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Fredric March, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Michael Atkinson Once revered as one of Old Hollywood's most versatile and reliably brilliant actors, Fredric March seems all but forgotten today. Blander than Cary Grant, less iconic than Gary Cooper, much less of an Everyman than James Stewart, March was the Golden Age star no comic could impersonate. Yet he was a more daring actor than all three of those other actors put together, and his uneasy balance between vulnerability and menace often led him into territory Hollywood wasn't prepared to cover. His crushed movie actor in A Star is Born is a bruising experience, and his war-weary dad in The Best Years of Our Lives is the deepest thing in that celebrated movie. But for March's oddest, most audacious moment, you have to go back to 1932, and his first Oscar, for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Director Rouben Mamoulian's Hyde is the definitive version of the Robert Louis Stevenson chestnut, and the most berserk, thanks to March. You can easily miss the creepy malignance of March's work if you find it hard to tolerate a few early-sound-era line readings and grand theatrical gestures (this is 1932). March truly goes for the jugular here, bot as Jekyll--a riveting portrait of an addictive personality helplessly caught in the gears of a new drug--and as Hyde, who resembles nothing so much as a hyena trying desperately, and unsuccessfully, to act human. With his misshapen head, loose-in-the-socket eyes, primate gait and teeth that grow out of his face like trees from poisoned soil, Hyde is a true grotesque, an utterly mundane, utterly terrifying pervert. PAGE 1 | 2 |
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Hardly the quasi-werewolf of other movies, March's Hyde is a hateful mutation of a normal man, and therefore scarier. Hyde pants, slavers and runs at a frenzied clip like a rabid dingo. He's so hungry to spite and defile humankind (particularly Miriam Hopkins's scared-shitless streetwalker) he can hardly keep from drooling. At times you can't imagine that it's the same actor; Hyde is even a few inches taller than Jekyll. "How you must love me!" he spits sarcastically at Hopkins, before a night of (offscreen) rape and whippings, and March makes us believe in Hyde's black heart as few actors ever could. He's a visitor from the rat pit in each of our souls. That March was Oscar-awarded instead of shunned by the industry for such a shocking exploration of degenerate desire (remember, 1932) is, frankly, a miracle. While Hyde inhabits this otherwise typical Hollywood movie like a cancer, March's Jekyll grows more sunken-eyed and self-loathing as his addiction snowballs further out of control. Think of him as a white-collar junkie inexorably pissing his career, family and friendships away, and March's grasp of the grim realities within the fantasy tale becomes evident. His nerve-racked Jekyll is the sort of man (of which there seem to be an endless supply nowadays) to wake up and discover he has strangled his wife in a boozy rage, and self-pityingly sets out to dump her body in a shallow grave. March makes both halves starkly believable, and if his Hyde leaves a darker scar, it's because his Jekyll is shaken rigid by what only he knows Hyde is capable of and why. March's performance is one of the more unsettling plunges into sociopathy Hollywood has ever seen, and especially worth taking a look at now that we're in a new era of movie monsters. What did you think of this performance? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |