The New Pictures

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Metro Goldwyn-Mayer) is such a pretentious resurrection of Robert Louis Stevenson's ghoulish classic that it might well serve as a final mausoleum for the bones of the ill-fated Harley Street medico and his test-tube twin.

Durable Spencer Tracy, a cinemactor who can really act, plays Dr. Jekyll and Friend Hyde for more than they are worth. When bright Dr. Jekyll decides to put all his evils in one basket by swallowing the laboratory brew which turns him into the dreadful Mr. Hyde, the result is not horrifying. It is laughable when he addresses his captured barmaid (Ingrid Bergman) as "my tired fungus"; revolting when he spits grape skins in her pretty face; hammy when he chuckles fiendish "Heh, heh, hehs" at his lecherous face in the mirror.

This unfortunate portrayal is the result of Actor Tracy's and Director Victor Fleming's (G.W.T.W.) refusal to play the hoary fable for its horror. They have dressed it up with overtones of Freud in which Tracy's transformation to Hyde is accompanied by symbolic montage shots of a bounding lion (the beast in Hyde); lilies (the purity of luscious Lana Turner, Jekyll's upper-crust fiancee) ; an hourglass (Jekyll's frustration). The result of this phantasmagoria is boredom.

Only grave, good-looking, lyrical Ingrid Bergman wrings credit from the tortured script. Her portrayal of the unfortunate barmaid who charms Jekyll only to fall victim to Hyde's sadism is a refreshing element in a preposterous part. As for Lana Turner, fully clad for a change, and the rest of the cast (Donald Crisp, Ian Hunter, etc.), they are as wooden as their roles. Hyde, heckling Jekyll in the mirror, probably sums it all up best. Says he: "How did such a dull, pompous ass like you ever think of anything as charming as this?"

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde early in 1886. At the time he was living in Bournemouth, England, ill with tuberculosis, suffering recurrent hemorrhages of the lungs. Friends could visit him for no more than a quarter-hour at a stretch. One night his wife woke him from a particularly violent nightmare. "I was dreaming a fine bogey tale," he told her, and at once began sketching out the story of Jekyll and his evil companion--up to the transformation scene, where he had been awakened.

Despite his physical condition, the buoyant Scot finished his first draft in three days. In three more he had written the final draft--a phenomenal average of 10,000 words a day.

Jekyll and Hyde was an instant bestseller and a boon to hundreds of sermon-seeking clerics. Richard Mansfield read it and induced his friend Thomas Russell Sullivan to adapt the "shilling shocker" for the stage. He played it in London and all over the U.S. until he died 20 years later. Two notable film versions of the play were made: one by John Barrymore in 1920--looking like a fur cap--the other by Fredric March--looking like Gargantua--in 1931. Both cinemactors played it successfully as pure horror, without fretting over the psychological implications.

Stevenson's story of the dual nature of man and the tendency of evil to triumph over good was no instant gift of a dream. It began in his childhood home in Edinburgh. There were a bookcase and a chest of drawers in his room made by a notorious split personality called Deacon Brodie--a respectable cabinetmaker by day who used his nights for thievery. The author never forgot the stories his nurse made up for him around the Deacon's furniture. These, together with a Frenchman's treatise on the subconscious, which he read years later, helped fashion Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a first-water literary classic that is still infinitely superior to its stage and cinemadaptations.

The Little Foxes (Samuel Goldwyn; RKO Radio) is a blue-ribbon adaptation of Playwright Lillian Hellman's and Producer Herman Shumlin's bitter Broadway drama of a rapacious Southern family hell-bent for power and money at the turn of the century. If it consists of too much photographed talk, too little movement, that is Hollywood's error for trying to film stage plays instead of designing stories for the camera's rangier talents.

So completely conceived was the stage play that its leading character, heartless, ambitious Regina Giddens, is played by Tragedian Bette Davis with scarcely an accent's difference from gruff Tallulah Bankhead's interpretation of the original Broadway role. This was not Miss Davis' idea. She quarreled with gap-toothed Director William Wyler (Jezebel, Dead End) for her own version. He--or the play--won. Result: the films' foremost dramatic actress not only acts like Tallulah but looks like her (see cut).

Stalwart as her massive mahogany fourposter, a hateful woman whose keen mind and force of character command respect, Regina lures her unloved and invalided husband (Herbert Marshall) home to persuade him to invest his funds in her ratty brothers' scheme: to take advantage of the South's cheap and defenseless labor by establishing a cotton factory in partnership with a Northern capitalist. When he balks, she torments him to death, then emerges triumphant over the rest of the greedy pack.

Five members of The Foxes' Broadway cast play their original roles in the cinema version. They are of immense help to the slick production, especially Patricia Collinge, whose portrait of the well-bred, gentle wife of one of Regina's villainous brothers is played with a poignant anguish that is not in the repertory of most Hollywood actresses.

The Foxes' attempt to sell a bill of indictment of small-time capitalism along with its astringent drama does not come off so well. The characters are so clearly black or white that they are too vivid for real life. But this does not keep a Southern lady's melodrama, aided and abetted by Gregg Toland's talented camera craft, from being a memorable portrait of greed. Regina and her wretched relatives possess the fascination of rattlesnakes courting in a bathtub.

Because Texas is so big, the MARCH OF TIME marched 18,000 miles and used up almost 60,000 feet of film (a record) for its current feature, Thumbs Up, Texas I Result: a corking good film of twangy Texans and their gargantuan State going all out for armament.

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