horrorfest 2013 evening two: dr jekyll and mr hyde

(1931. dir: Rouben Mamoulian) The really marvellous part about pre-code films is fully embodied here: that wonderful, irreplicable ambience of heavy sensuality combined with unfeigned innocence which only seems possible in hindsight. A film like this literally could not be made today, even one set in an appropriate historical era. Jekyll's proud and entirely proper chastity (a word which bears today a certain taint of sexual taboo, alongside jealousy and frigidity) would be untranslatable onto celluloid today without an accompanying and apologetic hint of psychological disorder from childhood trauma, or at least a clearly-stated bias on the part of the filmmakers against sexual repression.

Fredric March offers up a forthright and bold performance, giving us a Jekyll who, with Vulcanian logic, sets about solving the bedevilment of his illicit lust for Miriam Hopkins through purely scientific means, by using chemicals to separate out his basal, troglodyte instincts and leave the superior man intact to live a good, faithful, and fruitful life. But, as Captain Kirk will find out in "the Enemy Within" (apologies: I've been immersed in Star Trek lately, and, like the Mahabarata, it's amazing how some episode or other applies to nearly everything you run across in life), the one cannot live without the other, and the shunned shadow is where our strongest energies abide.

Technically, the film is stunning. There is no trace of March in his Hyde, none at all. He is completely obliterated through a combination of genius maquillage and bravura physical acting, for which March deservedly took home his first Oscar. (The slow and convincing transformations were achieved through use of color schemes and filters which would not show up on the black and white film.) Karl Struss' camera tricks are sometimes strikingly modern and effective, sometimes intrusive and clumsy, but the shots of the laboratory are lovely, done with care and agility.

And let's have a word about the unjustly forgotten, or anyway under-remembered, Miriam Hopkins. An actress with lithe facility in both comic and dramatic roles, her work with Ernst Lubitsch alone enshrines her amongst the greats: both Design for Living and Trouble in Paradise can claim places among the best films ever made, and she stands with easy grace at the center of both. As the prostitute whose crush on Jekyll instigates all the trouble, she owns the flesh appeal of a Harlowe and is fully, tragically human.