Director: Victor Fleming
Producer: Victor Fleming, Victor Saville
Writer: John Lee Mahin
Stars: Spencer Tracy, Lana Turner, Ingrid Bergman
Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul. Now suppose we could break that chain, separate those two selves … free the good in man and let it go on to its higher destiny …
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941)
This Halloween season, the Turner Classic Movie channel did not disappoint. (It rarely does.) I was busy enough that I wasn’t able to tune in until the week before Halloween and, when I did, I started off with DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941), director Victor Fleming’s interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous gothic tale. In case you’re unfamiliar with the plot, “The Mysterious Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” concerns the Gothic theme of the double (or, as it’s more familiarly called today, the doppelgänger). Dr. Jekyll, a prominent scientist, is fascinated with man’s spiritual duality, particularly after observing the case of a mentally ill gentleman who is transformed from friendly family man to hostile recluse after sustaining brain damage. Jekyll begins to develop a potion that he believes will cure the man, exorcising the evil from his spirit and leaving only the purest good, but the subject dies before he can test his groundbreaking new formula. Left with no other choice, he decides to test the potion on himself, consequences be damned. What emerges is Mr. Hyde, a sociopathic monster who wreaks havoc and threatens to end Jekyll’s life as he knows it.
Dr. Jekyll (Spencer Tracy), hard at work developing a rather controversial new medicine. (Image via IMDb.)
WILDERNESS 