A Film Canon

 

 

This film opens on an extremely promising note - an extended point-of-view sequence that encapsulates Mamoulian's ambition to create a film consisting of a single tracking shot to a greater extent than even Applause, while promising a particularly cinematic exploration of the ontological issues posed by Robert Louis Stevenson's novel. Unfortunately, this shot only recurs a few times, in a severely truncated form, its import tending to be deflected into excessively demonstrative dialogue. Nevertheless, Mamoulian successfully takes advantage of the (waning) laxity of the Hays Code to perform a kind of social psychoanalysis, bringing Stevenson's implicit conflation of convention with repression - and marriage with sexual satisfaction - to the surface. Forced to wait eight months for his wedding, Jekyll (Fredric March) positively bristles with sexual frustration, to the extent that it's hard not to read his constantly brimming 'scientific' secretions as ejaculatory compensations, or his shivering, jerking transformation into Hyde as anticipation of the orgasmic pleasures that his new incarnation will achieve. These only occur in and around a series of places "made just for it" (bars, backstreets, dives), whose contrast with Jekyll's conspicuously bourgeois mileu characterises London itself in terms of a divided personality. The special effects also deserve mention - especially the groundbreaking use of colour filtration to portray the central transformation, which is exaggerated as the film progresses.