken the serum. He then goes to Ivy's flat and finds her celebrating her freedom from him. He repeats words that she had spoken to Henry, she becomes hysterical with fright and screams, but he strangles her to death before the neighbors can summon the police. He then rushes to the outher door of the laboratory but realizes that the key was destroyed. Poole will not admit him through the front door, so, in desperation Hyde goes to Dr. John Lanyon, Henry's good friend. After demanding the medications that work as an antidote, Hyde transforms back into Henry, to John's shock and horror. Henry reveals everything to John, then goes to Bea to break their engagement. She refueses to accept that they cannot be married, and he leaves, then returns as Hyde. She faints, but her initial scream has roused Sir Charles, whom Hyde then beats to death with his walking stick. Now desperate, Hyde pushes past Poole at Henry's front door and goes to the laboratory to take more antidote. As Sir Charles's body is examined by the police, John sees Henry's cane and realizes what must have happened. He then takes the police to Henry's house where they break down the door of the laboratory just after Hyde has taken the antidote and turned back into Henry. Henry says that Hyde was there but left, but in his anxiety under John accusations that he, indeed, is Sir Charles's murderer, Henry quickly transforms back into Hyde. While attempting to fight off the police and flee, he is mortally wounded, and as he dies, his demeanor changes back into Henry.

Tags: gothic, murder, violence, good versus evil, insanity, romantic, suspenseful, sadist

Review:
HYDE back in the '30s and always assumed that because of this his performance was superior to Spencer Tracy's.But having just seen the Tracy-Bergman-Turner version, my opinion has changed.
All of the performances are first rate except for an uncertain Lana Turner who has a pallid role and can do little with it.The only flaws are the film's length--it takes too long to tell the tale with its long-winded speeches--and the leisurely pace under Victor Fleming's direction makes the horror more muted than it need be..
Time has been good to this film and we can see the differences in interpretation.The Jekyll character that Tracy creates is a soft spoken guy, a lot like Father Flannagan.
Retrospectives now are kinder to him and his method of interpretation.Stepping into the female roles played by Rose Hobart and Miriam Hopkins in the March version are Lana Turner and Ingrid Bergman.
As befits the director who made "Wizard of Oz," "Red Dust," and "Gone with the Wind," Victor Fleming turns the story into a thinking man's horror film, and succeeds brilliantly.As to the cast, Spencer Tracy, like Frederick March, was effectively cast against type for the part, and delivers a good, understated performance.
He scared me to death when he vaulted over a railing and down a couple fo flights of stairs.This is more of a thriller than a horror movie and done long before it became fashionable to throw tons of money and big-name performers at horror classics in order to produce blockbusters that were once just silly.This supposedly cleaned-up version has Hyde asking Ingrid Bergman if she likes him because he's a little bit Jeckyll or Jeckyll because he's a little bit Hyde.So many people are fussing that this movie turns the prostitute into a bar maid.
It's not the version to watch if you are looking for excitement or horror, but as a more psychological approach it mostly works.Spencer Tracy plays the dual leading role, and does pretty well at creating two distinct personalities - the transformation uses only minimal special effects, and relies on Tracy to make the characters convincing.
Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Lana Turner in this boisterous, not-so-subtle Freudian-laden adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson's tale of the good and bad in all of us.
MGM did a stellar job of producing a high quality Horror film, putting together director Victor Fleming (of "Gone with the Wind" fame) and stars Lana Turner, Ingrid Bergman, and Spencer Tracy.
Like 2000's "The 6th Sense," 1941's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"  actually respected the horror material enough to demonstrate the heights to which a major studio could take the genre.The film takes us to darker places than we dare imagined existed at good ol' MGM, home of the happy-go-lucky family musical.
An adaptation of "Robert Louis Stevenson's classic "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" wasn't particularly necessary after the 1931 version, but just as the Fredric March version brought new elements over the 1920 silent classic with John Barrymore, there could have been something fresh to make out of the 'old' material.
