The Sound of Silence: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913)

If you ask someone to name the first of the classic Universal horror films, you'll typically get one of three answers: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Lon Chaney; The Phantom of the Opera, again with Chaney; or Dracula, with Bela Lugosi. While all three are good guesses (although, I personally don't consider Hunchback to be a horror film), they're technically wrong, as the original Universal horror film is this little known, 27-minute film from 1913, produced right before Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving Pictures Co. of America, or IMP, merged with several other production companies to form Universal Pictures. Although I probably read up on it in the many books on classic horror I read as a kid, my first concrete awareness of it came from the documentary, Universal Horror, where it was very briefly touched on as Universal's, "First contribution to the horror film," in the lead-up to the discussion on the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and how Paramount was inspired to produce it due to the success of films like Dracula and Frankenstein. When I decided on this year's theme, I thought this would be a unique and interesting way to kick things off, given how obscure it is, to the point where most books on Universal horror forget to mention it. Due to its age, I was afraid it might be lost, save for that clip shown in the documentary, but, fortunately, it is just about fully intact (there are some obvious frames missing here and there) and easy to find online, albeit in very rough shape. (While Universal Horror's clip of it was taken from a pristine-looking print, despite a lot of searching, I had no such luck finding such a version, so you'll have to excuse the quality of the images. Believe me, this was the best I could do.) Upon watching it, I have to say that, while it's certainly interesting for historical purposes, there's little other reason to seek it out, as it's just a cliff-notes version of the Jekyll and Hyde story and was totally surpassed by the later film versions in the 20's, 30's, and 40's. Also, its depiction of Mr. Hyde has not aged well and is really laughable.

Save for Universal founder and president Carl Laemmle, I'd never heard of anybody associated with this film, including director Herbert Brenon. However, I've since learned that Brenon, an Irishman who began his career with IMP in the early 1910's, was considered something of an early auteur filmmaker, particularly in the 1920's, when he began working for Paramount. Although his direction of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is very, very basic, as his career went on and he was given bigger budgets and more material to work with, he became known for getting rather extravagant. Sometimes, that came back to bite him, as when he directed the now lost 1916 film, A Daughter of the Gods, for the Fox Film Corporation and went vastly over-budget, which founder William Fox was not at all happy about. Notably, one of his film from the late 1920's is Laugh, Clown, Laugh, starring Lon Chaney. But, like a lot of silent era directors, Brenon didn't adapt well to sound, and after several not so good talkies in the early 30's, he moved back to England, where he'd grown up. He found some minor success there, but retired after directing 1940's The Flying Squad. He died in 1958, at the age of 78.

Playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is King Baggot, an actor who, despite being totally forgotten today, was among the movie industry's first superstars, once touted as, "King of the Movies," and appearing in over 300 films during his decades-long career. Despite the presence of other actors, this film is basically a one-man show for him, and he's the most memorable thing about by far. As Jekyll, he's pretty much what you would expect: a kindly, handsome young doctor who devotes much of his time to his charity patients, to the point where he unintentionally neglects his fiancee, Alice. The movie lampshades this immediately, opening with Alice reading a note from Jekyll, saying that he can't attend an opera with her and her father, and when they visit him at his practice, he apologizes but insists on continuing to attend to his patients. At the same time, Jekyll is, of course, embarking on some experiments that two of his friends, Lanyon and Utterson, ridicule him for, as well as express concern about their unorthodox and potentially dangerous nature. That night, in his laboratory, Jekyll puts his experiments to the ultimate test, drinking a serum meant to unleash his inner evil. Immediately, he transforms into Mr. Hyde and embarks on a campaign of terror and violence across London.

