This is a film in which Spencer Tracy fantasizes about whipping Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner while they’re harnessed like horses pulling a carriage. (Just in case you think the movies didn’t get weird until the 1970s.) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, director Victor Fleming’s adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, has a handful of such stylized, surrealistic sequences—meant to depict the deranged imagination that overtakes Tracy’s Jekyll, a physician in 1880s London, after he drinks the potion that turns him into the violent, lecherous Hyde. This is to the movie’s credit. So is the rare, lascivious performance from Bergman, playing a frisky barmaid who tries to seduce the upstanding Jekyll but ends up as the imprisoned plaything of Hyde instead. (I’m telling you, this movie gets perverse.) Turner, meanwhile, has the unlikely part of Jekyll’s virginal sweetheart, who nonetheless angers her father by kissing Jekyll in public. The movie’s sexual politics are dicey for most of its running time—depicting Bergman as the temptress who leads to Jekyll’s downfall—but it gains its senses by the end, making it clear that Hyde was always a choice the supposedly virtuous Jekyll (played by the supposedly decent Tracy) consciously made. Kinky, cleverly constructed, and featuring against-type performances from three of classic Hollywood’s biggest names, this is a movie that seems to be under the influence of a salacious potion of its own.
(7/17/2023)
