John Barrymore's performance in the dual title role may be a very lauded one from the age of silent horror but, truth be told, his portrayal of Dr. Henry Jekyll is quite straightforward for the most part, with few complexities. From the outset, Jekyll is shown to be a man who's equally interested in radical ideas in science (the first scene is him studying something beneath a microscope) as he is devoted to the care of the poor at his clinic, which he maintains out of his own pocket. He's so caught up in these two sides of his profession that he doesn't have much of a social life, unintentionally neglecting both his friends and his fiance, Millicent, but other than that, he is an absolute gem of a man and one who is seen as the salt of the Earth by his patients and his peers. As such, this compels Sir George Carew, his fiance's father, to test this apparent purity by taking Jekyll to a music hall and having one of the lovely, scantily-dressed dancers come on to him. Feeling the urge to act on his basic, primal emotions for the first time in his life, Jekyll quickly gets himself away from the dancer and the music hall, although this experience makes him fascinated with the dual nature of humanity, as he ponders, "Wouldn't it be marvelous if the two natures in man could be separated, housed in different bodies?... Think what it would mean! To yield to every evil impulse, yet leave the soul untouched!" He then devotes himself to finding a way to do just that, leading him to develop the serum that transforms him into Mr. Hyde. After he's able to become Jekyll again and realizes that his experiment has worked, he becomes ecstatic and intrigued at the possibilities it affords him to lead both possible sides of life and tells his servant, Poole, to allow Hyde to come and go as he pleases and have full authority of the house. For a time, he indulges in his more primal and savage desires as Hyde, going as far as to bequeath everything to him in his will should anything happen to he himself (in short, should he find himself unable to become Jekyll again), but after a while, he becomes repulsed by the horrible things that Hyde does. Concerned as well for Millicent, he decides to resist Hyde's dark urges, and it works for a while, until he becomes Hyde again during a moment of weakness.
As straight-laced as his performance as Jekyll mostly is, I can appreciate what Barrymore does with it but, as blasphemous as this is going to be to some, I can't say the same for his performance as Mr. Hyde. While I respect that he pulled off the first transformation live on camera, with no optical effects save for the close-up of his hand transforming, and that he didn't use much makeup at all, I've never found his Hyde to be all that menacing or exceedingly evil, especially when compared with Fredric March's rabid, violent portrayal and Spencer Tracy's sadistic and emotionally abusive one; in fact, with his exaggerated facial expressions and hunched manner of walking, I find him to be kind of silly more than anything else. I understand that during this time period, the acting style was very exaggerated and theatrical, as that's what people were used to, but when I see Barrymore making those weird faces when he first becomes Hyde, which he maintains throughout most of the movie, I can't help but smirk. As they often do with this story, each time he becomes Hyde, he's more and more hideous-looking, and there are moments where his crazed eyes and sharp teeth do make him look intimidating, particularly when he comes at Sir George Carew after transforming, but for the most part, I have a hard time taking him seriously. When it comes to the portrayal itself, this Hyde doesn't do anything so monstrous as to make me hope that he gets his. Yes, he forces the dancer, Miss Gina, to stay at his seedy London apartment, and you can only imagine what he makes her do during the time she's there, before he unceremoniously throws her out, he acts very cruel towards her when he runs into her again at an opium den, and he forces himself on the one poor girl upstairs in that place, but I don't really feel the impact of just how evil and vile he's supposed to be. The one thing he does do that I find really horrendous is when he knocks this really little kid over in the street and cruelly puts his foot on his back to taunt his friend before paying off the kid's father. Had he done more stuff like that, I would've found him to be a more effective villain. If you're wondering, "What about when he kills Sir George?", as violent as that is, as Hyde appears to bite into his neck before beating him with the cane, as I'll get into, I find it hard to feel bad for the guy for a couple of reasons. And as for the ending, where he almost has his way with Millicent before succumbing to the poison, I knew they weren't going to kill her off, so there wasn't much suspense.
