Detail obsessed as always, Selznick urged Fleming and the cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg to study how the cinematographer Gregg Toland had photographed Bergman on Intermezzo: “Toland did such wonderful things with her that you might as well all get the benefit of seeing the picture.” But Fleming understood without anyone’s help that Bergman could be the image of carnal purity. He and Ruttenberg did so well with Hyde’s monstrosity and her imperiled animal innocence that Cukor and Ruttenberg duplicated the gaslit effects of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for Bergman and Charles Boyer in the cat-and-mouse games of Gaslight (1944). “He got things out of me that were different from anything I had done before,” she said of Fleming to a reporter for the Times of London. “What more can an actor want?”
Mahin’s script sets a bold context for the story. It begins in church, with a minister (C. Aubrey Smith) praising Queen Victoria for her righteous example. The pews include Beatrix and Jekyll and his prospective father-in-law, Sir Charles Emery (Donald Crisp)—and also a heckler (Barton MacLane) who scoffs at Victoria for taking all the fun out of life. When other parishioners hustle the heckler out, Jekyll follows and learns that he’d been a model citizen and devoted husband before an explosion rocked his mind. Jekyll decides he’s the perfect test case for separating good and evil in the soul of man. Unfortunately, the poor bloke dies before the doctor can put him to the test; Jekyll has been too busy juggling the demands of scientific research, free clinical work, an upscale practice, and a high-society catch like Beatrix. He reckons the only way to advance his research is to become his own guinea pig.
All the major Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde films—Barrymore’s, the March-Mamoulian production, and Fleming’s—illustrate the Achilles’ id of Jekyll’s psyche in exactly the same way: the doctor encounters a demimondaine who makes him feel temptation without acting on it. In both Fleming’s and Mamoulian’s versions, Jekyll and his friend Dr. Lanyon rescue this lower-depths flower, Ivy, from an assault, then take her to her modest flat, where Jekyll briefly checks her aches and pains. Ivy doesn’t know that Jekyll is a doctor and takes his examination as a proposition. In Mamoulian’s version, the scene becomes a striptease, staged to the director’s written specifications. Hopkins’s Ivy, a saucy wench, makes a frontal assault on Jekyll. As soon as he checks out her bruised thigh, she grabs his hand and presses it down on her flesh. She asks Jekyll to turn his back as she gets ready for bed, then slithers off her stockings and undoes her dress and the rest of her underthings. When Jekyll turns his head, he sees what we do—her naked profile between the sheets. She pulls him to her for a kiss, her bare back to the camera, just as Lanyon enters and interrupts the scene. She keeps flashing her comely leg, rocking it back and forth on the side of the bed, as she asks Jekyll with a croon to come back “so-o-o-n.” After he exits, the words seem to whistle through his head.
Ten years later, the Production Code put any similar streak of nudity out of the question. Fleming gives Ivy’s come-on to Jekyll the even hotter glow of love at first sight. As we find out later, this Ivy isn’t an entertainer like Hopkins’s “Champagne Ivy,” just a barmaid at the cabaret known as the “Palace of Frivolities” who amuses the customers when she sings along with the stage show. After Jekyll and Lanyon (Ian Hunter) chase off her attacker, Bergman’s Ivy lifts her head to see Dr. Jekyll standing there appraising her, with a half smile. She beams at the sight of this calm gent. She’s an embattled innocent with a sexual readiness and an instinctive, premoral integrity that make her difficult to resist. Every instant in the sequence becomes erotic from the moment Jekyll lifts Ivy to keep her off her twisted ankle. He carries her to her upstairs room and drops her on the bed and turns up the gaslight. He asks, “You want me to have a look at you, don’t you?” Ivy reacts, “I don’t know. Yer looking, ain’t you?”
