Jekyll and Hyde 2:
American adaptations 1931-53
Today’s topics
The 1931 film:
•  point of view
•  dual women
•  psychoanalysis
•  film censorship
•  the coming of film sound
The 1941 remake
Cold War parody (1953)
Cartoons
opening sequence
psychoanalysis and dreaming
creativity and the unconscious
dream composition of J&H
God bless them [my Brownies]! who do one-half my
work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all likelihood,
do the rest for me as well when I am wide awake and
fondly suppose I do it for myself. For myself—what I call
it, my conscious ego, the man with the conscience and
the variable bank account—I am sometimes tempted to
suppose he is no story-teller at all...
Robert Louis Stevenson
the unconscious
•  from religious to psychological explanations of
dreams
•  paranormal psychology: ESP, telepathy,
clairvoyance, séances, etc.
•  the ‘discovery of the unconscious’:
Freud (biological and social) vs. Jung
(anthropological and mythological)
•  novella: initially changes through the drug;
later during sleep: ‘I had gone to bed Henry
Jekyll; I had awakened Edward Hyde.’
film and the unconscious
•  film cf. dream (the oneiric metaphor)
•  film and regression: Lacan’s imaginary
•  spectator identification: Lacan’s mirror stage
•  visual pleasure: the illusion of power and
omnipotent vision; actual passivity and
manipulation by cinematic techniques
e.g. Robert Eberwein, Film and the Dream Screen: A
Sleep and a Forgetting (1984)
psychoanalysis and repression
Jekyll, Hyde, and psychoanalysis
•  The two Carews: the Lord (1920) and the
General (1931); the tempter and the repressor
•  Freud: Hyde as manifestation of repressed id;
brought out by Carew (1920) and repressed by
superego/Carew/Emery (1931, 1941)
symbolism of repression
psychoanalysis and images
•  the sacred image (reveals what is hidden) vs. the
psychoanalytic image (hides the hidden/Hyde)
•  ‘a screen memory’: a memory used to
unconsciously suppress a related memory
•  Freud and dream interpretation (turning images
to words, the opposite of literary film
adaptation)
the casting of Ivy and Muriel, 1931
Miriam Hopkins as Ivy Rose Hobart as Muriel
1931 film: The link of
• scientific knowledge to
• self-knowledge to
• sexual knowledge
and of
• scientific curiosity to
• sexual curiosity
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1931
Muriel’s Garden
Sound Bites
•  ‘Now the unknown wears your face.’
•  ‘I’m not marrying to be sober; I’m marrying to
be drunk.’
•  ‘There are bounds beyond which one should not
go.’
•  ‘There are no bounds.’
•  ‘You sound positively indecent.’
•  ‘The doctor must hurt you a little to make you
well.’ Beating up Ivy as Hyde; treating/
compensating her financially as Jekyll.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1931
Ivy’s Bedroom:
Playing Doctor
Rouben Mamoulian, director
The beginning and end are still there but what’s
missing is her gradual undressing beneath the
blanket. You never see any part of her. From under
the blanket she keeps throwing away the stockings,
the garters, then the brassiere, the panties. The
scene builds and you don’t see Jekyll’s face, just his
feet pointed towards her. So you know he’s
looking. Well, they cut the whole middle out of the
scene. Today it would be totally innocent.
film censorship
•  links of Freudian superego to censorious
authority figures in the film
•  links of censorious figures in the film to film
censorship outside the film
•  intellectual, scientific, medical, military, legal,
class, and sexual repression in the films
Film censorship U.S.A.:
The Production Code, 1930
…forbade depicting ‘scenes of passion’ in all but
the most puerile terms, and it required that the
sanctity of the institution of marriage and the
home be upheld at all times (married couples,
however, were never to be shown sharing a bed).
