Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

Put yourself in her place! The dreaded night when her lover became a madman!

Dr. Henry Jekyll believes that there are two distinct sides to men: one that is good and one that is evil. He believes that by separating the two, man can become liberated. He succeeds in his experiments with chemicals to accomplish this and transforms into Hyde to commit horrendous crimes. When he discontinues use of the drug, it is already too late.

Date of release
1931-12-24
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (345)
Runtime
1h 36m
Genres
Horror, Science Fiction, Drama
Director
Rouben Mamoulian

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 3. Including: Academy Award for Best Actor

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a 1931 American pre-Code horror film, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March, who plays a possessed doctor who tests his new formula that can unleash people's inner demons. The film is an adaptation of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson tale of a man who takes a potion which turns him from a mild-mannered man of science into a homicidal maniac. The film was a critical and commercial success upon its release. Nominated for three Academy Awards, March won the award for Best Actor, sharing the award with Wallace Beery for The Champ.

Production

The film was made before the full enforcement of the Production Code, and it is remembered today for its strong sexual content, embodied mostly in the character of the bar singer Ivy Pierson, played by Miriam Hopkins. When it was re-released in 1936, the Code required 8 minutes to be removed before the film could be distributed to theaters. This footage was restored for the VHS and DVD releases.

The secret of the transformation scenes was not revealed for decades, when Mamoulian revealed it in The Celluloid Muse (1969), a volume of interviews with Hollywood directors. Make-up was applied in contrasting colors. A series of colored filters that matched the make-up was then used which enabled the make-up to be exposed gradually or made invisible. The change in color was not visible on the black-and-white film.

Wally Westmore's make-up for Hyde — simian and hairy with large canine teeth — greatly influenced the popular image of Hyde in media and comic books. In part, this look reflected the novella's implication of Hyde as embodying repressed evil, and hence being semi-evolved or simian in appearance.

John Barrymore was asked by Paramount to play the lead role in an attempt to recreate his role from the 1920 version of Jekyll and Hyde, but he was already under a new contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Paramount suggested Irving Pichel for the role, but the director felt that while he would deliver a fine performance, he was not handsome enough and suggested March.

When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer remade the film 10 years later with Spencer Tracy in the lead, the studio bought the negative and the rights to both the Mamoulian version and the earlier 1920 silent version, paying $125,000. Every print of the 1931 film that could be located was recalled and destroyed, and for decades, the film was believed lost.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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