During the transformation scene, a hallucination shows Jekyll whipping two horses whose faces are slowly transposed to the two women: Lana Turner who plays Beatrix, the eye-candy society lady and Ingrid Bergman who plays hell-for-soul prostitute Ivy Pearson.
We see love more than lust.And it doesn't get better with Hyde, the 1931 one had the face of a prehistoric man, incarnating our hidden impulses, Hyde here is evil all right but the very point of Hyde is to be more than a villain, here he looks like some bum escaped from an asylum, a rabid dog ready to bite out of despair, but not like some individual driven by something repressed for years.Maybe it's Lana Turner as Beatrix who failed to inspire Tracy (too voluptuous and sweet) but in the 1931 film, you could feel the sexual tension between Rose Hobart and March, and a similar tension between Jekyll and Ivy (played by Myriam Hopkins).I guess, the code is to be blamed, because while it does expose battle between the forces of good and evil in human soul, the line that Jekyll has to cross is never drawn in clear terms.
And she was so good that according to Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy wanted Bergman to play the dual role and I thought that was an interest twist on the story, how about the duplicity of women as well as men.
With modern special-effects, better sounds and cameras, it would have made this - and other horror films - scarier.Still, they did a decent job here in regard to Dr. Jekyll's transformation into Hyde, but the movie needs more suspense and horror, and a tighter script if it's going to be about two hours long.
He eschewed the make-up that March (and in the silent film, John Barrymore) used for the evil Hyde, and used a combination of facial contortions and lighting to change his appearance from the good doctor to his evil counterpart.One would like to say that it works.
Turner did nicely in the role, although Bergman's part was more interesting.The supporting parts are equally good, with Donald Crisp as the doomed father of Turner, Aubrey Smith as the righteous Bishop Manners (who is thrown momentarily by a noisy Barton MacLane in his congregation, jeering at the Bishop's homilies about Christian goodness), and MacLane himself in the brief sequence as the insane man with no compunction about doing evil.I like Tracy's version - on most points it is better acted than the 1931 version.
Robert Louis Stevenson's novella "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", first adapted as a play in the 1900s and filmed as a silent in 1920, is ironed out here for upper-crust audiences of 1941--this is no horror movie.
Perhaps Fredric March's Oscar-winning turn as Dr. Jekyll in the 1932 version helped to shape the vision and performances, as Spencer Tracy's portrayal of the mad scientist of gas-lit London is played strictly for prestige.
Spencer Tracy takes on the title roles in this version with Ingrid Bergman playing the tragic bar-maid (not prostitute) Ivy Peterson and both are great in their roles.
Dr Jekyll (Tracy) is a successful high society doctor who is engaged to Beatrix Emery (the very young and very beautiful Lana Turner) whose father Sir Charles (Donald Crisp) is skeptical of Jekyll's trying to prove that man's soul has two sides...one good and one evil and thus places doubts on his daughter's future happiness.
Spencer Tracy does quite well with the role, as do Lana Turner and Ingrid Bergman as his love interests Beatrix Emery and Ivy Peterson, respectively.
The makeup on Hyde is practically non-existent (it's hard to believe that people cannot easily recognize this Jekyll when he's Hyde!), and while Tracy's performance is better when he's Hyde and he pulls it off, he is no match for Fredric March's Oscar-winning turn as the sadistic madman.The scenes between Hyde and Ivy feel too long and stretched out.
The original novella is rightly recognized as a classic but this particular adaptation is considered inferior to the 1931 version starring Fredric March.In the movie, Dr. Henry Jekyll (Spencer Tracy) believes that man's evil side can be controlled through medicine so he conducts experiments to that end.
Yes, you could argue that the acting occasionally goes rolling-eyes over the top but the story is of course based on lurid Victorian melodrama, a penny dreadful tale if you will and if that meant that the acting was sometimes played as if it was aimed at the back of the hall, then I think it was justified.Spencer Tracy is the lucky man to have the young Lana Turner and Ingrid Bergman, both very early in their Hollywood careers, as his love / hate interest I guess you'd have to say and while the age gap between him and them is out-sized, I still felt he played well with each of them.
