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By Root 3610 0

Intermezzo, Bergman’s American film debut, and that he subsequently considered her for a role in his first picture to follow GWTW, which Jekyll and Hyde would likely be. Bergman, twenty-four, was already at work at M-G-M in a picture called Rage in Heaven, and on December 18 she shot a test for Jekyll and Hyde with actor Edward Ashley as Dr. Jekyll. Bergman was apparently tested for the part of Beatrix, Jekyll’s fiancée and traditionally the ingenue part in the play. She was, however, “fed up” playing nice girls, and when she saw the test, her instincts told her the better role would be that of Ivy the barmaid—Miriam Hopkins in the 1931 version—and she put in for that part instead. As Saville remembered it, “Ingrid came to Fleming and me and suggested the roles should be reversed and she should play the prostitute. The idea was immediately appealing. The obvious photogenic purity of Bergman would react to the evil part of the good Dr. Jekyll.”

By late January, Bergman was set for Ivy but the part of Beatrix was yet to be cast. In fact, much of the supporting cast was still in question, except for Donald Crisp and the English actor-director Peter Godfrey. Tracy, Fleming, and Saville had broken the characters of Jekyll and Hyde into numbered variations and were making—and remaking—tests of each. Tracy’s Jekyll makeup was generally okay, but the Hyde makeup was still to be tested. The Jekyll wardrobe was ready for fittings, but the Hyde wardrobe was at a standstill until Tracy, Fleming, and Saville could agree on the amount of padding for each of the four changes in the script—which was being rewritten.

On the matter of the transformations, it seemed as if every department on the lot had been mobilized to come up with a solution. The Cartoon Department would have a preliminary test by the end of the month, and cinematographer Paul Vogel was trying various methods suggested by tint and lab specialist John Nickolaus. Olindo Ceccarini, an authority on color photography as well as sound, had pretty much exhausted the possibilities of blue light, while Jack Dawn’s makeup department was preparing a test of hand transformations. Nobody had yet undertaken to watch Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version, in which the initial transformation was accomplished with a filtering method keyed to colored makeup. Apparently no one wanted to be influenced by—or accused of merely copying—a version that was not simply well regarded but had actually won an Academy Award for Fredric March.

Increasingly nervous and unhappy, Tracy dreaded the start of the picture and was unable to get to sleep most nights until two or three in the morning. On January 28 he took Johnny to the studio to see “the Jekyll & Hydes of old” and to watch all of the tests he had made. “Pred[ict] Jekyll & Hyde will be bad,” he wrote in his book later that night. “Picture & I will get panned by critics. This will be big bust.” Louise dragged him off to La Quinta for a long weekend—he had given her a new Lincoln Model 57 coupe for Christmas—and they spent their days on the tennis court. (“Weeze won the championship,” he noted.) They drove home, stopping at Pomona on a Sunday night to see a preview of Men of Boys Town.1 “Too saccharine,” he concluded. “Dull and unbelievable. Will not do as well as original.”

Fleming had Jekyll and Hyde laid out so as to shoot all the Jekyll script first, then all the Hyde script, and then the transitions from Jekyll to Hyde and vice versa. Still lacking final decisions on Hyde and the transformation scenes, he was nevertheless able to begin filming on the morning of Tuesday, February 4, 1941. Tracy, in a miserable mood, commemorated the occasion in his book: “Start of Jekyll & Hyde, what may well be the worst picture ever made. It will get panned, I will get panned—It will flop!”

Since both Fleming and Tracy wanted a closed set for the Hyde passages, it was thought best to get the press in and out early while Tracy was still in the guise of Dr. Jekyll. Cast at the last minute as Beatrix was M-G-M contract player Lana Turner, whose previous output