Adultery, illicit sex, seduction, or rape could never
be more than suggested, and then only if they were
absolutely essential to the plot and were severely
punished at the end (a favorite means was death
from accident or disease). -->
Also prohibited were the use of profanity (a
term extended to include ‘vulgar’ expressions
like ‘cripes’, ‘guts’, and ‘nuts’) and racial
epithets; any implication of prostitution,
miscegenation, sexual aberration, or drug
addiction; nudity of all sorts; sexually
suggestive dances or costumes; ‘excessive and
lustful kissing’; and excessive drinking. It was
forbidden to ridicule or criticize any aspect of
any religious faith, to show cruelty to animals or
children, to represent surgical operations,
especially childbirth, ‘in fact or in silhouette’. --
>
It was forbidden to show the details of a crime,
or to display machine guns, submachine guns,
or other illegal weapons, or to discuss weapons
at all in dialogue scenes. It was further required
that law enforcement officers never be shown
dying at the hands of criminals, and that all
criminal activities within a given film were
shown to be punished.
David A. Cook, A Short History of Film
Discussion
Getting around censorship
Other symbols
Other symbols
film technology and/as symbol
film technology as symbol
film technology as symbol
the coming of sound
The sound film had liberated the cinema
from its thirty-year bondage to the printed
word. The task now was not to re-shackle
the medium to the spoken word of the
talkie.
David A. Cook, A Short History of Film
Although the post-Griffith silent film had declared
its independence from the stage, the early sound
film became the vassal of the theatre once again. …
The moving picture stopped moving and stopped
using pictures. Critics and directors sang a
requiem for film art and said amen.
Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies
Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art:
A Panoramic History of the Movies
Chapter sub-headings:
•  ‘The Tyranny of Sound’
•  ‘Liberating the Camera’
•  ‘Mastering the Sound Track’
•  ‘Exploring the New Medium’
The Screen Review, 1931
•  ‘What with the audibility of the screen and the
masterful photography, the new pictorial
transcription of Stevenson’s spine-chilling work,
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” emerges as a far more
tense and shuddering affair than it was as John
Barrymore’s silent picture…the producers are
not a little too zealous in their desire to spread
terror among audiences…’
•  ‘this blood curdling shadow venture’
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1931
The transformation
Rouben Mamoulian
In Stevenson’s original work...Dr. J is a florid man
of 55 who is irked by the restrictions of morality...
His aim is to separate the two parts of his nature
so he can have one hell of a good time and still
keep up his hypocritical virtuous facade. I thought
this interpretation was not interesting enough and
not pertinent enough to the spectators who were
going to see the film.
I thought that a more interesting dilemma
would be not that of good versus evil or moral
versus immoral but that of the spiritual versus
the animalistic which are present in all of
us. ...Therefore, as a prototype for Hyde, I didn’t
take a monster but our common ancestor, the
Neanderthal man... Not the evil but the animal.
Animals know no evil; they’re completely
innocent and much better morally than we are.
Animals never kill except to eat.
...The first Hyde is this young animal released
from the stifling manners and conventions of
the Victorian period. He is like a kitten, a pup,
full of vim and energy...One of my favorite
scenes is when Hyde leaves the house and walks
out in the rain...The average Englishman would
have opened an umbrella, but [not Hyde] ... he
luxuriates in it. …Throughout the film you see
Hyde getting worse, both physically and
psychologically. …It’s the human, not the
animal that corrupts him.
Karl Strauss, cinematographer
I never agreed with the business of making a
monkey out of Hyde... I said to Mamoulian,
‘Listen, you’re going to have the audience rolling in
the aisles’. He just shrugged his shoulders and he
did it.
Karl Strauss, cinematographer
I can see the makeup man now. He squatted in
back of Fredric wherever he was seated and while
we were photographing one part of the body, he
reached around, put the false teeth in and then
disappeared. Or when we did another part of the
body, he’d put the hair on the arms. The camera
would swing back quickly to Fredric’s face while he
inserted fingernails. Then back to the hands again
while a wig went on his head and so on.
Mamoulian
Here you have a totally unrealistic event. Well, pictorially I knew how to do it.