Interesting that Bergman chose the "floozy" bar-maid part (actually a prostitute in the previous 1931 film version) as opposed to Turner's society girl role and it's interesting to conjecture a role swap between them but I think it works fine as it is.The story itself owes more to subsequent adaptations than to the Louis Stevenson original novel, but the addition of the sexual edge to Hyde's character adds further tension to the drama.
Spencer Tracy's split-personality performance here is somewhat uneven, what I mean by that is that while he was fine as the good hearted Dr Jekyll, despite the impressive and scary transformation montage I for one found him too restrained as Mr Hyde.
It's one of the few moments in the film that I found deft: when Tracy comes back to Turner, he has changed from Jekyll to Hyde, which works well with the low camera shot at his feet.
The story is the same, as educated and civilized Henry Jekyll, obsessed with the dual nature of man, experiments with a serum to control the evil side in all of us, but instead it backfires, as it overtakes him instead, turning him into Mr. Hyde, who proceeds to cause havoc, terrorizing barmaid Ivy Peterson(played by Ingrid Bergman) who still finds herself transfixed by him, though he treats her horribly.
Lana Turner plays his fiancée, Donald Crisp her father.Ineffective version lacks the impact of the first; though made with more polish, this film otherwise fails to match the original in every way, and remains a needless and forgettable adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel..
There are two love interests - Dr Jekyll's fiancée, Beatrix (Lana Turner) and Mr Hyde's obsession, Ivy (Ingrid Bergman).
The performance of Ingrid Bergman is the highlight of this version of the Jekyll and Hyde story.
Spencer Tracy as the two title characters admirably insisted on eschewing the extreme makeup applied to Fredric March in the Mamoulian version, but there is still enough of it on his face to make it clear that there is more to Hyde than mere acting.
Although Victor Fleming's adaptation of the classic Gothic tale of Jekyll and Hyde features a well-cast Spencer Tracy, gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, an intriguing music score and visual effects, and certainly looks good, it also suffers from a great many flaws and the worst of these is a significant lack of energy.
Not even close.Spencer Tracy is widely considered one of the greatest actors who ever lived and looking at his performance in this retelling of the classic story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one can see that this podium is well-deserved.
How MAD and SICK he could look when playing the always-conniving Mr. Hyde and then all of a sudden revert back into the kindly, harmless-looking Dr. Jekyll.But while Spencer Tracy is brilliant, the rest of the movie, including Victor Fleming's directing, is not quite on par.
Also, the movie boasts many scenes of Tracy changing from Jekyll to Hyde and back and uses a clever use of fading, sort of like the Wolf man, and this is interesting the first time.
With an interval of approximately ten years each time, classic horror cinema brought forward no less than 3 essential versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde".
Tracy gets a workout with the duel roles of Jekyll and Hyde, probably knowing he could not out do Fredric March's Oscar-winning portrayal of the tormented doctor ten years earlier.Lana Turner is lovely as the doctor's love interest Beatrix Emery.
Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner are both good and well cast as the leading ladies and they still put some life into the movie its story and characters.I know I probably sound very negative about this movie but that's just because the '31, of which this movie is an obvious remake, is so much inferior.
Spencer Tracy, one of Hollywood's most over-rated actors, can't hold a candle to Fredric March's early academy award winning turn as the good Dr. Jekyll and the very bad Mr. Hyde.
Exactly 10 years after the release of Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (starring Frederich March), MGM studios decided to make a new adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel.
In order to make his adaptation the definitive version of the novel, Fleming had the most successful actors of the time at his hand: Lana Turner, Ingrid Bergman and finally, Spencer Tracy in the dual role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.Set in the 18th century, the film tales the story of Dr. Henry Jekyll (Tracy), a young and successful physician, who has developed a theory to separate the two sides of the human soul, the "good side" from the "evil side", in an attempt to free mankind of the constant temptation of the dark side.
