Films: 1920s
(1920) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Monday, January 01, 2007
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Director: John S. Robertson
Release: 1920
Director John S. Robertson dips into Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella and paints with broad teetotaler's strokes across the celluloid canvas in 1920's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
John Barrymore is Dr. Jekyll, a philanthropist/scientist of the first order who is on the verge of a biochemical breakthrough in his London laboratory. While his colleague Dr. Richard Lanyon (Charles Lane) solemnly warns Jekyll against the realm of supernatural science, his experiments persist.
At the same time, Dr. Jekyll spends his evenings in the gutter, administering to the sick and the poor at a clinic. His administrations keep him from lovely dinner parties amongst the elite, in particular the parties of Sir George Carew (Brandon Hurst), a sensualist aristocrat who happens to be the father of Jekyll's would-be betrothed, Millicent (Martha Mansfield, who would burn to death in a freak on-set fire three years later).
Carew tempts Jekyll. He takes the doctor to a music hall, dangling before him liquor, tobacco and women. But Jekyll resists, even when the sultry dancer Miss Gina (Nita Naldi) is draped around him. The trial, however, is too much for Dr. Jekyll's constrained mind to bear. Returning home, he points his biochemical research at separating the ego from the id on a physical level, creating two separate physical forms, each of which may pursue their passions without sullying the soul of the other. With a serum, the plan works and Edward Hyde is born.
Hyde carouses, purchasing drink and sex throughout the basement dens of London. In the daylight, Dr. Jekyll continues with his work, but the shadow of his other self creeps into the sunlit world of its creator. Soon, Jekyll is strained and his ability to live without guilt for Hyde's sins weakens. He tries to marry Millicent, but the barrier between Jekyll and Hyde proves too thin, and the Carew family is descended upon by the darker thing within the doctor.
As Mr. Hyde is born of Dr. Jekyll's midnight concoction, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is born of Prohibition. Methodists had promoted a "dry" movement since the 1840s, and Stevenson's small book had been picked up and used by concerned preachers in England since its publication, but Robertson's 1920s film gives the story to the adherents of the 18th Amendment in the United States.
The allegory is clear, Robertson's visuals drive it home.
In the first case, Carew's gentle taunting of Dr. Jekyll at dinner reaches its keynote over a glass of wine. Carew tells Jekyll he must live more recklessly, create memories of his young manhood to carry into old age. Jekyll looks reluctantly at his wine glass, then concedes and drinks. Carew nods slowly.
Following the music hall temptation, Jekyll is tainted. He says as much to Lanyon, and he fills the crevice made in his otherwise pure soul by quaffing the potion that will turn him into Hyde. It is a veritable cocktail, mixed on-screen. Jekyll sits before a light, a snifter-like beaker in one hand, a test tube in the other. He pours the tube's contents into the beaker, the mixture darkens to a rum brown and he drinks. The effect is profound. Jekyll claws at himself, dances, hops, falls down and then emerges as the twisted and salacious Mr. Hyde.
And what does Hyde do, primarily, throughout the film? He drinks. He smokes. He drinks more, and he solicits women. When Jekyll does suppress the alter-identity for some time, and then Hyde returns (the addiction to the night life eventually surpasses the need for the potion, and Hyde emerges unbidden), the first thing he does is belly up to a bar. The bartender is elated to see an old regular return.
At last, the destructive nature of the feared demon (drink and Hyde, according to scriptwriters Clara Berenger and Thomas Russell Sullivan's mythology) destroys the family. Hyde kills Sir George, and then - in an apparent moment of self-reproach - eats poison to extinguish his own misery. The film lingers on the returned profile of Dr. Jekyll - at last released from his drive for the "supernatural" drink.
Robertson's visual landscape is stocked with tremendous and iconic moments.
Barrymore literally throws himself into both Jekyll and Hyde, but his transformation into Hyde is a stupendous makeup effect. By applications, presumably, Barrymore's skull is elongated and greasy locks of thinning hair frame a pocked and sagging face. Hyde walks as bowlegged as Jekyll walks tall, and the sinister alter-ego's fingers stretch to twice their size, ending in blunt, chipped nails.
When Hyde takes Jekyll from the world for the last time, Stevenson has it happen as a visual metaphor. Jekyll sleeps fitfully. A hideous, semitransparent spider shape scuttles from behind his bed. It is Hyde with eight legs. The spider thing, hairy and thirsty, creeps onto the bed, settles onto Jekyll's chest and sinks in to drain its simultaneous host and prey.
Cinematographer Roy Overbaugh uses composite images brilliantly for this and other scenes, creating semisolid images that seem at once concrete and phantom-like within the frame. Another notable use of the technique: Overbaugh overlays Carew's face, many times out of proportion to the room, as Jekyll commits to his first drink of potion.
Heavy-handed to be sure, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is nonetheless an atmospheric and powerful statement, complete and fully realized - it is a masterpiece of allegory. Stevenson, Robertson and Barrymore come together in one perfect cinematic moment to cement a famous dual-character into a masterful telling.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1920
As Mr. Hyde is born of Dr. Jekyll's midnight concoction, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is born of Prohibition. Methodists had promoted a "dry" movement since the 1840s, and Stevenson's small book had been picked up and used by concerned preachers in England since its publication, but Robertson's 1920s film gives the story to the adherents of the 18th Amendment in the United States.