While Baggot is an acceptable Jekyll, his Hyde is something else entirely. In watching these old movies, you have to let some things slide, such as the melodramatic acting and gestures, as well as the limited special effects technology available, but this depiction of Mr. Hyde is among the most unintentionally laughable I've seen. For one, there's his look, which Baggot came up with himself, as was the norm for actors back then. He's just silly-looking, with those buckteeth and unkempt hair (as

Troy Howarth noted in the book, Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the Silent Era, he looks like Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor), not to mention that hunched over, crouched stature of his, where he's down so low to the ground that the other characters tower over him. Way to make Hyde not at all intimidating. And despite what I said about his "campaign of terror," Hyde never does anything truly monstrous or despicable. When he comes across some tavern patrons during his first night,

he initially does little more than make faces and laugh at them through the window. He then comes down and tries to intimidate them, but never does anything. He takes a room at a boardinghouse and intimidates the woman who runs the place, though, again, nobody should ever find him threatening. He does attack and beat on a crippled boy, an act that later prompts Jekyll to give up on his experiments when he changes back, but the way Hyde is forced to pay him compensation and shakes his fist at the guy who walks off with the money makes him

come off as rather pathetic. And while he does randomly kill Alice's father outside his own house, the way he slinks away afterward, hides in the bushes, and, because of the presence of a policeman, has to come up with an elaborate plot for someone to get him the antidote to become Jekyll again all make him come off as a weaksauce villain. 

The transformation scenes are a bit uneven as well. On the good side, they make use of a slow dissolve between Jekyll and Hyde that's quite sophisticated for the time, and Baggot is quite good at expressing Jekyll's horror when he feels himself beginning to change without the serum. Also, you never see the reverse on-camera, and while it's often done with simple cutting, when Hyde regresses to Jekyll in front of Dr. Lanyon, he ducks down behind his desk and, when he stands back up, is now Jekyll,

without any editing tricks. It's clear it was pulled off by Baggot simply removing his makeup when his face was out of frame, but it's a clever way to do it, regardless. However, during the transformations into Hyde, it's only once he's fully transformed that he starts flailing around and contorting his body, something you would expect to see during the transformation itself (I guess technical limitations kept them from being able to pull that off but it doesn't feel right).

Because of the movie's short length, after Hyde turns back into Jekyll for the first time around the halfway point, the second half feels very rushed. You watch as Jekyll first becomes Hyde without the serum, makes up a will bestowing everything to him, and then randomly becomes him numerous times, each time having to quickly get his hands on the antidote to save himself. Eventually, he comes down to the last bit of it, drops it before he can drink it, and tries to get his servants to get for him

more of the chemicals necessary to recreate it. Instead, when he starts destroying the lab, they bring Lanyon and Utterson there. The two of them break down the door, only to find that Hyde has ended up killing himself, somehow (it plays out like he either went so crazy that he overtaxed his body until he had a heart attack or slipped off the table in a way that proved fatal).

There's very, very little to say about the other characters. Alice (Jane Gail), Jekyll's fiancee, has absolutely nothing to do, except lament his constant absence in her life due to his charity work and experiments. In the latter half of the movie, as he struggles to keep control of Hyde, Alice senses that there's something wrong with him. In one scene, he sends her away when he feels himself starting to turn, and in another, she's perplexed when he suddenly disappears after the two of them 

walk to her home together (as you can guess, he ran away when he felt himself changing again). However, she only sees Hyde for herself once, near the end of the film when Jekyll changes outside her house for the second time. At the end, when Hyde is dead, Alice comes running in and removes the coat that Lanyon covered him with to see Jekyll's face instead. As for her father (Matt B. Snyder), he comes off as gruff-looking but actually quite kind-hearted and understanding towards their relationship. He even seems to understand Jekyll's devotion to his charity work more than Alice. Regardless, at one point during the second half, Mr. Hyde attacks and beats him to death with his cane.

