• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3707 0

and Eckman, he acknowledged, was “better” than before. However, according to Sidney Franklin, the studio was “more or less turning against the boy and the mother” and the problem of quickly recasting the roles became the film’s undoing. In June, Tracy appeared in tests with actresses Frances Farmer and Ruth Hussey, both as possible replacements in the part of Ma Baxter, but the animals were growing and the time for returning to Florida had passed. The Yearling, for reasons of weather and landscape as well as wildlife, had to be filmed in the spring. The decision to postpone it was made on June 13, 1941. The studio’s total investment at the time was estimated at $500,000.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had its first sneak before a paying audience on June 18, but Tracy simply noted the event in his datebook with a question mark. One thing was certain: the scenes in which Jekyll turned into Hyde didn’t work and would have to be redone. Editor Harold Kress recalled that when he was first assigned the film he asked, “What about his changes?” They had hired, he discovered, some thirty animators to put close-ups of Tracy on cells because someone had sold Victor Saville on the idea. “Well,” said cinematographer Joe Ruttenberg, “there were many tests made … thousands of dollars spent on making experiments with certain chemicals that certain lights would change, and it didn’t work out at all.”

Tracy resisted playing Mr. Hyde with makeup and regretted doing so for the rest of his life. (SUSIE TRACY)

On July 14 Tracy returned to the studio to confer on the effects for Jekyll and Hyde. With the press preview only a week away, the changes would have to be made quickly. “We dissolved,” said Ruttenberg of the ultimate—and most obvious—solution. “We sat him down, tied his shoulders and put his head in one of those old fashioned still photographer’s gadgets to keep his head steady, and we kept grinding one or two frames at a time as the make up was being changed … It took hours … same position … It was like doing an animated film, you know.” Tracy, said Ruttenberg, patiently submitted to the tedious process of filming all three of the on-camera transformation scenes over the course of two long days. “He was very uncomfortable and very cooperative. He realized how much trouble it was.”

Tracy saw Ingrid Bergman the night he finished with the new transformation shots, unconvinced they would make any difference and still fretting over his performance. The trade showing took place in Los Angeles on July 21, and the early returns were a lot more positive than he expected. Daily Variety faulted the film’s length, suggesting that Fleming held his scenes “beyond their fullest realization” but nevertheless pronounced the picture exceptional in every respect. The Reporter called it a “master screen work” and praised the “magnificent” performances of both Tracy and Bergman. “Tracy wisely chooses to play Hyde with the smallest application of makeup, and his face, though radically altered with the assistance of Jack Dawn’s creations, is no longer a visage designed to haunt little children. Tracy’s interpretation reaches deeper into the characterization, and his playing makes it more memorable for not being merely another protean feat. His Jekyll and Hyde is the top portrayal of a top actor’s career.”

Tracy was in San Francisco with Bergman when Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had its world premiere at New York’s Astor Theatre on Tuesday, August 12, 1941. The following day, he saw the notices in the metropolitan dailies and carefully listed the good versus the bad in his book. “Worst panning for an actor ever received?” he wrote. “The horrible notices of ‘Mr. Hyde.’ He! he! All bad for [the] picture business [in] New York.” To be sure, the reviews were generally slams, and Tracy took the brunt of them, Bergman and even Turner coming off considerably better. Ted Strauss, in the Times, said that Tracy’s portrait of Hyde was “not so much evil incarnate as it is the ham rampant.”

Archer Winston in the Post chimed in by calling the role a “ham’s holiday,” and Cecelia