How The 1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Buried An Oscar-Winning Horror Performance For 30 Years
MGM set itself up for success by buying — and burying — a classic horror.
In 1941, powerhouse movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was set to produce a lavish new film version of Robert Louis Stevenson's iconic 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. MGM was known for its star-studded extravaganzas and this horror film was going to be no different. Producer Victor Saville was coming off of critical and commercial hits like The Mortal Storm (1940) and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) and the film's director, Victor Fleming, had just directed two massive Oscar-winning hits: The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939), the latter of which netted him the Academy Award for Best Director.
The duo had put together a cast of Oscar-winners and up-and-comers. The titular Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde was to be played by Spencer Tracy, who years earlier had made history as the first male actor to win consecutive Oscars, winning for his performances in Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938). Although originally cast as Jekyll's sweetheart Beatrix, Ingrid Bergman begged Fleming to let her play the grittier role of music hall barmaid Ivy Peterson, switching roles with Lana Turner. With a cast like this, MGM was set for a massive hit.
However, this wasn't going to be a new adaptation of the source material. A decade earlier, over at Paramount, director Rouben Mamoulian helmed a 1931 version that not only adapted Stevenson's novella, but also found inspiration in Thomas Russell Sullivan's 1887 stage adaptation of the work. Before production began on Fleming's version of the story, MGM bought the print negative and the rights for both Mamoulian's film and an earlier 1920 silent version starring John Barrymore from Paramount for $125,000. MGM located and recalled every print of the 1931 film and locked them away. This allowed MGM's version to both legally reference Sullivan's stage production, but also eliminated any competition from their remake, as it meant no movie theater could rebook Mamoulian's film once Fleming's hit the market.
Because of this legal red tape, Mamoulian's film stayed out of circulation for both screenings and study until prints resurfaced in the mid-1960s, rendering the film effectively lost for almost thirty years. This meant that younger audiences and scholars alike were unable to see for themselves Fredric March's chilling performance as Jekyll and Hyde, for which March became the first performer in a horror film to win an Oscar. A standout sequence in which March seamlessly transitions between the two roles in a single take with no cuts was a genius combination of March’s acting, special lighting devised by cinematographer Karl Struss (who had won an Oscar a few years earlier for his work on F. W. Murnau’s 1927 silent masterpiece Sunrise), and innovative make-up developed by Wally Westmore. The trio kept just exactly how they achieved what Variety called "a triumph of realized nightmare" a secret for decades. Their process would go on to inspire modern horror makeup master Rick Baker.
While MGM's tactic did successfully suppress Mamoulian's pre-code masterpiece, which may have helped Fleming's film at the box office, it backfired when it came to its critical reception. A contemporary review in The New York Times praised Bergman as "a shining talent can sometimes lift itself above an impossibly written role"; it repeatedly called the film hokum and "a mulligan stew hidden under an expensive souffle," while also writing of Tracy that his performance "is not so much evil incarnate as it is the ham rampant." In his 1994 book Robert Louis Stevenson: Life, Literature, and the Silver Screen, film historian Scott Allen Nollen called Fleming's film "a pretentious, overlong, and dramatically bankrupt imitation."
Spencer Tracy as the scientist Dr. Jekyll.
According to author Larry Swindell in his 1969 biography of Spencer Tracy, the actor, who was under contract at MGM at the time, had tried to get out of the assignment before the production even started, feeling he was not right for the role. However, the studio appealed to his vanity, saying they wouldn't make the film without him, even going so far as to suggest if March could win an Oscar in this role, surely a two-time winner like Tracy could as well.
Swindell writes that March, despite the deluge of negativity hurled at Tracy's performance, thought "Spence did a fine job, as he always does. His Jekyll and Hyde weren't anything like mine, but why should they be? After all, we're two different actors, aren't we?" Allegedly, March telephoned Tracy to tell him as much, to which Tracy replied, "Why Fred, you son of a b*tch, I've just done you the biggest professional favor you'll ever have!"
Although a clip of March’s Oscar-winning performance in the 1931 film was featured during the televised broadcast of the 1953 Academy Awards ceremony, prints of the film remained effectively lost and the film’s reputation largely hinged on mentions in film magazines like Famous Monsters Of Filmland. That is, until prints surfaced for a handful of public screenings in the mid-1960s, including a 16mm print that collector/scholar William K. Everson screened for a small group of film fans in Manhattan on March 8, 1966, and a more official screening organized by Raymond Rohauer for a 1967 tribute to Rouben Mamoulian at the Museum of Modern Art.
Tracy Spencer and Ingrid Bergman.
Both Fleming’s version and Mamoulian’s film were released on DVD in 2018 and Blu-ray in 2022 by Warner Bros., who own the pre-May 1986 MGM film and cartoon library due to a purchase by the wily Ted Turner in the mid-1980s. Paramount’s silent film starring John Barrymore is also available for viewing online for readers who want to compare and contrast all three of these early cinematic conjurings.
A few years after their suppression of Mamoulian’s film for their remake, MGM pulled this same trick again for their adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's 1938 stage play Gas Light, buying up not only the rights to the play, but also British director Thorold Dickinson's 1940 adaptation starring Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard. This time the trick really paid off, with George Cukor's 1944 film Gaslight netting seven Oscar nominations and a Best Actress win for star Ingrid Bergman. But that's a story for another day.
