Product Review

“I’ll show you what horror means...” growls the hideous Mr. Hyde (Fredric March) as the helpless, terrified Ivy (Miriam Hopkins) cowers on her bed. And now you’ll see too, as you watch this fully restored 1932 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s spine-chilling masterpiece. With the inclusion of 17 minutes of previously censored material, this is the definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Director Rouben Mamoulian’s choice of young, handsome Fredric March (known then as a comic actor) to play the lead raised studio hackles. But Mamoulian argued, “I don’t want Hyde to be a monster. Hyde is not evil, he is the primitive, the animal in us, whereas Jekyll is a cultured man, representing the intellect. Hyde is the Neanderthal man, and March’s makeup was designed as such.” Obviously, Mamoulian’s insistence paid off, as March won 1932’s Oscar for Best Actor. Indeed, the public’s fascination with Hyde equaled that of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula.