Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920 – Paramount) [Impossible Voyages #5]

As mentioned previously, in “Impossible Voyages” I’m watching and writing about a run of new (to me) science fiction films to be watched over this year (and possibly beyond). You can read the rationale and ground rules here. In the meantime, we are advancing from 1918 to 1920 with this movie, #5 in this series.

It actually took me a while to figure out what movie I wanted to watch next. Originally, I chose The Master Mystery, a movie serial from 1920, featuring a big robot and Harry Houdini of all people. I even started watching it, but then it turned out that the version I was watching did not include the whole movie (even allowing for the fact that some of the film is lost).

So then I considered another Houdini film, The Man from Beyond, from 1922. This movie features Houdini as a man found frozen in ice after 100 years (shade of Avatar: The Last Airbender!), but that seemed to the movie’s only science fiction quality. Was that enough, I wondered, to count as an actual science fiction movie?

There was a more obvious choice from 1924 that will probably still feature in this series, but I didn’t want to skip ahead that many years if I could avoid it, so eventually I navigated toward 1920’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Does this count as a science fiction movie, I pondered? If you had to stick it into a single genre, you’d probably say it’s a horror movie, but obviously there is overlap. Using an admittedly (and intentionally) simplistic definition that I came up with–“a movie which features aliens, spaceships, robots, time travel or other advanced technology”–it does fit, but barely (“advanced technology”). But then I came across this article, which argues with much more scholarly foundations that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the book, anyway) is, in fact, science fiction.

So, with that long-winded pre-amble out of the way…

Spoilers Ahead

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920 – Paramount)

Directed by John S. Robertson

The Story: Philanthropic Dr. Henry Jekyll becomes obsessed with the idea of finding a way to separate out all his dark and immoral impulses into a separate person. This results in creating a formula that turns him into the ugly and misshapen Edward Hyde. As Hyde, his lascivious and cruel acts escalate eventually to murder. Before Hyde can rape or kill Jekyll’s sweetheart Millicent, Jekyll commits suicide.

Starring: John Barrymore as Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, Marsha Mansfield as Millicent, and Brandon Hurst as Millicent’s father. Nita Naldi is Gina, an Italian exotic dancer that Hyde becomes involved with. Charles Willis Lane and J. Malcolm Dunn are Dr. Lanyon and John Utterson (friends of Jekyll). George Stevens is Jekyll’s butler Poole.

Comments: It turns out that saying you are going to watch the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde isn’t specific enough, because there are no less than three film adaptations of the book that were produced that year, and two of them have the same name. This one, featuring legendary actor John Barrymore in the double (is that actually accurate?) role of Jekyll and Hyde is certainly the best known.

I haven’t seen the others from that year (or really, almost any other adaptation), so I cannot comment on how this one compares. I have read the book though, and I know there is a lot going on here that wasn’t in Robert Louis Stevenson’s original work. The movie takes cues from a variety of sources, including a stage version of the story that had been popular years earlier, and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Thus, we have plot elements such as Jekyll’s romance with the virtuous Millicent, Hyde’s affair with the exotic Gina, and the cynical Sir George Carew tempting Jekyll to explore concepts of immorality in ways that lead to his doom (in a manner similar to a character from Wilde’s book). It all amounts to more elaborate and overtly horrific plot than you get in the original novel (where the reveal that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person was a late twist).

Some of all this works really well, and some of it does not.

Certainly one of the strong point is John Barrymore’s performance as Jekyll and Hyde. The two personas are remarkably different–some of that is makeup and costuming of course, but much of it is to the credit of the actor.

Like the other characters who meet Jekyll and Hyde, I’d never guess that they were the same man if I didn’t already know. Jekyll is almost unnaturally saintly in his demeanour, while Hyde is not just misshapen, but just dripping with corruption and a kind of sexually predatory menace. The way he touches various women the he meets in London’s underbelly is really, really icky.

The transformation scenes are a little outdated–they are depicted through cross-dissolves which might have been a less obvious choice then than it is now, and also through the larger-than-life physical performances (grand gestures, convulsive movements, etc) that we often associate with silent film acting. But these scenes definitely get the point across, which of course is the important thing.

I’ve heard it said that Hyde’s makeup is actually progressive–it becomes more pronounced as the movie goes on, but I have to say I wasn’t watching closely enough to notice this. It is worth noting, though that the very first transformation doesn’t use any make up at all, and is achieved only through Barrymore’s acting, which as we’ve already noted is quite impressive.

There is also this one inventive bit in the story where Jekyll’s dark persona is visualised as a kind of ghostly giant spider that creeps up on him while he is sleeping that is genuinely terrifying. Obviously it’s not real but man, is it creepy–I’m not the biggest fan of spiders, so I’m glad this movie wasn’t some sort of 1920s silent giant monster movie, I’m not sure how I would have handled that.

Overall movie has got some interesting ideas to explore. Jekyll is a virtuous and generous, but the implication is that he holds to his values, at least in part, out of some sort of fear or duty–he is easily tempted toward darkness in his soul that is normally kept buried. He wants to find a way to give expression to these baser desires while still keeping himself morally untouched–but once his lust and greed is unleashed (in the form of Hyde), he finds its not so easy to bottle them up again.

But the presentation of these ideas–the moments the movie chooses to dramatise and the ways these events are paced–lets the story down for me. Parts of the story lurch forward in fits and starts, with abrupt edits between major events, and a dependence on the intertitles to communicate that certain things have happened at all.

So for instance, we are told early on, “As Hyde plunges deeper into his vice, his trail was soon strewn with victims of his depravity,” but we don’t really see much in the way of those victims to get the full sense of what is being referred to.

Indeed, there’s only a little bit of the movie devoted to Gina, the Italian dancer that Hyde takes up with–it definitely feels like there could have been a lot more story there. Later, we read that, “For some time Dr. Jekyll renounced the dark indulgences of Hyde—until in an hour of weakness the demon, long caged burst forth more malignant than before,” but we don’t see any of that renouncing or that bursting forth. When we get back to the action, Hyde is just wandering the streets of London again.

I don’t know enough about the era of silent filmmaking to know how common this approach was, but for my modern eyes it disrupts my immersion, and causes me to wonder if I’ve missed something. The stuff they are talking about here sounds really interesting, and I find it disappointing not to get to watch it.

But even with this, there is a lot to like in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s Barrymore, as I’ve already said. The set design is nice–it really does give you a sense of Victorian London. And the movie has an interesting ending, in which Jekyll realizes that imminent transformation into is going to endanger his fiancée–so he quickly kills himself with poison that he acquired earlier. Hyde still emerges and threatens Millicent, but then the poison takes effect and Hyde dies.