Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Ingrid Bergman Transforming
Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 4:20PM 
All month long we're celebrating Ingrid Bergman's centennial. Here's Jason on Bergman taking charge of her own career...
By 1941 Ingrid Bergman had followed up her first Hollywood foray Intermezzo (which abstew so beautifully introduced this series with on Thursday) with two more movies where she played, and these are her words, "a Hollywood peaches-and-cream girl," meaning the nice nicer nicest girl you ever did see, and she was fed up with it. In Adam Had Four Sons she was "the nice housekeeper" and in Rage in Heaven she was "a nice refugee." She wanted to actually be an actress, and act, and challenge herself. Producer David O. Selznick thought he had the winning formula though, and wanted to keep the ship steady. In her autobiography Bergman said of Selznick:
"David believed the Hollywood legend: the elevator boy always plays the elevator boy, the drunk's a drunk, the nurse always a nurse. In Hollywood you got yourself one role and you played it forever. That's what the audience wants to see, they said, the same old performance, the familiar face."
Selznick loved her already familiar face though and he was lining up projects left and right for her -- next on her plate was a remake of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde...
(I call it a remake because the movie's got much more in common with the 1931 film version than it does Robert Louis Stevenson's book). But Selznick had her once again, to her chagrin, playing to her sweetness - she was to play Dr. Jekyl's decent, loving fiance.
Director Victor Fleming, having just come off the biggest year any director has ever had or ever will have, full stop, with Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz under his belt, was directing the film, and Bergman went to Fleming without telling Selznick to plead her case -- wouldn't it be so much more interesting for her to play the lusty low-class barmaid that teases the dirty Hyde side out? Lana Turner had been cast in the part already but Bergman insisted that they switch, and she convinced Fleming to give her a secret screen-test in the barmaid role... and she apparently wowed them - Fleming took the footage to Selznick and his reaction, according to Ingrid?
"Well... okay."
Just a couple of years into her career and she was already striking the most powerful men in Tinseltown dumb - is it any surprise she had the career she did?
The film itself was a financial success and received a few Oscar nominations in below the line categories, but it was a critical dud -- her leading man (excuse me, men) Spencer Tracy was savaged by the critics; he wasn't comfortable with the dual roles and he felt silly under the make-up and it shows -- my favorite diss is from the New York Times, which said:
Mr. Tracy's portrait of Hyde is not so much evil incarnate as it is the ham rampant."
Bergman's performance in the film itself is easily the highlight (Lana Turner hardly registers) -- her accent work is maybe a bit of a disaster, wandering freely among all the isles of the United Kingdom as if she's giving us Eliza Doolittle as played by a salty sea-faring leprechaun, but she nails the tremulous emotion of the mad and maddening young woman, the peaks and valleys of terror and kinkiness that would drive any good doctor into the throes of crazypants passion, potion or potion-be-damned. There's this shockingly dirty sequence in the film where Jekyl has a sex-fantasy about whipping the women in his life and Bergman makes her barmaid's eyes shine with tears of simultaneous lust and horror and joy in all kinds of appropriately discomfiting ways - who needs mad scientists, she's commanding all the forces of good and evil herself thank you very much.
Anyway it's a head-first cliff-dive of a movie star's charisma going full-on supernova (remember that in less than a year she'll be amounting to much more than a heap of beans in Casablanca) and she's all you wanna be watching.
And she knew it too -- I'll leave you with this passage from her diary written during the filming:
"Shall I never be happier in my work? Will I ever get a better part than the little girl Ivy Petersen, a better director than Victor Fleming, a more wonderful leading man than Spencer Tracy, and a better cameraman than Joe Ruttenberg? I have never been happier. Never have I given myself so completely. For the first time I have broken out from the cage which encloses me, and opened a shutter to the outside world...I am so happy for this picture. It is as if I were flying. I feel no chains. I can fly higher and higher because the bars of my cage are broken."
Reader Comments (12)
I'm so happy this series about Ingrid Bergman is happening. The expertise with which the movies have been covered so far is making me really enjoy the story of her career. It's getting me excited for what's to come.
I was never a big fan of the 1941 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, mostly because it pales in comparison to the Fredric March/Miriam Hopkins movie. It's comforting to know I'm not alone in thinking that Spencer Tracy is miscast and Lana Turner is basically forgettable. And even though I love Ingrid Bergman so much, Miriam Hopkins will always be Ivy to me. However, I must say that I admire Bergman's ambition and courage in the way she demanded the Ivy role and then proved that she was right for it. It's true that she's really the only reason to watch the film.
That silhouette of the man in the Top Hat with the cane creeps me out.
This movie is just not good. The 1931 version is superior in every way. I disagree and thought the entire time I was watching the movie that Bergman and Turner should not have switched. Turner may not have been the best actress, but she had an erotic presence. She could believably drive a Victorian era man into lustful actions. Bergman was always too refined to be playing a lowly barmaid/hooker. The way she holds her body and voice, she always seems like a lady.
Bergman is beautiful as the bar maid who was obviously a hooker in the pre-code 1931 version which is better in every way.
I also prefer the earlier version but think Ingrid is terrific as Ivy and was right to ask for the switch. Lana is breathtaking but at this point the docile Beatrix was a better role for her. In a couple of years she would have been perfect for Ivy but in 1941 her sexuality was more kittenish then carnal. Besides she was already on her way up since this was her big breakout year with Ziegfeld Girl just before this and Honky Tonk with Gable as a follow-up but Ingrid needed this to as she said break free of her school teacher image.
Oh and that scene with Lana and Ingrid as the horses with Spencer lustfully driving them on....how the hell did that ever get past the censorship board?
Jargon - Bergman was not in the pre-code 1931 version. What you talking
about?
Mark - I think that Jaragon is just saying that they changed the profession of Bergman's Character from the 1931 version, in which she was a prostitute, to just a barmaid in the 1941 version. He just said it in a round about way.
I echo others' sentiments here in much preferring the 1931 version. But I also agree that Bergman is good in the Fleming version and admire her for getting the part she wanted.
I'm looking forward to this month of Ingrid Bergman!
Yeah, I didn't comment on the last entry because I didn't have anything special to say, and I don't now either - other than: I'm really excited about this series.
For reasons that are completely arbitrary and uninteresting, it took me more than a decade of viewing classic Hollywood stuff in order to properly fall in love with Bergman. But - even though I still never think of her when i think of my favourite actresses - fall in love I certainly have. I think a second viewing of Notorious helped, and multiple ones of Casablanca (the film itself also took me a bizarre amount of time to warm to), and crucially, a viewing of Autumn Sonata (a horrifyingly underrated film).
Alas I don't remember much of her performance in Jekyll - I just remember her being all over the place, albeit in an entertaining way.
And yes, the 1931 version of Jekyll is just in a whole other stratosphere compared to this one - which, now that I think of it, is itself all over the place, albeit in a [tackily] entertaining way.
Anyone else at first think that was her daughter Isabella in the top picture? wow
I saw this movie when I was a kid, and even then I thought it was weird. And after reading this entertaining essay, I want to watch it again. Selznick was a formidable force of nature, and it took some moxie on Ingrid's part to go after what she wanted. Smart girl.