Classics of the silent screen (1959)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1920 In 1920, years before Hollywood had created a real horror cycle, and before Lon Chaney had established himself as a master of the macabre, no fewer than two versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic thriller were put into production. One was a minor "quickie" ( with a happy ending showing the whole thing to be a dream), produced by Louis B. Mayer. It even shifted the locale of the story to New York. This one was soon forgotten! But Paramount's version, filmed at their Long Island studios, with John Barrymore as the hapless doctor who succeeded all too well in separating the good and evil personalities in man, was quite another matter. A fine Grand Guignol thriller in its day, it remains a powerful and effective film even now, despite several ambitious later versions with, among others, Conrad Veidt, Fredric March and Spencer Tracy. The thirteenth of Barrymore's films, it was the first to present him in a bizarre role calling for horrific makeup. That Barrymore thoroughly enjoyed himself in the romp is proved not only by the astounding zest with which he throws himself into the more gruesome moments (his change-over scenes, his apparitionappearance as a giant spider, the savage murder sequence) but also by the increasing frequency with which he injected himself into similarly bizarre situations, even in films which did not particularly call for them! In Don Juan he has a scene directly deriving from his change-over scene in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and in The Sea Beast (the first of his two ver John Barrymore as the good Dr. Jekyll, in the clinic for the poor maintained at his own expense. sions of Moby Dick) he quite inappropriately (but effectively! ) repeated his Hyde makeup in the role of the tortured Capt. Ahab! Barrymore's Jekyll and Hyde might not have pleased Stevenson too well. Nita Naldi, as a sexy dancer in a London dive, displayed some incredible cleavage in a role not even referred to in the original story. And doubtless feeling that they were off on a real literary binge, the adaptors changed the motivation of the story completely by "borrowing" the character of Lord Henry from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and making him, in the person of Brandon Hurst ( and with an assist from lifted Oscar Wilde lines) Dr. Jekyll's evil mentor. Stevenson might have complained, but audiences in 1920 didn't. Apart from literally two John Barrymores, and lovely Nita Naldi, they also had the charming Martha Mansfield, and the less charming (but no less popular) Louis Wolheim to rivet their eyes to the screen. 28