At various junctures in the picture, an inventive use of long dissolves retains ghostly imagery of one scene in the next, in order to convey the notion that the former event remains in the doctor's tormented mind. Thus, Muriel's face holds well into the sequence of Jekyll walking with Lanyon. After Jekyll's erotic encounter in Ivy's bedroom, the parting visual of her bare leg swinging from the bed remains for some 25 seconds while Jekyll good-naturedly parries Lanyon's rebukes. A similar application is made of diagonal and vertical transitional wipes, which pause halfway to let opposing scenes play simultaneously — such as separate shots of Ivy and Muriel, the two women Jekyll desires.
Mamoulian and Struss could never agree on Hyde's physical appearance. Stevenson's Hyde is "pale and dwarfish," younger, smaller and more athletic than Jekyll (who is 50), and completely unlike him in bearing. A witness remarks, "There is something wrong with his appearance, something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere — he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He is an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way . . . I can't describe him." Another is unable to explain the "hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear" that Hyde inspires. "The man seems hardly human — something troglodytic . . . or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent?" Only Dr. Jekyll knew that this beastly quality arose "because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil. And Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil."
Mamoulian favored a "troglodytic" countenance for Hyde. He told AC, "I wanted a replica of our ancestor, the Neanderthal man that we once were, to show the struggle of modern man with his primeval instincts." The director always refused to explain the methods used in filming March's transformation sequences. In Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Darien House, 1975), which reproduces all of the film's scenes and dialogue, Richard J. Anobile notes that "Mamoulian has yet to divulge what lights and makeup he used for the effect, but no doubt it was accomplished with infrared light." [Author's note: bad guess.]
Struss, however, spoke quite freely on the subject. In a 1976 dinner conversation at the ASC Clubhouse, he admitted to a disdain for the idea of Hyde looking "like a monkey. It was terrible. Jekyll's change should have been mostly psychological, a mental rather than a physical change, with subtle makeup.
"The first time Jekyll changed, we used a technique I had devised years before to show the healing of the lepers in Ben-Hur [1926]," Struss explained. "Everybody was using orthochromatic film then, which reproduced reds and yellows as black, and gave blue-eyed actors 'fish-eyes.' I had begun using panchromatic film, which is sensitive to all colors. The leprosy spots were red makeup, which registered when shot through a green filter, but when we gradually moved a red filter over the lens, the makeup disappeared. The Hyde makeup was also in red and didn't show at all when the red filter was on the lens, but when the filter was moved down very slowly to the green, Mr. Hyde appeared."
The six Jekyll-Hyde transformations in the film are all visually distinct from one another. Hyde's guise changes each time. He first appears as a man of slight but strong build, with a brutal yet sensuous, definitely human face. In each succeeding metamorphosis, he grows larger and more animal-like, with increasingly fanged teeth, a broadened nose, more pronounced brows and rather profuse hair growth. These subtle alterations keep Hyde's appearance from becoming too familiar, thus maintaining the impact of the transformation.
In the first malevolent makeover, the camera focuses on Jekyll's reflection in a mirror from the physician's POV. As his hand lifts a glass into the scene, the focus changes to tilt towards camera. Jekyll moves closer and suddenly becomes wracked with agony. The doctor clutches his throat as his hands and face darken, his nostrils widen and signs of degeneracy manifest themselves. He falls to the floor, and the room starts to spin. (Actually, the camera was whirled about while an assistant rode on top to rack its focus.) The rapidly dissolving faces and voices of Muriel and the accusing Carew and Lanyon are swept aside by visions of Ivy as he last saw her — in bed, her bare leg swinging over the side as she murmurs, "Come back soon . . . come back, come back, come back." The camera returns with Hyde peering into the quicksilver pane, where he sees his new face.
Mamoulian devised an innovative use of sound to enhance the first transformation. The director described this sonic novelty to Raymond Rohauer during a 1967 Mamoulian tribute at New York's Gallery of Modern Art: "The transformation, obviously, was not a realistic phenomenon . . . yet it had to be made convincing to the audience. Now, photographically we had many ways of doing it — through the camera revolving around its axis in a kind of vertigo, the distortion of images, double and triple exposures. All of these were unreal. To score them with realistic sounds would have been quite ineffectual. I felt that the sound elements here had to be as unreal as the visual effects. I [therefore] decided to combine a number of sounds which cannot be heard in real life — eerie sounds of high and low frequencies, approaching subsonic and supersonic levels, photographed directly from light; soundtracks of gongs being struck, with the impact cut out and the resulting tracks run backward. Then I thought this surrealistic melange needed a rhythm, a beat. We tried all sorts of drums, but they all sounded like drums — too real. Then an idea popped into my head. I ran up and down a staircase for a couple of minutes, then put the microphone over my heart and photographed the heartbeat. Incidentally, this aural concoction became known in the studio as 'Mamoulian's sound stew.'"
[ continued on page 4 ] © 1999 ASC