The most interesting character in the film to me is actually not Dr. Jekyll but Sir George Carew (Brandon Hurst), the father of his fiance, Millicent. His introductory scene reveals him to be the opposite of Jekyll in many ways, with the intertitle describing him as someone who is, "Always as far from misery and suffering as he could get," and when you first see him, he's reading the gossip column. Having been someone who has most certainly "lived," as it were, he finds it impossible to believe that Jekyll is as pure as everyone says he is, and when he joins him and his colleagues for dinner at his house that night, he tasks him about it, suggesting that he's devoting so much of his time to others that it's at the expense of his own personal life. When Jekyll asks, "Isn't it by serving others that one develops oneself?", Sir George lectures him, saying, "Which self? Man has two, as he has two hands. Because I use my right hand, should I never use my left? Your really strong man fears nothing. It is the weak one who is afraid of experience. A man cannot destroy the savage in him by denying its impulses. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." Feeling that Jekyll should live just as he himself has, adding, "I have memories. What will you have at my age?", he takes him to the music hall (it's really little more than a seedy tavern with dancing girls) and has the place's proprietor send one of the dancers to the spot where they're sitting to come on to him. While Jekyll resists this moment of temptation and flees the music hall, Sir George has unknowingly planted the seed of the theory that ultimately leads to the creation of Mr. Hyde in his head, which is why, despite my interest in him, it's kind of hard for me to feel bad for him when Hyde kills him near the end of the film. Even though he had no way of possibly knowing what his actions would bring about, everything that happens is more or less his fault and he also had no business prying into Jekyll's life to begin with. Plus, the smug, all-knowing attitude he exuded while doing so doesn't help his case with me. As Jekyll's friend, Dr. Lanyon, says after the scene at the music hall, the one truly good thing about Sir George is that he clearly does care for Millicent, having sheltered her from the world's impurities (note how he hides the gossip column he was reading in her introductory scene) and comforting her when she's distraught over Jekyll virtually disappearing from her life during the latter part of the film. The latter prompts him to try to find out what's become of Jekyll, leading to him encountering Mr. Hyde for the first time and learn that there's a connection between him and Jekyll. This leads to his confrontation with Jekyll in his laboratory, where he demands to know how someone as pure as he is could be connected to a vile, cruel person like Hyde, and when he threatens to break off his marriage with Millicent unless he tells him, this results in Jekyll becoming Hyde out of rage and killing him.
None of the other characters have that much meat to them, least of all Millicent (Martha Mansfield), Jekyll's fiance. In fact, I had no idea they were even engaged, as it's never brought up until very late in the movie by Sir George Carew when he's threatening to call the wedding off, and before, all I was aware of was that Millicent did have an interest in Jekyll, as she's very eager for him to show up to the dinner party that her father has at their house at the beginning of the film. It also doesn't help that the two of them have very few scenes together (meant to illustrate Jekyll's devotion to his profession but it caused me to think they didn't have much of a bond), they're not shown to be passionately kissing until about the middle of the movie, and even then, I thought they had just then truly become lovers. Moreover, not even Jekyll's friends, such as John Utterson, seem aware of the engagement, as he himself proposes to Millicent, and when she turns him down, he go as far as to ask if there is someone else. Aside from all that, there's really nothing to Millicent as a character, as all she does is pine for Jekyll, become depressed and distraught when he seems to begin neglecting her, is shattered when she learns that her father has been murdered and pleads with Jekyll to help track down the killer, and in the end, attempts to see Jekyll in his laboratory, only to nearly become Mr. Hyde's latest victim before the poison Jekyll swallowed finally kicks in. Having been told by Dr. Lanyon that Hyde killed Jekyll, the last shot of Millicent is of her grieving by Jekyll's body in the lab. Future versions of the story made the relationship between Jekyll and his betrothed far more meaningful but here, it amounts to very little.
Miss Gina (Nita Naldi), who the intertitles describe as someone who "faced her world alone," is an Italian dancer at the music hall who, despite putting on a nice face for the customers, is obviously not thrilled with her lot in life, although she perks up when she's sent over to entertain the gentlemen, particularly Dr. Jekyll, whom she comes onto. While Jekyll rejects her, this encounter makes her a target for Mr. Hyde later on, who she's less than enthusiastic to get to know, being repulsed and frightened by the sight of him. However, after their first scene together, it becomes clear that they did go on to have a relationship, as Gina is later shown to be staying at Hyde's apartment, which he kicks her out of when he's had his fill of her (like I said earlier, one can only guess the awful things he put her through). He later runs into her at an opium den, looking very bedraggled and out of it (I think they're implying that she might've lost her job as well) and he takes the opportunity to cruelly humiliate her by forcing her and another woman he's met there to look at themselves in a mirror and then shove Gina to the floor while gently petting the other woman's cheek, making it very clear that she's nothing more than trash to him. Gina is not seen again after that but, most significantly, she carries a special Italian ring once used for carrying poison which Hyde takes from her and Jekyll later uses to commit suicide. And while he only has two scenes in which he appears, the man who runs the music hall (Louis Wolheim) comes across as the kind of guy who'll do anything to keep his customers happy, including using his dancers to personally entertain the men. You can also easily guess that he probably doesn't treat his employees that well, either. (The way the intertitles for his dialogue is written, it seems to suggest that he has a Cockney accent.)
