As Dr. Henry Jekyll, the moral, religious man who keeps company with society gentleman who find Henry more than a little self-righteous, Barrymore takes on a theatrical nobility: quiet and subdued, he stand tall and stiff and favors his great profile to the camera. He runs a free clinic (called "the human repair shop," a phrase that inadvertently brings to mind Frankenstein more than Hyde) that his friend Sir George Carewe (Brandon Hurst) sneers at. "You should live--as I have lived," he advises the sheltered Henry. Sir George is the father of the proper young lady Millicent (Martha Mansfield), who admires and loves Henry, a seeming contradiction that he explains to Henry thusly: "I protected her as only a man of the world could." After a visit to a seedy nightclub, where Sir George invites dancing girl Miss Gina (Nita Naldi) to get Henry all hot and bothered, Henry decides that maybe it's time to let his baser desires out for a romp. But rather than sully his soul (or his reputation) he concocts a potion is release the evil buried inside (the original sin?), essentially releasing the id from his dominant superego, to take a Freudian approach.
Barrymore makes the transformation into a theatrical showpiece. He curls up on himself and emerges gnarled and bent, with a bald cone sprouting on top of his head surrounded by matted hair and grotesque teeth jutting from his twisted smile. It's Barrymore's version of a Lon Chaney transformation without the elaborate prosthetics. Make-up effects turn his hands knobby and gnarled but the rest of the transformation is in his performance: he screws his face into a demented grimace and he takes on a spidery body language, looking like an urban troll with evil on his mind. He is as close as you'll come to pure evil in a 1920 movie, leading a life of wanton vice and leaving a trail of victims in his wake. Jekyll, meanwhile, becomes addicted to bad behavior and goes about creating a separate like for Hyde so he can live out his basest desires and impulses but "leave the soul untouched." It's pure hypocrisy on the part of Jekyll, pretending that he has no responsibility for the acts perpetrated by Hyde even as he lets his alter ego out to play with greater frequency. He changes his will to leave everything to Hyde and spends more and more time in his life, neglecting his own practice and looking worn and exhausted when he's back as Henry. And when he decides to kick the habit, it's too late: Hyde emerges without the potion after a terrifically bizarre dream sequence with a monstrous spider bearing Hyde's head.
Barrymore was almost 40 when he made Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, already a star of the stage and veteran screen performer, and he used the role as a performance showcase. Known as a handsome leading man, he delivers a big, outsized performance of a grotesque figure and he unleashes the hammy side of his style as the leering beast of a thug, but what a monster. By the end of the film, he's stomping children in the street and wantonly murdering Henry's friends. And he brings a tortured struggle to the repressed doctor, horrified at the demon he's unleashed, guilty that he enjoys Hyde's unrestrained life of drinking and whoring, and terrified that he can no longer control the transformations. Barrymore was acclaimed for the performance and it launched him into the 1920s as a real movie star.
This was an A-list studio production and John S. Robertson delivers a handsome canvas, something not always apparent in earlier home video editions. Henry's world is perfectly fine but the squalid slum streets and dive taverns frequented by Hyde really give the film its atmosphere. But it also has a choppy narrative with a heavy reliance on bridging intertitles to carry the plot forward and explain the narrative turns of the film. The script drops story threads (whatever happened to his free clinic?) and no one seems to notice how Henry has all but dropped from sight, only that his association with the repulsive Hyde is becoming too much for even the sybarite Sir George to put up with.
Barrymore's performance carries the film and it's more interesting than convincing today; his brand of flamboyant theatricality hasn't aged well, but it is fun to watch. Nita Naldi, who made her film debut here, is memorable in the small role as Miss Gina, the wicked woman next to Martha Mansfield's angelic good girl Millicent. Naldi later starred opposite Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand (1922) and Cobra (1925).
The 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which long ago fell into the public domain, has been released in numerous substandard editions. Kino first released the film on DVD in a fine edition in 2003 but has gone back to archival 35mm materials to create a new HD master for its Blu-ray debut. There are plenty of artifacts on the image--scratches, grit, chemical damage--and a couple of scenes are clearly salvaged from inferior prints to fill in missing footage. The difference in clarity from a 35mm source and a 16mm copy is glaring, which only illustrates the vast improvement in image quality from previous editions. Even with the emulsion scratches and chemical degradation, the image underneath is presented with greater clarity and sharpness than in any previous disc release and that allows viewers to look past the visual noise to the film itself. The film is presented at a slower and more accurate frame rate than the previous Kino DVD and features color tints.
The accompanying score is compiled by Rodney Sauer and performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Supplements (carried over from the previous DVD release) include a one-reel version of the story from 1912 starring future director James Cruze, a 15-minute digest version of the rival 1920 version of the film starring Sheldon Lewis, the 1925 Stan Laurel one-reel parody Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride, and a rare 1909 audio recording of "The Transformation Scene" with actor Len Spencer. All of these extras are also on the new DVD edition made from the same HD master.
by Sean Axmaker