In Mamoulian’s version, March reacts lightly and gaily to Hopkins’s unrestrained lust. In Fleming’s, Bergman’s ardor deeply affects Tracy. Who wouldn’t succumb to Bergman’s Ivy? Everything about her is erotic and touching, from her voluptuous form to her Scandinavian-cum-Cockney vocalizing. Saville said he coached Bergman “most mornings to perfect her accent—we decided on the very posh upper-Tooting style—‘Ouw, yereversonice, aren’t yer.’ ” Bergman’s Ivy is delighted that Jekyll asks to look at her side. “Yer aren’t half the fast one, aren’t you?” she asks, taking down her blouse. At that point, Jekyll could be another literary doctor, Tomas, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), telling his lovers, “Take off your clothes.” He makes clear to Ivy that he and Lanyon are physicians. When she can’t pronounce or comprehend the word “physicians” and is startled to learn he’s a doctor, Tracy becomes more distant and comical in his demeanor. But she continues to come on to him. He’s the one who’s over his head when Bergman bares her ankle and leg for his inspection.
In a bit of business that Fleming and Mahin pick up from the earlier version but imbue with more sensuousness and gravity, Jekyll warns Ivy that her garter is too tight; it could impair the circulation. She offers it as partial payment for his care, then kisses him. She’s mortified that he might think of her as a whore and not as a woman in love. “You’re a girl with a heart just where it ought to be,” he reassures her, “maybe a little too generous, that’s all.” He tells her that if she knew him, she’d know he didn’t want to be there; they were just being “foolish.” Ivy retaliates for the insult: she declares she knows that their kiss “wasn’t all in fun”—and Tracy’s sudden sober expression suggests Jekyll’s agreement. Under Fleming’s direction, these two robust performers manage liquid emotional shifts.
The composer Franz Waxman, in his potent, subtle score, uses the period song “See Me Dance the Polka” even before we hear it in Ivy’s saloon. This merry strain grows ambiguous as it follows Jekyll and Ivy through their bedroom scene and then comes up again unexpectedly as Lanyon scolds Jekyll for loose behavior. (“Polka” had been a giant hit for the songwriter George Grossmith, co-author of The Diary of a Nobody and a sometime Savoyard; Martin Savage played him in Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy.)
The backdrop to the last temptation of Dr. Jekyll is the refusal of Sir Charles Emery to let his daughter Beatrix wed him soon. In Mahin’s script, Sir Charles doubts Jekyll as much for his public displays of affection as for his misplaced professional priorities and his heretical view that he can isolate man’s good and evil sides. As he locks horns with Sir Charles, Tracy’s solid, confident Jekyll represents adult independence from meaningless proprieties, not youthful ardor like March’s Jekyll, who urges his fiancée to push up their wedding date in their very first scene, and not innocence like John Barrymore’s. (In the Barrymore silent, Jekyll’s prospective father-in-law, a habitué of Victorian London’s sexual underworld, thinks Jekyll isn’t experienced enough.) Tracy’s Jekyll moves from accompanying Beatrix at church to mock-nibbling her knuckles in the carriage outside. Rather than a matinee idol jumping out of his skin, he’s a well-rounded grown man with a forward-looking sense of what it means to be well-adjusted. It makes more sense that when his cork pops—in one hallucination, literally—the effects are catastrophic.
Although Bergman said Tracy reassured her at the start of filming (“You know, I’m scared of my part, too, but then aren’t we all? I guess it’s the name of the game”), she thought he “wasn’t really very happy” during the picture. She surmised, “He didn’t like doing these two characterizations; the sane doctor and the monster Hyde. He wanted to play himself, his own personality, which of course was the warm and marvelous personality that made him a great movie star.”
But there were practical reasons for his grouchiness. An illness kept him out of the studio for most of January, delaying the tailor Eddie Schmidt from properly adjusting the costumes, designed to contrast the grotesque dandy Hyde with the understated gentleman and shirt-sleeved researcher Jekyll. And Tracy wanted to undergo the transformation not just without tricks or makeup but even without a mysterious potion. He wished to portray Jekyll as a
good doctor and Mr. Hyde as a result of drugs and alcohol, carrying on depraved acts of hedonism and/or cruelty in a disreputable neighborhood or town.
In Tracy’s vision, Beatrix would still have been the virginal fiancée, but Ivy would have been Hyde’s dream prostitute, aching for debauchery. Hepburn said he wanted her to play both parts. According to Man-nix, “Mr. Mayer thought that if Spence flipped out when he drank booze and took dope, it would be too close to home for a lot of people, and besides, it would make a ‘message picture,’ which L.B. hated.”
