Somewhat surprisingly, director Rouben Mamoulian uses less
Expressionism in this horror film than he did in the backstage musical Applause two years earlier, and he did so in the same year
that Hollywood's co-optation of German Expressionism became complete with
Universal's Frankenstein and Dracula.
That's not to say that this film is any less experimental
than its predecessor. Instead of shadows, Mamoulian builds his horror out of
close ups and POV shots, mostly of Frederic March as the eponymous Victorian
monster and his hirsute dark side. The film begins locked in Jekyll's POV, a
lengthy and slightly irised roving shot that firmly establishes both the
obsessive tunnel vision that will destroy Jekyll and our complicity with him.
We don't see March himself until he looks in a mirror, and his reflected
appearances will become a recurring motif, culminating in his arrival in the
background behind Miriam Hopkins's doomed showgirl, slinking out of the back of
her head, a nightmare made tangible.
A repeated pattern of close-ups is even more disturbing.
Mamoulian will begin a scene, say March and his virtuous fiancee Rose Hobart
talking about how much they love each other, in a balanced two shot, both
actors perpendicular to the camera. He then begins a shot/reverse shot
exchange, but instead of the typical over-the-shoulder angle shots, the
characters are framed dead-center, looking straight into the camera, like in
Ozu, but closer, so that only their head is visible (Ozu frames them with neck
and shoulders too). He then moves even closer, to extreme close-ups of the
actors' eyes. The dialogue (their engagement is being delayed by her father, a
proper gentleman) provides the context: the two are very much in lust and,
bound by society, cannot express it in any way more physical than burning hot
eyeballs.
The critique of Victorian sexual repression is very much on
display in this pre-Code film, much more than in the earlier adaptation with
John Barrymore or the later one with Spencer Tracy. Hopkins is present first as
a physical object, stripping in her first scene with Jekyll, tantalizing both
him and the audience with ample displays of flesh. Upon transforming into Hyde,
the first thing he does is track her down and entrap her, for months it seems,
in a kind of sexual slavery. The repressed male id, once free, expresses itself
with not only violence and rape but the need to subjugate, to control, to
repress the sexually attractive woman. Jekyll's need to repress his sexual
desire is transmuted into Hyde's need to oppress the object of that desire.
Thus Jekyll creates Hyde: both are monsters. And thus the men of the British
Empire, with their relentless need to control not only the far corners of the
world but the depths of their own psyche are exposed: nasty, crude, brutish and
above all lustful.
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