Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
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Movie Reviews of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Movie Review: Far from definitive, but worth a look - if you get the Kino NTSC version
Summary: 3 Stars
Despite being one of his signature screen roles, John Barrymore's hugely successful 1920 version of Robert Louis Stevenson's oft-filmed tale is far from the definitive one - for that you'd have to see the 1931 Rouben Mamoulian-Frederic March film, which is still striking today. Despite a few moments of censor-baiting child cruelty and sexual exploitation, it's a rather flat adaptation, with Barrymore the main attraction. His Jekyll may be a bit of a milquetoast, but the ham in him knows that Hyde is the real meat-and-potatoes for an actor, and he devours it readily, showcasing his own remarkable makeup-free initial transformation achieved with little more than some expressive scrunching of his own features and some subtle lighting that is extraordinarily successful (later shots of him fully transformed did take advantage of some monster makeup, however). It's a party trick Barrymore repeated, perhaps even more successfully, in a scene in his later Don Juan, but where that had a great film built around it, here the transformations at times feel too much like the whole show. And it's certainly worth the price of a ticket at least once, even if the film itself is distinctly average even for its day.
As one of the most popular Public Domain titles on the DVD market, there's no shortage of truly terrible transfers - most poor prints, often running at the wrong speed, sometimes incomplete and often with hideous and irrelevant scores - so it's worth noting that Kino's Region 1 NTSC DVD release is probably the best version we'll ever get. Aside from a good print at the right speed, it also comes with copious and always relevant extras - an extract from the rival and much cheaper 1920 Sheldon Lewis version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that was offered to exhibitors who couldn't afford the more expensive Barrymore version, an early Stan Laurel short film Dr Pyckle and Mr Pride, detailed production notes that are far from the usual PR fluff you get on DVDs as well as a rare 1909 audio recording of a particularly hammy stage version of `The Transformation Scene.' It may cost a bit more, but it's worth it.