But Tracy’s determination to steer Hyde away from out-and-out monstrosity persisted, to the ultimate good of the picture. “I even suggested that Hyde never be pictured, except maybe the back of his ear or something like that, but it never worked out,” he said. The relatively spare makeup adjustments that Fleming approved flare Tracy’s nostrils and sharpen his nose, give him devilish laugh-lines around unblinking eyes, and make his mouth more simian and his mane and eyebrows more ominously hirsute.
In the March-Mamoulian picture, the photographer, Karl Struss, revived a trick from the leper scenes in the silent Ben-Hur to depict what Vladimir Nabokov called Jekyll’s “hydizations”: Struss rendered jolting facial transformations in real time by shooting colored makeup with rotating colored filters. But MGM couldn’t duplicate the results and didn’t want to order special filters from the Corning Glass Company. And Fleming and his editor, Harold Kress, hoped to avoid imitating the previous picture, anyway. Kress observed that when Mamoulian and Struss shot the star’s entire face and body, “Fredric March dropped his hands down, they cut to the hand, hair started growing, cutaway, cutaway, all cutaways.” (In the pivotal scene, Mamoulian does, indeed, swing Struss’s camera down from Jekyll’s face, then jump-cut and move to one hand, then go back up and down and jump-cut again before descending to the other hand.)
Kress dismissed the notion that cartoonists should animate the change from Jekyll to Hyde over shots of Tracy’s face, “the way they did the old flip cards.” (Kress and Saville mentioned seeking advice from Walt Disney, but a studio memo specifies tests made by “Mr. Sprunk of the cartoon department.”) Ultimately, Kress sought to direct the metamorphoses himself. He told Tracy, “I’ve got an idea. The motion picture [camera] will be locked off, steel riveted to the stage floor so nobody can move it. Next to you we’ll have one of those old-fashioned cameras with the big plate behind it and an artist who will sketch you. I’m only going to shoot your face, it will be so effective if we can see your face changing. There will be a long makeup table, all the pieces for your changes will be laid out and you’ll be in a barber chair with wheels.” Fleming gave his blessing. But Saville, Kress recalled, said, “Young man, you’re just the film editor on this picture, this is none of your goddamn business and I’m going to have you fired!” The assistant director, Tom Andre, called Kress at home and said, “We hear you’re not on the lot, stick by the phone.”
Saville soon learned that Fleming was fiercely protective of his crew. (And before the film reached the theaters, Saville would learn how adamant Fleming was about the details of his own contract.) The director canceled the day’s shooting, though all three leads were on the set. Then he and Tracy marched into Mayer’s office and backed up Kress. The editor remembered Mayer ordering Saville’s return to England, but the producer did stay on the picture; Mayer simply barred him from the editing room and the stage where Kress and Tracy plied their magic.
Kress found Tracy “a dream to work with.” An artist sketched his position to keep him in proper alignment, Kress operated a camera by remote control, and the star went through forty-six makeup changes. Kress talked Tracy through it like a silent director: “Okay Spence, get ready, we’re rolling now, just a little grimace, a little more, you fight it, fight it, cut.” In the end, Kress was able “to make a continuous series of dissolves,” always staying on Tracy’s face. (Mamoulian had used quicker, clumsier dissolves to show March’s Hyde reverting to Jekyll.)
Franz Waxman’s score made a signal contribution, too. Like Bernard Herrmann or John Williams at their best, Waxman imbued tension music with operatic sweep. (Christopher Palmer later crafted a symphonic suite out of his score; Waxman was working on a full-scale opera version for the New York City Opera at the time of his death.) During one of Jekyll’s hydizations, Waxman utilizes a string of half notes that Williams duplicated, consciously or not, as the shark’s theme in Jaws. In the climactic scene, when Jekyll involuntarily changes back into Hyde and Lanyon shoots him dead, Tracy wanted to speak desperately through his dying action. Kress said, “We’ll do it just like a music number with playback. We’ll make the sound track first.” Tracy mouthed the words to a playback disc. For his skill and ingenuity, Kress earned an Oscar nomination; so did Ruttenberg and Waxman.
