Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Victor Fleming, 1941)

Filmmaker Victor Fleming had a landmark 1939, with sole directorial credit on both The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. The truth is a bit more complicated, and both films had troubled productions with multiple directors. Here's the abbreviated, but not that abbreviated, history: Wizard of Oz producer Mervyn LeRoy fired original director Richard Thorpe a few weeks into filming after deciding that Thorpe was moving too quickly and carelessly and getting lousy performances. LeRoy replaced Thorpe with George Cukor, a much stronger filmmaker, but as soon as Cukor got things rolling on Oz, the studio moved him to Gone with the Wind, which he'd already agreed to direct and which was now finally ready to shoot after many delays. Fleming replaced Cukor but followed Cukor's blueprint. Cukor clashed creatively with producer/studio executive David O. Selznick and star Clark Gable (though in Gable's case, it was also homophobic discomfort with Cukor's homosexuality) on the Gone with the Wind set, and despite intense lobbying from pro-Cukor stars Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland, Selznick fired Cukor and replaced him with, you guessed it, Victor Fleming. Fleming had finished the color sequences in Oz, but most of the black-and-white Kansas-set scenes still needed to be shot, so another great filmmaker, King Vidor, took over and directed what would become the first third of Oz. Fleming, handling the bulk of Oz and Wind back-to-back, crashed out from exhaustion, and yet another director, Sam Wood, took over for three weeks of filming before Fleming came back to take Gone with the Wind over the finish line. It's incredible that both films were even semi-competent with all the behind-the-scenes musical chairs, but the fact that they became enduring cultural landmarks is miraculous (though I'm a much bigger fan of The Wizard of Oz; I find Gone with the Wind historically fascinating but morally noxious and aesthetically overstuffed).

Fleming wisely took 1940 off, but he eventually followed up his 1939 double whammy with his second Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation (after 1934's Treasure Island), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Though I prefer John S. Robertson's 1920 silent version with John Barrymore and, especially, Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 pre-Code version with Fredric March (one of the great American movies, in my opinion) (an additional shoutout to Hammer's excellent 1971 gender-bending take, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde), Fleming's approach to the material yields some impressive results and maintains the overwhelming darkness of its predecessors, despite having to water a few things down due to Hays Code restrictions. These early Jekyll and Hyde movies are far bleaker and more intense and overtly sexual than many contemporaneous horror films and appear to be speaking to a primarily adult audience.

Spencer Tracy in the title role(s) may seem on paper like more of a commercial choice than an artistic one. That's not a slam on Tracy as an actor, who was mostly excellent, but he specialized in light, sophisticated comedies and as righteous crusaders of justice in heavy dramas, and it's hard to picture him going full Hyde. He pulls it off in a major way, though, and his Jekyll/Hyde is strengthened by the moral ambiguities flavoring his portrayal. The point of his research is trying to separate the good and evil that share space inside all of us. His Jekyll is not a cartoonishly aw-shucks embodiment of goodness contrasting with the monstrous Hyde but is instead a flawed but mostly decent human being whose serious weaknesses become the bedrock of Hyde's personality.

Tracy's Jekyll is a successful young doctor on the rise who cares about the people in his life and is deeply in love with his fiancée Beatrix (Lana Turner), but he's also a bit obsessive about his crackpot research and loves to shock the high society normies with a bit of the ol' proto-Ricky Gervais "Oh, am I offending you? How cheeky and daring of me!" He also has some trouble hiding his lust, and his PDA moments with Beatrix scandalize Beatrix's father Sir Charles (Donald Crisp) despite his protestations often beginning with the phrase, "I'm more broadminded than most, but... ." When Jekyll and his best friend and colleague Dr. John Lanyon (Ian Hunter, not the Mott the Hoople singer) rescue a woman, Ivy (Ingrid Bergman), from an attacker, Jekyll basks in the glow of her flirtations, insists he can handle escorting the woman to her apartment alone, lets her hit on him for an extended period of time before letting on that he's a doctor and needs to return home, and reciprocates her kiss before his disapproving friend returns and convinces him to skedaddle.

Ingrid Bergman's performance has been criticized because of her not particularly convincing attempt at a Cockney accent, which often slips back into her natural Swedish cadence, but I think her overall performance is so good, the less than stellar accent is pretty easy to overlook, especially since she mostly abandons it after her initial few scenes. She does so much with her facial expressions and her emotional delivery, and the camera loves her, so I would argue that her performance here is underrated. 

Lana Turner is also great in what could have been a boring, thankless, stand-by-your-man performance. Her character has a less interesting lifestyle than Ivy's, cinematically speaking, but Turner gives Beatrix real life. She also does so much with her facial expressions, and, again, the camera loves her. She injects a stock character with real personality and flavor, and her and Tracy have good chemistry. She's a good girl devoted to her father, her future husband, the community, and the church, but she also gets to display some reciprocal lust for her fiancé and delivers solid emotional pain when Jekyll starts acting in ways she can't understand. These are not milquetoast sexless characters driven by plot machinations. They convince you they're living it.

Fleming also spices things up with some nutty dream/fantasy seizure-visions Jekyll experiences as he's turning into Hyde that somehow got past the Hays Code enforcers. They may have been a little too strange for the imagination-deficient censors to know what they were looking at, including Jekyll floating above Ivy and Beatrix while the women are in cleavage-baring tops, Jekyll atop a carriage whipping two horses who turn into the bare-shouldered women, and a giant champagne bottle with Ivy's head as the cork, which pops off as champagne spews into the air. Code standards forced Fleming to change Ivy's profession from sex worker to barmaid, and there's a lot less skin than in the Mamoulian version, but these expressionist fantasy sequences somehow squeaked through.

Fleming's two most famous movies as director are producer-driven for-hire projects that had a strong visual design already in place when Fleming came aboard, but Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shows off what he was capable of when he had more control. (I love The Wizard of Oz, but it's not particularly representative of Fleming's overall body of work.) Fleming is great with atmosphere and mood, and he excels at emotionally intimate scenes between two or three characters. You really feel Hyde's mistreatment of Ivy here (often to an uncomfortable degree) and the spark between Jekyll and Beatrix, and that intimate scale reflects my two lust-filled pre-Code Fleming favorites, Bombshell and Red Dust, the first a screwball comedy and the latter a brutal, offbeat melodrama, both starring Jean Harlow. Cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg (Fritz Lang's Fury and Cukor's The Women and Gaslight) does wonders with light and darkness, and is equally strong with interior and exterior scenes and closeups and long shots, and filmmaker and cinematographer complement each other's work here.

A few of the transformation scenes haven't aged well (though they still look better than the vast majority of visually dead, untactile, revoltingly empty 21st century digital effects) and the movie runs a bit long, but this is otherwise a strong interpretation of the Jekyll and Hyde story. Sure, there are several others I'd put ahead of it, especially the 1931 version, but that's just a testament to how many good and great Jekyll and Hyde movies we have. This one is a worthy effort and still somewhat undervalued.