Two contemporary movies has Mr. Hyde portrayed as a Hulk-like being. Once Dr. Jekyll takes his potion, he Hulks-out. I have never read the esteemed Robert Louis Stevenson, but I don’t believe that is how he portrayed Mr. Hyde. Can someone who did read the book describe Mr. Hyde for me?
I haven’t read the book either but a quick google search turned up a wikipedia article on the novella and its synopsis states that “after using the potion on himself, Jekyll became physically smaller as his evil nature became predominant; this persona was called Edward Hyde” so it looks like it’s an inaccurate, if popular, conception of the character.
Hyde was closer to a twisted little hobbit than Hulk. He really looked like Jekyll (though no one recognized the resemblance at all), but with a leering expression, hunched over more than abeit, and a grim, cruel looking visage. While he wasn’t stronger, he was certainly much more aggressive and violent. While less intelligent, he was more cunning.
As described by Stevenson, Mr. Hyde is smaller and younger than Dr. Jekyll. I think he was smaller in stature as a representation of the “small meaness” of the evil inside Jekyll which became personified by Hyde. He was younger from being repressed all these years.
Alan Moore justified the hulkines of Hyde in LoEG as Hyde becoming more dominant and Jekyll becoming less so. Hyde’s monolog to Nemo after some unspeakable acts in Volume 2 explanes it better than I ever could.
I’m sure some one will either reproduce it or provide a link sooner or later.
To quote the book as is available free off Gutenberg:
I believe that it started in the late 1940’s during the “monster-movie” phase. It began with some make up guy putting more of a werewolf type of look to the charactor in order to make him look more, well, monsterous. Think Abbot & Costello movies.
As far as the hulk-CGI crap, well, you give a special-effects guy the ability to do something different, he’ll take it as far as he can.
Jack Palance was the best Mr. Hyde I’ve ever seen.
John Barrymore played Hyde in 1920 as something of a giant spider.
Frederic March in 1932, looking somewhat apish. He won the Best Actor Academy Award for the role.
Spencer Tracy did the part with minimal make-up in 1940, relying on grimaces and other facial distortions.
Moore, as noted above, is the one who started the “Mr. Hyde as Giant Hulk-like Monster” thing in his series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The carried it through i the movie, of course (they changed or left out an awful lot, but the visual as too good to lose. Also the pint. Hyde as a giant is a menace and dramatic. Hyde as a dwarf isn’t good adventure cinema).
Then along came the movie Van Helsing, and they decided t use that, too. Expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
In Stevenson’s book, Hyde is a twisted little dwarf of a man whom one dislikes instantly. If you haven’t done so, you should read the book. It’s infinitely superior to any adaptatio of the story.
John Barrymore, I note, played the part without make-up, or any special effects. The Rouben Mamoulian version, with Fredric March, is a classic, mostly because of Mamoulian’s extremel original direction, camerawork, and editing. Well worth a look. But, I swear, March’s made-up Mr. Hyde looks like Jeff Goldblum to me.
If you can, get hold of The Essential Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde, with annotaions by Leonard Wolf. It’s pretty revealing, and it’s a shame that it’s out of print. Particularly interesting are Vladmir Nabokov’s comments (from the preface to one edition of DJAMH). “Ignore the picture on the cover”, he told his students, trying to wean them away from the image of Hyde as Hollywood monster and back to the psychological and urreal in the book. But I predct that the Hollywood Hyde is going to go on t a long life.
As others have noted, the original Hyde is physically small. He was shown as a hulking monster in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the image seems to have caught on.
Hyde’s increase in size can in fact be justified from the original text of Dr Jekyll, though. In the final chapter, Jekyll states:
In the last chapter of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Jekyll acknowledges that he used to be larger than Hyde.
There are also versions of Hyde (a PBS mini-series comes to mind) that make him a charming young–and conscienceless–psychopath in contrast to the proper middle-aged–and guilt-repressed–Jekyll
Aren’t you exaggerating just a tad?
We’re still waiting for the LoEG quote. I know it ran something along the lines of: “Without me, he had no motivation; without him, I had no restraint.”
Most people don’t realize it, but Barrymore actually looked like that. All those other photos of him, where he looked handsome? Really, really good makeup job.
That sprang from one passage in the story: “But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half-shut on the bed clothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. {Italics mine} It was the hand of Edward Hyde.”
This is the only reference to dark hairiness - as noted in other posts, Hyde is physically small, pale, seemingly deformed, and ineffably repellent, closer to Gollum than the Hulk - but has formed the basis of movie interpretations of a simian or werewolf-like Hyde {particularly Spencer Tracy in the 1941 version}, which have in turn shaped the popular view of Hyde as some kind of hairy ogre: a skinny little villain who only attacks little girls and old men isn’t that impressive cinematically.
As for the later “Hulk” variant from The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen {the comic and the movie}, I guess Moore amalgamated this idea of a werewolf transformation with the Hulk’s rage-fuelled changes- the Hulk drew fairly heavily on Stevenson in any case.
Quite true. However, the problem with doing a straight forward adaptation of the story is that everyone already knows the twist. In the original text, the revelation that Jeckyl is Hyde is a shocking twist :eek: coming near the end, followed by about 20 pages of Jeckyll explaining how he did it. At that point in the story, a modern audience would say, “well duh”.
Well, in the Frank Wildhorn musical, the difference is that his hair is down.
Since I am a big Sherlock Holmes fan, people got me a lot of “new” Holmes novels for Christmas. One of them was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes. It is a mediocre book. Not too bad, not great. Based on what I have read here, the author does the original representation of Mr. Hyde justice.
Marvel has had a large Mr Hyde for a long time. He goes by the name of . . . Mr Hyde.
Calvin Zebo read the original work as a boy and became obsessed with it. He eventually suceeded in creating a potion which made him larger, stronger, and a lot meaner (though Zebu doesn’t seem to have had a good side to begin with). Hyde dresses in Victorian clothes. Due to the transformation, Hyde’s face is always twisted into a sneer/snarl. OTTOMH Hyde’s most evil act was the beating of the bound and helpless Jervis, butler to the Avengers. This left Jervis with severe injuries, blinded him in one eye, destroyed most of the hearing in one of his ears, and permanent damage to his legs.
Of course the best looking hyde is Sean Young