After Jekyll and Hyde, the most significant characters are Jekyll's friends, Dr. Lanyon (Howard Crampton) and Utterson (William Sorelle), an attorney. They're introduced in the same scene as Jekyll, as he tells them of his theories and his experiments. While Utterson just laughs them off, Lanyon seems concerned for Jekyll's safety and appears to caution him about going forward with this work. When Mr. Hyde comes about and begins terrorizing London, Lanyon becomes even more worried when he sees Hyde head into the backdoor to Jekyll's home. Both men are later put off when Jekyll writes his will, declaring that everything he has will go to Hyde should anything happen to him, and Lanyon tries to stop him from going through with it, but to no avail. Alice arrives and the two of them hope she can talk some sense into Jekyll, only for the three of them to then see Hyde glaring out at them from his laboratory window, and then become perplexed when he disappears and Jekyll is now standing in his place. After Hyde murders Alice's father, Utterson tries to run after him but ends up losing track of him. Shortly afterward, Lanyon learns the horrible truth when Hyde sends him a note to fetch some boxes of chemicals from his desk drawer, then mixes up the antidote and drinks it, reverting back to Jekyll in front of him. And at the end of the movie, Lanyon and Utterson are called to the house when Hyde goes berserk in the lab, breaking down the door right after he's ended up killing himself. Lanyon, who likely told Utterson the truth, covers Hyde's face with a ripped down window curtain, and when Alice runs in, they turn away as she removes it to find Jekyll beneath it instead.

Since it was more or less made at the beginning of movies in general, the filmmaking in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is extremely simple. Like many films around this time, it's very stagey, with the camera always in the same fixed position several feet from the action, meaning you never get a close look at the actors' faces (the one exception being a shot where Alice is standing by a window, pining for Jekyll), which can make it hard to keep track of some of them, and the sets feel very small and claustrophobic. Speaking of which, the small

number of sets include a sitting room in Alice's home; Dr. Jekyll's office, the waiting room right outside, his study, and his laboratory, beyond a door in the back of the waiting room; the threadbare tavern set where Mr. Hyde makes his first public appearance; the very small room Hyde takes in town; and Dr. Lanyon's office, where he receives the note from "Jekyll" to fetch some materials from his desk drawer. That said, though, there is a fair amount of location work here, done in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where IMP, which was

based in New York at the time, had production facilities. According to Tom Meyers, the Executive Director of the Barrymore Film Center, in his online presentation of the film (you can watch that on YouTube), a significant location is the Madonna Church, where Jekyll and Alice watch a procession of children walk by. It's really the only notable location, aside for the exterior of some of the characters' homes, as most of it consists of dirt paths, bushes, and a spot where Hyde ducks 

between two small trees and has a boy deliver his message to Lanyon. And there are very few dialogue intertitles, as most of them simply describe what's going on in the scene or what a character's motivation is. Other than that, and some close-ups of Jekyll's letters and will, you have to figure out what the characters are discussing or feeling simply by their gestures and actions. Though, given how theatrical they are, it's not that hard.

The film isn't completely unremarkable as, like I said, the slow dissolves for the transformations from Jekyll into Hyde, and the way they pull off some of the reverse changes are quite clever, and there are moments of dark, moody lighting, such as when Jekyll is sitting in his study, lit only by the fireplace to his left, and suddenly changes into Hyde without the serum, and the accompanying shot of Alice standing in the dark, looking out the window, giving a real sense of how she's thinking of her fiance. And the end of the movie, as Alice

cradles her dead fiance in her arms, it cuts to a final shot of a church bell tolling, possibly signifying that Jekyll is finally at peace. But these occasional instances of technical brilliance can't change the fact that this film is an, inevitably, creaky relic that was surpassed in the following decades by the Jekyll and Hyde movies starring John Barrymore, Frederic March, and Spencer Tracy. And I'm not just saying that because it's from the 1910's, as I think the famous 1910 film of Frankenstein by the Edison Studios is much more interesting and memorable, and that's shorter than one reel.

If you're a big fan of classic horror, especially those produced by Universal, and want to go as far back with it as you can, then the 1913 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is certainly worth looking up but there's little reason otherwise. While it has some instances of interesting filmmaking and King Baggot makes for a passable Dr. Jekyll, it's a very dated, stagey, constrained run through of this familiar story, with an ineffective and even laughable portrayal of Mr. Hyde and other actors who are not only superfluous but, in some instances, hard to keep track of due to the fixed camera and the lacking picture quality. If you're interested, it's not hard to find, and since it's only 27 minutes long, it's not that big of a sacrifice; otherwise, just stick with the other Jekyll and Hyde movies made during the Golden Era of Hollywood.