‘Henry, Henry, why do you distress yourself with such morbid thoughts?’
The mysterious illness of one of his patients prompts a brilliant doctor to pursue a new line of chemical research while neglecting his fiancé. When he tries the resulting potion on himself, a strange transformation takes place…
Low-budget version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s celebrated story, released to theatres to compete with the prestigious production of the same title, fronted by John Barrymore. Sheldon Lewis stars as the misguided scientist under the megaphone of writer-director J. Charles Haydon.
Clik here to view.
Young physician Doctor Jekyll (Lewis) works tirelessly at his clinic for the poor. A new case has him puzzled and intrigued: a young child who still lives despite appearing to be dead. The consultation makes him late for an evening dinner date with his fiancé, Bernice (Gladys Field) and her family. Her father, Dr. Lanyon (Alex Shannon), is already a little concerned about the match, given the young doctor’s dedication to his work. Breaking a subsequent date for the opera, Jekyll drinks an experimental potion he has concocted instead. The liquid transforms him into the ugly Mr. Hyde, who rushes out into the street and mugs a young woman for her purse. The police apprehend him, but he escapes.
As Jekyll, he rents a room in a squalid tenement where he can hole up in his Hyde persona. His increased absence from home causes Field to break off their engagement with a letter. When he goes to her house to explain, he finds she has already agreed to marry his romantic rival, Danvers Carew (Leslie Austin). Throwing himself into his work, he becomes increasingly dominated by Hyde and obsessed with the thought of revenge. He sets a fire in a downtown building and attacks Austin in a brutal frenzy, killing him as Field watches helplessly. But his savage crime wave has attracted the attention of the authorities, and the police are closing in.
Clik here to view.
According to Wikipedia, a ‘mockbuster’ is defined as a film ‘created to exploit the publicity of another major motion picture with a similar title or subject. Mockbusters are often made with a low budget and quick production to maximise profits.’ It’s a term the public has become quite familiar with in recent years, so it’s intriguing to discover that what could be the first example was made over 100 years ago. Because that’s precisely what this film is; a cheap, hurried production knocked together to ride the box office coattails of ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ (1920), the big-budget movie starring John Barrymore produced by the Famous Players-Lasky company.
As the film begins, it appears Haydon may have gotten a glimpse of the script of the competition, as proceedings start in a very similar fashion. However, Jekyll’s tardiness for a dinner date with his prospective bride’s family is lifted from the first act of the stage play by Thomas Russell Sullivan and Richard Mansfield, which debuted barely a year after the novel was published. Haydon’s main contribution is restricted to moving a few characters around; Dr Lanyon now doubles as the father of Jekyll’s beloved (now called Bernice), and Carew goes from parent to young lover. At least lawyer Edward Utterson (Harold Foshay) gets to keep his job, if not his first name.
Clik here to view.
One of the principal issues here is the small budget, which makes for a bare-bones production. Considering what’s on the shelves, Jekyll’s lab looks more like a wine cellar, and Hyde is left skulking in his wretched flat for long periods instead of tripping the light fantastic with various ladies of the night. This Hyde’s focus is revenge, not fun, but it’s a revenge that’s also affected by the lack of available cash. His first action is to play the firebug and set light to a building. Fair enough, but the film never identifies his target or links it to the objects of his vengeance. I guess it could be a building owned by his ex’s father or Field’s husband-to-be, but we never find out. Or it could be that he commits the crime because it dovetails nicely with a lot of library footage of a big fire and collapsing buildings that the writer-director had to hand. Perish the thought.
The screenplay also demonstrates other weaknesses, with leaps in logic and plot developments that are a little hard to swallow. How the dying child’s illness links up with Jekyll’s research is never really addressed beyond the fact that it has something to do with the doc’s theory that the soul does not exist. This suggests that perhaps his experiments drive the soul from his body, and the bestial form that remains results from its absence. However, I’ve not seen his research notes, and I doubt his work has been peer-reviewed. This interpretation does inform the oh-so-subtle religious subtext, though, with Fields even urging Jekyll to ‘let God’s sunshine into your heart.’ But these deep theological discussions never progress beyond ‘god is great’ and ‘science is a bit crap really, and will get you into all sorts of bother.’
Clik here to view.
Another issue is that Haydon makes no real effort to establish a timeline for these events, so the hook-up between Fields and Austin seems very sudden indeed. It’s so sudden, in fact, that it’s far easier to sympathise with Hyde’s pursuit of vengeance than it is to feel concerned for the young lovers’ welfare. To make matters worse, Hyde’s idea of evading capture is to scuttle down a public street, trying to look in all directions at the same time, crouch behind piles of crates, and hide in doorways. It’s an object lesson in how to look incredibly suspicious. He even behaves this way the first time he leaves Jekyll’s house, and that’s before he has committed any crime! Some of these flaws can be explained by the ending of the film, which has a twist in the tale. No spoilers here, but it’s so predictable that you’ve probably guessed it already, although, to be fair, it wouldn’t have been so tired and hackneyed back when the film was made.
Given the obvious gap in available production resources, it’s not fair to make direct comparisons between this effort and the Barrymore film. Still, the filmmakers invite such judgements by mounting such a blatant cash grab. How many cinemagoers of the day paid their ticket money expecting to visit Barrymore in the penthouse and ended up in the bargain basement with Lewis? So, whereas the Barrymore version has striking makeup and SFX for its time, this one…does not. Lewis’ Hyde is a man crouched over in a scrunched-up hat, a bad wig, joke shop teeth, and a bit of face putty. The transformations are rendered by Lewis pulling some faces, cutting away to something else (such as a brief shot of the butler brushing Jekyll’s hat), and then returning to the laboratory where, hey presto! Hyde is already fully formed.
Clik here to view.
It’s impossible to know for sure because most of the earlier silent versions of the story are lost, but Haydon’s film may be able to boast one first. Rather than set events in the twisted, fog-shrouded streets of Victorian London, the action is switched to contemporary New York. Obviously, this was a budgetary decision, but it may have been Jekyll and Hyde’s first international excursion, an innovation ignored by most subsequent mainstream adaptations. Curiously, the film is listed in all available public sources as having a 40-minute runtime, yet the version I saw, a restoration by Harpodeon, was 58 minutes long. This confusion may have been exacerbated by a later reissue of the film to theatres in 1934 in an even shorter presentation. This cut ran only 10 minutes and was presumably another attempt to cash in, this time on the box office success of the 1931 Frederic March version.
Lewis was a prolific character actor born in Philadelphia in 1869, whose movie career ran from 1914 to 1936. On the evidence of his performance here, it’s unsurprising that it lasted only briefly in the sound era. His Jekyll is stiff and wooden, his Hyde an eye-rolling, teeth-gnashing, gurning pantomime villain. Of course, this interpretation provides some entertainment value for a modern audience, but I suspect not in the way that the filmmakers intended. To be fair to Lewis, some of the surviving films he was involved in as a featured supporting actor are highly regarded, such as D W Griffith’s ‘Orphans of the Storm’ (1921) and the serial ‘Lightning Hutch’ (1926). He is best remembered now for his role in Benjamin Christensen’s ‘Seven Footprints to Satan’ (1929) and the serial ‘Tarzan the Tiger’ (1929). After the conversion to sound, he appeared in feeble old dark house mysteries ‘The Phantom’ (1931) and ‘The Monster Walks’ (1932). He made his last film in 1936 and passed away 22 years later.
Top marks for business acumen, I suppose, but not many for filmmaking.