To capture the feeling of Jekyll’s vertigo. I had the camera revolve around on
its axis 360 degrees, the first time this was done on the screen. One
cameraman had to sit on the floor, and the man handling the focus--luckily a
very small guy who looked like a jockey--was tied with ropes on top of the
camera box, so that he could control it from the top. Because the camera
revolved, the whole set had to be lighted which was a real tough job. With such
a fantastic transformation what sound do you use? Do you put music in here?
God, it’s coming out of your ears, the scoring. I thought the only way to match
the event and create this incredible reality would be to concoct a mélange of
sounds that do not exist in nature, that a human ear cannot hear.
I said, ‘Let’s photograph light.’ We photographed the light
of a candle and directly transformed the light into sound.
Then I said, ‘Let’s record the beat of a gong, cut off the
impact, run it backwards.’ And we recorded other things
like that. But when we ran it, the whole thing lacked
rhythm..… they brought in all sorts of drums, a bass drum,
a snare drum, a Hawaiian drum, Indian tom-toms. But no
matter what we used, it always sounded like what it was--a
drum. Finally in exasperation I got this wonderful idea. I
ran up and down the stairway for a few minutes and then I
put a microphone to my heart and said, ‘Record it.’ And
that’s what is used as the basic rhythm in the scene--the
thumping noise which is like no drum on earth because it’s
the heart beat, my own heartbeat. So when I say my heart is
in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I mean it literally.
The 1941 MGM film
•  dir. Victor Fleming
•  perfs. Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana
Turner
•  MGM bought the rights to Mamoulian’s film and
put it in a vault for 30 years.
•  David Selznick remade the film and MGM
released it in 1941.
The casting of Ingrid Bergman and
Lana Turner
•  Ingrid Bergman: ‘Couldn't we switch, and let
Lana Turner play the fiancée, and I play the little
tart in the bar, the naughty little Ivy?’
Victor Fleming: ‘That’s impossible. How can you
with your looks? It’s not to be believed.’
•  Spencer Tracy wanted Katharine Hepburn to
play both roles.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1941
Ivy singing in the bar
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1941
Beatrix singing in church
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1941
The transformation (1)
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1941
The transformation (2)
Power plays/parodies
1947-53
1947
Post-war Jekyll and Hyde
What’s in a name? Jekyll and Hyde
Tom and Jerry
Jekyll/Hyde
Tom = tom cat
From a 2011 forum:
•  WW II: Tom: the British (Tommys = army
privates) trying to catch Jerry (Gerry the
German) who outwits him
•  What is the message?
•  Cold War: Big greedy Ameri-tom; underdog
Jerruski
•  When MGM moved to revive the series in the
early 1960’s, they used a Czech animation studio.
Slapstick: Making violence funny
•  Blend of violence and comedy
•  Tex Avery (animator for Tom and Jerry): ‘We
found that you can get a terrific laugh out of
someone just getting demolished as long as you
clean him up and bring him back to life again.’
•  Indestructible characters
•  cf. Gothic: zombies, vampires, etc.
Cold War Jekyll and Hyde (1953)
1931
Transatlantic, transGothic
•  Tubby and Slim, American cops trying to get
back on the UK police force after being
dismissed for bungling
•  Gothic Dr Jekyll (Boris Karloff) wanting to
marry young ward cf. incestuous version of the
1941 Carew, ‘I’ll not let you marry anyone but
me!’
•  Climbs walls like Dracula; has a lab assistant
named Batley
Who is the real monster?
•  Confusion between waxworks and fakes cf. cold
war: Who is the real enemy?
•  But also parody of 50s literary criticism:
authentic originals vs. fakes/adaptations
•  Mocks the search for originals in the wake of so
many Gothic sequels and adaptations
•  Boris Karloff, the original Frankenstein (1931)
plays Dr Jekyll 22 years later
Parody and doubling
•  Parody of doubling/duplication
Tubby (Costello): ‘Either Dr Jekyll is the
monster or the monster is Dr Jekyll.’
Slim (Abbott): ‘That’s the same thing, you idiot.’
Doubling and the actor as character
Hyde played by stunt man Eddie Parker.
doubling the monster
multiplying the monster
The law is the enemy…
! 
Post-war gender roles
to be continued…