Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount-Artcraft, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I wanted to watch the Turner Classic Movies Silent Sunday Showcase, but it had already started at 9 p.m. and therefore overlapped the Lifetime movie by an hour. Fortunately, it was a film I already had on DVD – the 1920 Paramount film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – in a Kino on Video boxed set of four silent films featuring John Barrymore. (The others in the box were the 1922 Sherlock Holmes, 1927’s Beloved Rogue – in which he played François Villon – and 1928’s Tempest, a tale of the Russian Revolution based on an original story by Erich von Stroheim, and it’s a pity he didn’t get to direct it as well.) Gene Fowler’s biography of John Barrymore rated this as the only truly good silent film he ever made – Fowler seemed to think Barrymore really needed sound for his acting to register at its peak – though it’s an oddly poky film despite a literate script by Clara Beranger, who ripped off Oscar Wilde’s famous line from The Picture of Dorian Gray about how the only way to overcome a temptation is to yield to it. (That was enough that imdb.com listed Wilde as an uncredited writer on the project, along with Thomas Russell Sullivan, who wrote a stage play based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella that Beranger must have drawn on.) The DVD we were watching was a Kino on Video release from 2001 (though there’s been a newer restoration and added soundtrack from 2018) that contained several extras, including a 1925 Stan Laurel spoof called Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde; clips from a competing version of the story, also made in 1920, produced by Louis B. Mayer and starring Sheldon Lewis in the title role(s); and one I played last night, a 1909 Columbia recording of the final speech from the play, in which Dr. Jekyll (Len Spencer) bemoans the experiment that changed him from kindly Dr. Jekyll to evil Mr. Hyde and prepares to commit suicide, as he does at the end of Stevenson’s novel and the 1920 Paramount film with Barrymore as well. (In the competing Mayer production, it all turned out to be a dream at the end – though, as my husband Charles pointed out when we watched the Mayer/Lewis version years ago, at least its script went into greater detail about the evil things Hyde has done and some of them weren’t sexual in nature.)

One surprise about the Len Spencer record was that it wasn’t just the actor reading; it contained a full orchestra (as much of one as could be recorded in 1909) and an organ in the background, and Mr. Hyde calls out the organ to stop playing, presumably because its religious connotations seem like a personal insult to him. It’s also interesting that Spencer pronounces Dr. Jekyll’s last name “GEE-kull,” not the “JEH-kull” pronunciation that’s become standard these days. The Kino Lorber blurb for this film on their Web site says the 1920 Barrymore Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is “[c]onsidered by many to be the first great American horror film” – which it isn’t; though I’ve never seen it, I suspect D. W. Griffith’s 1914 film The Avenging Conscience, a compilation of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, is likely to be better. Ploddingly directed by John S. Robertson, the 1920 Paramount Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde misses as many points as it makes. Like the 1935 Universal film The Werewolf of London (a film I really like, actually; it was a Laemmle-era product and has struck me as a far finer movie than the “New Universal”’s much better-known entry into lycanthropy, 1941’s The Wolf-Man), it suffers from a leaden script that spends too much time at high-end London dinner parties and not enough time in the London slums. Dr. Henry Jekyll is depicted as almost saintly – a far cry from his characterization in Stevenson’s novel, in which he’s the usual jumbled mixture of good and evil (in fact, Stevenson describes Hyde as physically smaller than Jekyll because he only contains the evil side of Jekyll’s nature, which made me think that the best way to film it would have been to use two actors, and I know who they should have been: Boris Karloff as Jekyll and Peter Lorre as Hyde) – who’s late for one of those damned dinner parties because he’s running a free clinic for the poor in Soho. Jekyll ends up doing his diabolical scientific experiment on the unwitting urging of Sir George Carewe (Brandon Hurst), who tells him he’s frittering his youth away on social service and should start having fun instead.

Carewe takes Jekyll to a music hall, where Jekyll meets Italian dancer Gina (Nita Naldi) and her boss (Louis Wolheim), who in this genuinely “pre-Code” film appears to be pimping her. The problem is Jekyll is engaged to Carewe’s daughter Millicent (Martha Mansfield, who delivers a quite impressive and very restrained performance not at all like the stereotype of the “good girl” in a silent movie). Later Hyde moves in on Gina and makes her his sex slave – though, unlike the incarnations of her character in the 1932 and 1941 films of the story, she at least doesn’t get murdered by Hyde at the end. Instead Hyde clubs Carewe to death out of anger that it was his temptations that led Jekyll to mix his famous drug. I’ve long argued that Stevenson’s story is the first “Just Say No” tale: it was written at a time when heroin and cocaine were still legal and the evil, addictive effects of them were just becoming known, In Stevenson’s book Jekyll reflects that if he’d been in a better frame of mind when he first took the drug, he’d have become absolutely good instead of absolutely evil, a refrain frequently heard in the 1960’s about the use of psychedelics and how the only responsible way to take them was in the company of someone else who could guide you through adverse effects. One thing that happens in both Stevenson’s novel and Beranger’s script is that Jekyll runs out of the key ingredient in his drug, though Beranger left out a point from the novel that when Jekyll finally obtains a new supply, “the ebullition followed, and the first color change – but not the second one,” and he deduces that his original sample had been impure, and that impurity had been key to the drug’s effect. There’s also a rather risible scene in which a giant model spider literally crawls inside Dr. Jekyll (through double exposure) to indicate that he’s no longer in control of the process and he’s changing into Hyde at random without further doses of his drug.

The transformations themselves are surprisingly effective even though they’re done with simple dissolves instead of the colored lights and filters used in Rouben Mamoulian’s stunning 1932 version, and there’s an interesting story in Gene Fowler’s book about John Barrymore using his Hyde makeup to his personal advantage. It seems that he’d agreed to buy a house in L.A. for $6,000, but he got the price knocked down to $5,000 by showing up for the closing dressed as Hyde. The good points of this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are Barrymore’s performance (though he does overdo the twitching and writhing when he actually transforms from Jekyll into Hyde) and also Martha Mansfield’s, and the sets by William Cameron Menzies and Clark Robinson, especially the ones representing the lower-class Soho district of London. Otherwise it’s an estimable work whose principal defect is that virtually all the directors in the world who could have made this story work in 1920 were in Germany: Robert Wiene (director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau (who actually made a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde knockoff in 1920 called Der Januskopf – “The Head of Janus” – in which a Roman relic of the two-faced god Janus instead of a chemical formula was what turned the protagonist into his evil self; alas, that one is lost except for a few surviving stills).