However, the scientific community and even his friends think he is being too ambitious, so Jekyll decides to test his theories and experiments himself, awaking his inner dark side, the sadistic Mr. Hyde, a cruel and vile man, who is decided to cause pain in Jekyll's life focusing on the two women he loves the most: his fianceé Beatrix Emery (Lana Turner) and a woman he once helped, Ivy Peterson (Ingrid Bergman).While it was intended as new adaptation, writer John Lee Mahin based a lot of his screenplay in the 1931 version (in turn based on a play), making the film an exact remake of Rouben Mamoulian's film, albeit with certain differences.
Lana Turner is less fortunate, but she delivers an effective performance as Jekyll's beloved Beatrix.This film has been very harshly criticized, specially as it compares unfavorably with Mamoulian's previous version, but Fleming's film is not really as bad as that may make one believe.
Victor Fleming's take on the story is a classy period piece that will definitely be pleasant for fans of 40s films, specially for fans of Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman.
Not As Good As The March Version, But A Fine Film In It's Own Way. I watched the 1941 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with Spencer Tracy after viewing the 1932 Pre-Code Fredric March version first, so my opinion of this film was always going to be dented a little in comparison to the earlier work.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) ** 1/2 (out of 4) As I write this I've seen 56 and of the 78 movies that Spencer Tracy did in his career and I've always said that this here was his worst performance.
With such a large studio as MGM, a hot director like Victor Fleming and a cast that includes Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner and countless great character actors, there's really no excuse for the film turning out the way it did but when you've got an aggravated star refusing to wear make-up then you know you're in trouble.
Nominated for three Oscars, this film contains an all-star cast: Spencer Tracy (Boys Town, Captains Courageous), Ingrid Bergman (Murder on the Orient Express, Anastasia, Gaslight), the 20-year-old Lana Turner (Peyton Place), and Donald Crisp (How Green Was My Valley).Losing the subject upon which he was to test his formula, Dr. Henry Jekyll (Tracey) decides to try it upon himself.
I thought Tracy was superior as Jekyll, while March probably portrayed a more overtly evil Hyde - and I'm referring to his performance rather than merely the heavy makeup in the earlier version, which was mercifully absent in this one.
Ingrid Bergman was good as the barmaid Ivy, whom Hyde becomes obsessed with, but she didn't match up to Miriam Hopkins' portrayal of the character, and Lana Turner seemed to me to be far less central to the story as Jekyll's fiancé Beatrix than Rose Hobart was in that role, although I'd give a slight edge to Turner's acting over Hobart's rather dry performance.
Yes the 1941 Mr. Hyde is scary.*The versions: 1920 with Barrymore and 1931 March has Mr. Hyde looking more like a monster than the 1941 with Tracy for a comparison.* Over all this is a great film for a late night horror - worth watching if you enjoy classic horror.9.5/10.
And while both Lana Turner and Ingrid Bergman turn in very good performances, it is Spencer Tracy who really makes this film so successful.
Less a horror movie than a lavish excursion into an elegant costume drama MGM-style, this version of Robert Louis Stevenson's novella still manages to hold itself well due to the presences of the three leads, Spencer Tracy, and two rising female stars  Ingrid Bergman, and a very young Lana Turner.The story behind DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE is that Spencer Tracy wasn't one of the actors to be considered for the role, but because he knew that his looks were too masculine to be taken for a matinée idol, he tackled the dual role in his own way, but on viewing his own performance it seems he overacted whenever he was on screen as Mr. Hyde, and the makeup didn't exactly help.
MGM spared no expense for this lavish production of the oft-told Jekyll & Hyde story (it had been filmed with the excellent Frederic March in the lead role(s) in 1931) with Spencer Tracy (uncharacteristically) taking the honors of portraying the memorable scientist experimenting with the notion of separating good and evil so that man could be free from the ill effects of the latter.
Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1941): Starring Spencer Tracey, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Donald Crisp, Ian Hunter, C.
The story line in this film slightly varies the characters and situations, and that's probably the case with all of the movie adaptations, of which there seems to be quite a few.I don't know if Spencer Tracy would have been the best choice for Jekyll/Hyde, he doesn't seem to have the demeanor or countenance for a film bordering on horror.
Tracy scares as Hyde and, at the same time, can be lovely as Jekyll.Ingrid Bergman is gorgeous.