Like Jekyll's fiance, as well as the other supporting characters in the story, Poole (George Stevens), the Jekyll family butler, would be more developed in future adaptations of the story but here, he's a pretty superfluous presence. He does little more than simply do whatever his young master asks of him without question, including allow Mr. Hyde to come and go as he pleases, and he also informs him of when it's time to attend to his clinic. His most significant part in the story is during the latter part of the second act and early on in the third, when he tells Sir George Carew and John Utterson of how Hyde is the only one with a key to Jekyll's laboratory and that Jekyll instructed him to have full reign of the place whenever he comes by, and when he catches a glimpse of Hyde making his escape after he murders Sir George, telling the police inspector, Dr. Lanyon, and Utterson this and making Hyde the prime suspect. Otherwise, Poole is just as perplexed by his master's absences as everyone else, unable to tell his friends and the police anything significant, and during the final stretch of the movie, he becomes caught up in Jekyll's frantic need for the chemical that will allow him to stave off Hyde, shocked at how he's acting as if it's a matter of life and death. He is clearly upset by what's happened to his master, though, as are the other servants, and at the end, after Jekyll has committed suicide and Lanyon tells Millicent and everyone else that Hyde murdered him, Poole can be seen wiping a tear off his face as he walks away. And finally, even though he's only in a few scenes early on and has no significance to the story at all, I feel I have to mention the character of Edward Enfield (Cecil Clovelly), mainly because of how odd he looks, with his derpy expressions and overly gray hair and eyebrows (which I'm sure was makeup, since Clovelly, who only appeared in a few other films afterward, was only around thirty when this was made). The only notable things he does is how he backs everyone up at dinner when they're telling Sir George of how noble Jekyll truly is, saying that he lost some kind of wager on him, and when he accompanies them to the music hall, he's the one who Sir George sends to tell the proprietor to send Miss Gina over to them. Other than that, I only bring him up because of his strange appearance, which itself left an impression on me.
While certainly not the most stylish-looking film of its time, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was still one that obviously had some talent behind the camera. For one thing, the sets, while nothing spectacular, do look good, with some coming across as fittingly lavish and upper class, like Jekyll's laboratory, the big sitting room in his house, and the fancy sitting and dining rooms in Sir George Carew's house, while others illustrate the darker, more unsavory aspects of London at this time, like the dark streets, the small, somewhat rundown-looking apartment that Hyde takes, and the very seedy dance hall and opium den that he frequents. The cinematography by Roy F. Overbaugh is also pretty good for the time, especially whenever scenes are dimly lit to create a sense of mood, like Jekyll's laboratory in many of the scenes there, particularly during the latter half of the film, and Hyde's seemingly always dark apartment. Like many silent films, it uses intertitles not only for the dialogue but also to inform the audiences of what's happened in the story during scene transitions that span some lengths of time, as well as to introduce characters when they first appear onscreen (I don't know of many that actually mentioned who played them as well, though), and some of the cards for these captions are accompanied by atmospheric drawings that tie into what the viewer is being told and do manage to give it a little more style than most films of this period, as well as give it a kind of storybook vibe. Unfortunately, as you can see, when it comes to the way the actual film itself looks, most of the really good prints of it that you can find use a rather ugly brown filter for the majority of the scenes, with nice blue ones only being employed for the exterior nighttime scenes and a purple one for the scene in the opium den. A little more variety would've been nice.
The movie also contains some instances of optical effects that are quite skilled for having been created this early in the game. For example, when you actually see Jekyll become Hyde in instances such as when you see a close-up of his hands changing and when he transforms right in front of Sir George Carew (one of only a couple of full-body changes you see in the whole film), as well as when he goes from Hyde back to Jekyll after he's died, they use an early version of the lap-dissolve technique that would become popular in later werewolf movies and it's surprisingly effective. That change from Jekyll to Hyde in front of Sir George, aided by the dark lighting in the scene, looks quite seamless, and is an instance where John Barrymore's overdone acting style helps, as he starts out as a stunned Jekyll feeling the effects of the coming change and transitions into a maniacally-grinning Hyde. There's a nice instance where Sir George's smug face is superimposed over the shot of Jekyll when he initially hesitates to take the formula for the first time, which you can tell gives him the incentive he needs to go ahead with it, and, while it's very subtle, when Miss Gina is first introduced, there's an iris around her as she dances, which suggests how she's already captured Jekyll's attention before they've even met. The best instance of this type of effect in the film, though, is when Jekyll has that bizarre nightmare of Hyde appearing as a big, transparent spider abomination that becomes one with him as he changes in reality. Which leads me into the next bit of discussion...
