The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 20-26
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian
Amidst an attempt to truncate Hollywood’s risqué leanings, the stiffly moral Hays Code aided horror’s relegation to second-class citizenship. Lush theatrics, literary elegance, and the promise of technical strides shrank alongside the genre’s threatening subtext: the empowered and privileged rank among the most monstrous. Seeing cinema as a safe haven for indulging the sexual and violent mores probed by the titular embodiment of ego/id, Mamoulian renders leading man Fredric March (in an unparalleled dual role) as his audience’s avatar. Commencing with an extended POV sequence, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde maintains that primal instinct, like cinema, affects no single class system; each viewer can be restrained in their yearning and frustration before succumbing to degenerative tendencies. Through Miriam Hopkins’s sex appeal as the impoverished object of Jekyll and Hyde’s affections, the lure of sensationalism paves way for the terror of abusive relationships, implementing a moral foundation more indelible and effective than any censor’s invention. Max Kyburz (April 21, 2pm, 7pm at “Metrograph A-Z”)