Despite his beef with Fleming over Kress and a more intense one over final credit, Saville memorialized the director with fond respect. “Victor was not only well informed, he was, above all, never hurried into making a decision that required deep thought. Although of a completely different temperament—I’ve made a few slapdash decisions in my time—I enjoyed working with him because I learned much from his profound knowledge.” As an example of Fleming’s willingness to spend “long hours to make up his mind as to how many angels can stand on the head of a pin,” Saville recalled a conference with the production designer Cedric Gibbons about the opening, set in a “fashionableWest End church.” Fleming sat silently as Saville and Gibbons discussed the scope of the scene, until Saville asked, “What’s worrying you, Victor?” “You know,” Fleming replied, “there is nothing so deadly as a hundred extras seated in pews listening to a sermon.” After another period of silence, the director asked, “Couldn’t we photograph architecture? A lot better than people.” Saville remembered, with satisfaction, “the congregation represented by four heads framed at the bottom of the picture of a beautiful Gothic window.”
There are dozens of extras, but the architecture does dominate the scene expressively—befitting the high-toned aspirations of the preacher. Fleming taught Saville that “impressions so often make a scene more believable than spelling everything out in detail.” All they needed for “a perfectly convincing chase,” for example, was “Tracy, with a cape flying” across a wet-down studio floor along with “a set of Palladian-type stairs, an arched bridge, a few set pieces of masonry, and a string of electric light bulbs shining through the misty night.” (The athletic Hyde was the stuntman Gil Perkins.) Even negative reviewers singled out this sequence.
The most flamboyant sequences are the montages depicting impulses darting through Jekyll’s mind as he morphs into Hyde. Saville did take credit for these audacious surges of symbolism. “Robert Louis Stevenson, in his short story, talked about Plato’s ‘Twin Horses of the Soul.’ I had read and reread Stevenson looking for something I could clue into the film. So, I materialized Plato’s thought of the Twin Horses. We made a montage of fantasy with Tracy as a charioteer with lash, driving in harness Bergman and Turner, with windswept manes. It was a good piece of symbolism—Life magazine reproduced, in its two center pages, each frame of the montage.” The scholar Christopher Falzon has noted the sole parallel in Stevenson’s text: Hyde emerges from a horse-drawn cab as “these two base passions [fear and hatred] raged within him like a tempest.” Falzon rightly sees that Saville and Fleming transform the “Platonic image of reason in control of the other parts of the soul” into a “metaphor for the unleashing of Jekyll’s desires for sexual possession and domination.”
Of course, the Production Code forced the filmmakers to “delete all scenes where Tracy is shown lashing the two girls”—Jekyll couldn’t be shown with a whip in his hands. But the suggestion of the whip remains. Not so another montage, referred to in Life, depicting the myth of Leda and the swan (Zeus, as a swan, raping Sparta’s queen Leda, presumably Turner) and apparently containing suggestive images of a stallion and a girl (presumably Bergman). Joseph Breen requested that Fleming exci
se two shots of Bergman’s “unduly exposed breasts” as well as her closing line to Jekyll, “Next time you look at a girl, make up your mind.” For the Palace of Frivolities, Breen ordered Fleming, “Delete the crotch shot of the dancing girls.”
The hallucination of the stallion would have echoed Freud’s comparison of the ego and the id to a rider and his steed. But what’s wonderful about the movie is that it contrasts animal urges and rational conduct without any clinical categorizing. The expansive performances and surreal episodes explode formula. Fleming’s depiction of Jekyll’s second hallucination pictures Bergman and Turner in champagne bottles against volcanic backdrops; the uncorking of her bottle seems to decapitate Bergman, but she appears healthy and sexy in the very next shot.
In the March version, there’s something too post-Freudian about the way Hyde proclaims himself “free,” just as there’s something too earthbound about his declaration to his absent, moralizing enemies, “If you could see me now, what would you think, eh?” He goes through a gavotte of confusion over his new state before giving in to giddiness. Fleming’s emphasis is on Jekyll’s immediate gaiety at his transformation. Tracy doesn’t make himself jump when he shows up as Hyde, the way March does; his Hyde is delighted—ready to spend a night on the town.
And that interpretation fits Stevenson’s perfectly: “There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.” Jekyll was astonished to be “conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This too was myself. It seemed natural and human.” In Fleming’s movie, Tracy asks, after his first hydization, “Can this be evil?”—then, in relief or disbelief, laughs.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 47