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

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. I started a double-bill of two cinematic adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the 1920 Paramount silent directed by John S. Robertson and starring John Barrymore and Nita Naldi in a script by Clara Beranger that freely borrowed not only from the original Stevenson novel but Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (notably the famous line that the only way to overcome a temptation is to yield to it). I haven’t read Stevenson’s novel in years but I recall it as a somewhat rambling piece in that ill-fitting “novella” length – too long to be a short story but too short to be a full-fledged novel – and it’s in 10 chapters and deals mostly with how Dr. Henry Jekyll attracts the curiosity of his attorney, Mr. Utterson, when he submits a new will leaving everything he owns to his friend Edward Hyde, and that if Dr. Jekyll disappears from ordinary life for more than a few weeks Hyde is to be allowed to occupy his home and help himself to Jekyll’s possessions as if Jekyll were dead. It’s only in the next-to-last chapter that Stevenson reveals – or at least definitively nails it to both characters and readers – that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person and that Hyde was created when Jekyll invented a drug intended to separate the good and evil parts of his personality.

The real meat of the book is in its final chapter, narrated by Jekyll himself and a sort of combination confession and suicide note explaining how he happened to conduct the experiment that turned him into Mr. Hyde and brought forth the monstrous parts of his character, including murdering Sir Danvers Carew by clubbing him to death with Jekyll’s cane. In the book Hyde is described as being shorter and smaller than Jekyll because he contains only the evil parts of Jekyll’s character (which suggested to me that the best casting for a Jekyll-and-Hyde film in the classic Hollywood era would have been to use two actors, and I know whom I would have wanted the two actors to be: Boris Karloff as Jekyll and Peter Lorre as Hyde.) The first film adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was made in 1915 by the Chicago-based Thanhouser studio, which specialized in literary stories by “name” authors, and starred future director James Cruze in the title role(s). In 1920 Paramount decided to make a feature-length version of the story and hired Barrymore to play the lead just four years after his star-making stage triumph in Gerald du Maurier’s play Peter Ibbetson – for which reviewers dubbed him “The Great Profile.” The name stuck, and so did the reputation; it’s obvious that John S. Robertson and his cinematographer, Roy S. Overbaugh, shot a lot of Barrymore’s close-ups in profile just to enable him to live up to that reputation.

Clara Beranger made some fundamental changes to the story that got carried over in the later major-studio versions, particularly the other one we watched last night – the 1932 Paramount remake, written by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath and directed brilliantly by Rouben Mamoulian, and the 1941 MGM version (for which MGM bought the remake rights to the 1932 version so they could use Hoffenstein’s dialogue, even though the screen credits in 1941 listed John Lee Mahin as the sole screenwriter and suggested he’d written the film as a direct adaptation of Stevenson’s novel with no other writers intervening): instead of an innocent victim of a random killing by Hyde, she made Danvers Carew – or, as she renamed him, George Carewe – the father of Jekyll’s fiancée, Millicent Carewe (Martha Mansfield) and also the one who first tempts him down the primrose path. Carewe says that at least as a young man he indulged in various dissipations and has the memories of them to live with, while Jekyll is spending his own youth in such strait-laced pursuits as running a free clinic for the poor in London’s West End and losing his opportunities to sin. Accordingly Jekyll goes into a laboratory in his home (where, being British, he works in his dressing gown) and devises the potion that will turn him into Hyde. Another change Beranger made in the story that persisted in the later films (though imdb.com lists an intervening stage adaptation by Thomas Russell Sullivan and some of the changes from the novel might be his, not hers) is that even before Jekyll’s transformation, Carewe takes him to a music hall where he sees dancer Miss Gina (Nita Naldi) and is immediately sexually attracted to her. Later, as Hyde, he seeks her out and turns her into his sex slave until, in a fit of anger at her attempts to get away from him, he kills her.

In 1920, the same year the Barrymore version went into production at Paramount, Louis B. Mayer, then an independent producer, shot what amounted to the Asylum Video version (anticipating Asylum’s current policy of rushing out movies based on public-domain stories before the heavily promoted major-studio versions can be released – like their film of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which came out before the big-budget version directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise – or else story premises that were virtually impossible to copyright, like a drama about street auto races called The Fast and the Fierce and a comedy-drama about ghost hunters called, natch, Ghost Hunters) with Sheldon Lewis as star and a script that Charles liked if only because it depicted Hyde as doing evil things that didn’t have anything to do with sex. (Its most chilling scene, as I recall, was one in which Hyde burns down a building just for the fun of it.) I’ve long regarded Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as essentially the first just-say-no-to-drugs story; in 1880, when Stevenson published it, morphine, heroin and cocaine were all legal and were being so widely abused that their adverse health effects were beginning to become known. In the early 20th century there was an international convention whose participating countries all agree to make those drugs illegal in an attempt to control their use and the socially destructive consequences of them.

The success of Stevenson’s tale led to a whole spate of novels about individuals using either scientific or supernatural means to split their personalities so they could indulge their evil natures without consequences – when Charles and I watched James Whale’s 1933 film of H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, published in 1890 (ten years after Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Wells’ debt to Stevenson’s story was obvious: both are about men who invent powerful drugs that release the evil sides of their natures and turn them into antisocial megalomaniacs. Later Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Grey, yet another story about a man releasing his evil self, which Clara Beranger ripped off for this film so obviously imdb.com lists Wilde as one of its writers, “uncredited.” The 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a good film but not a great one; though Barrymore and Naldi are superb in it and the transformations are quite credibly done (ironically, John Barrymore’s Hyde looks a good deal like his brother Lionel Barrymore’s character makeup as Rasputin 12 years later), the other cast members seem pretty much to be walking through their roles, there are too few close-ups and the piece remains relatively stage-bound. (Charles noted one goof in which, in Barrymore’s first transformation from Hyde back to Jekyll, one of his fake long finger extensions falls off before it’s supposed to disappear.) It’s a capable movie but one wishes it could have had a stronger director – like D. W. Griffith, Rex Ingram or Erich von Stroheim (a Stroheim Jekyll and Hyde with him as both director and star … ah, what might have been!), let alone one of the Germans like Robert Wiene, F. W. Murnau, Paul Leni or Fritz Lang, who were inventing the horror film back home (and Murnau directed a Jekyll and Hyde knock-off called Der Januskopf – “The Head of Janus” – in 1920, in which a statue of the two-headed Roman god Janus turns the archaeologist who discovered it into an evil monster) and unwittingly preparing themselves for future careers in America.