Holy hell, where did this come from?! Think about how startling this scene is to a first-time viewer: you're watching a well-made but still fairly standard silent film version of the iconic story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, when suddenly, around eleven minutes before the end, you get an intertitle that reads, "And now, in his hours off-guard, outraged Nature took her hideous revenge-- and out of the black abyss of torment sent upon him the creeping horror that was his other self," followed by a scene of Jekyll in bed when he seemingly wakes up and senses another presence in the bedroom with him. Then, in a wide-shot of the room, you see the disturbing vision of a large, ghostly, scuttling spider come around the bed and, if you look closely at it, you can see that it has Hyde's head and body attached to its underside. When I first saw this, I was taken aback, to say the least, as it's not something you'd be expecting by this point, and it's an effectively creepy moment due to that fact, as well as how the way the thing creeps around the bed (it moves in such a way that it looks like either stop-motion was employed or the film was sped up) and then crawls up onto it towards the helpless Jekyll, who loses consciousness as it hovers over him and disappears into his body, with a lap dissolve showing him become Hyde himself as a result. I don't know if it was intentionally supposed to be see-through or if that's just a case of bad matting and compositing but it adds to the otherworldly, eerie quality, giving it a sense of Hyde emerging from the depths of Jekyll's consciousness to take control of him. In the close-up, when it hovers above Jekyll, it looks like John Barrymore in his Hyde makeup, with a big, fake spider attached to his back, but rather than coming across as silly, as it might sound, it is still downright freaky, especially when you see how long and hairy the spider legs really are. I don't how the filmmakers came up with the notion of doing this scene but, regardless, I have to applaud them for the effectively unsettling creativity on display here. Just look at it!
It's interesting how, when we think back to the "classic" age of Hollywood from the 20's into the early 60's, we have this image of the films made during that period being glamorous and classy, with none of the excessive violence and sexual content that we see everywhere nowadays. That's the main reason why, with very few exceptions, my parents didn't allow me to see many movies that were more recent than the 60's, as they considered it to be the period when movies were "safe" and could be watched by anybody, when in reality, films of yesteryear can be very perverse and subversive in their own ways. That's especially true of horror films made during what's referred to as the "Pre-Code" era, before the Motion Picture Production Code, or the Hays Code, started to be rigorously enforced in the mid-30's, and this version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is something of an example. While the 1931 film is much more shocking in how overt its sexual content is for the time, this version doesn't shy away from the seedier side of life either, as it's very clear what Sir George Carew is getting at when he's talking to Dr. Jekyll about truly living and having memories before we get to the "music hall," which, despite that term that they use, is clearly more of a sleazy tavern with showgirls who are asked to sometimes entertain the men who come in. You can see how unclean this place is as soon as the men enter it and it's obvious that Jekyll is feeling some emotions and impulses when he's never felt before when he's watching Miss Gina dance on the stage and when she's sent over to them and comes on to him, which prompts him to get out as quickly as he can. And Mr. Hyde's intentions are very clear and the place's proprietor, as you can see during their conversation at the table while Hyde is smoking a cigar, with a very devilishly pleased expression on his face, is more than happy to help him satisfy them, sending Gina in to see him by herself in a private, murky room. As I've said before, one can only guess what Hyde forced her to do to please him during the time he had her living in his rundown apartment, and later during the scene at the opium den (I honestly didn't know that's what it was until I read up on it; I thought it was a tavern/brothel), we see a guy who's so drugged up that he thinks ants are crawling all over him, Gina looking very worse for wear, no doubt due to her own addiction, and upstairs, Hyde is allowed to have his way with a girl who looks uncomfortably young. That moment is made even worse by how Hyde goes for her throat, and while we can surmise that he's probably kissing or licking it, the fact that we later see him apparently bite Sir George's neck like a vampire before bludgeoning him with the cane makes it all the more unsettling.
Speaking of which, obviously a movie from this time period is not going to have anything on the violence we've seen in movies from the 1970's on but, regardless, that moment where Hyde bites Sir George's neck after jumping on him and forcing him to the ground and before beating him with his cane has a savage feel to it. The moment in the scene before that, when Hyde knocks down a very young boy on the street (just barely older than a toddler, by the looks of him) and cruelly puts his foot on his back to spite the older boy he was playing with is still uncomfortable. And finally, during the climactic scene where Hyde lures Millicent into Jekyll's laboratory and locks her in, it's obvious that he's probably planning to rape and kill her, especially given how downright monstrous he has become at this point in the story. Again, it just goes to show you that old movies were certainly no slouches when it came to content that you'd think only came in fashion in the later decades.
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