FAQ

Prominent London physician Henry 'Harry' Jekyll (Spencer Tracy) develops a formula that allows him to separate his good side from his evil side, whom he names Mr Hyde. However, Henry soon finds that he's unable to control the transformations, with disastrous results for his fiancee Beatrix (Lana Turner), her father Sir Charles Emery (Donald Crisp), and barmaid Ivy Peterson (Ingrid Bergman).

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an 1886 novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-1894]. This movie is a direct remake of the 1931 movie, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), utilizing the screenplay originally written by screenwriters Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath with adaptations for this movie by American screenwriter John Lee Mahin.

It's some grapes from the bunch of grapes he was eating.

Several times during the movie, Ivy (and others) refer to other people—usually wealthy, well-dressed, upperclass people—as 'toffs', and that's just what 'toff' means...someone wealthy, well-dressed, and aristocratic in bearing. In British English slang, it has a somewhat derogatory connotation. The word is thought to come from tuft, a golden tassel worn by titled students at Oxford and Cambridge.

Hyde returns to the lab but remembers that he locked the back door and burned the key. He tries to get in the front door, but Poole (Peter Godfrey) won't let him in so he goes to see Henry's best friend, Doctor John Lanyon (Ian Hunter), and asks him to go to the lab and bring him certain vials of medication. Lanyon complies but refuses to let Hyde leave with the medicines until he has taken him to Jekyll. In desperation, Hyde prepares and drinks the antidote while Lanyon watches in horror while Hyde transforms back into Jekyll. Henry realizes that he's lost control of Hyde and can no longer marry Bea. He goes to her and tries to break their engagement, but Bea refuses to accept it, so Henry walks away. As Bea lays on the steps crying, Henry turns around and walks back. Bea is overjoyed that Henry has returned...until she looks at his face and sees Hyde. She screams, and Sir Charles comes running. Hyde beats Sir Charles so severely with his cane that it breaks in two then runs back to his lab for another dose of the antidote. Lanyon sees the cane and realizes what Henry has done. He leads the constables to Jekyll's lab where Henry tries to convince him that Hyde has escaped. Lanyon urges Henry to confess, but Henry keeps insisting, 'I'm Dr Henry Jekyll,' even as he transforms into Hyde in front of their eyes. Hyde tries to escape but, when he grabs a knife and goes after Lanyon, Lanyon is forced to shoot him. In the final scene, Hyde lies dead on the floor and slowly turns back into Henry Jekyll while a choir sings and the 23rd Psalm is read from the Bible ('The Lord is my shepherd...I shall not want...').

Yes. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is in the public domain. A copy of the text can be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg.

The movie's history is rather complicated when it comes to what is the original theatrical version. Several sources mention a run time of nearly 127 minutes for the original theatrical version but when it was released on VHS and DVD only a 113 min. version was used. There's definitely a longer cut available because in Germany a longer version is shown regularly on TV that features not only prolonged plot scenes, sometimes important monologues by Jekyll/Hyde, but also prolonged transformation scenes. Nonetheless this TV Version is still shorter than the 127 minute theatrical version if it exists.