Watch Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde For Free

Simply A Masterpiece

Good start, but then it gets ruined

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

I won't say much about the story itself, as many of you should already know it. That is unless you you haven't read this great Robert Louis Stevenson story, and to that I say get thee to a library and check it out. Or you could probably read it online. I don't know.Anyway, this 1920 silent film adaptation stars John Barrymore as the titular characters. The movie itself was great. The acting and costumes were fine, and the Jekyll/Hyde transformations were really cool. The Mr. Hyde makeup was very well done. Hyde looked disheveled, creepy and positively evil. Also looked like he hadn't bathed in weeks. That's a stark contrast to the clean, neat, upstanding Dr. Jekyll.My only pick is the score on this version could have been better. Sometimes the music didn't match the film. Kinda odd for some happy upbeat sounding music playing over a rather dismal scene. But the version I watched was on this "50 Horror Classics" DVD set which only cost me $9, so I guess I can't complain too much. Still a great film regardless.

Well I never read the novel and my knowledge about this story was pretty low before I watched this movie. Well yes the story is pretty straightforward and the characters are introduced in a minimalistic way. Except for Dr. Jekyll we don't get to know most of the characters for real, they look pretty cardboard doing what they are supposed to do. There is little surprises since almost everything that will happen is announced by the title cards. For me a silent is more effective when intertitles are mostly used for dialog while the visuals, the gestures and expressions of the cast should do the rest. That said John Barrymore looks really nasty as Mr. Hyde (now that was some nice piece of horror) and it's incredible both the good Jekyll and the evil Mr. Hyde were played by the same actor. The spider scene was memorable but overall the storytelling was rather choppy and dull.

Robert Louis Stevenson's story is familiar to most of us. Dr. Jekyll is an altruistic doctor, maintaining a clinic for the poor at his own expense, "the Saint Anthony" of London, a paragon of probity and a pillar of the community. But he's doing some research on drugs that his more conservative friends believe to be dangerous.They point out to Jekyll that every man has dual sides, a buried nature that is bad, even Jekyll himself, and, well, in short, it's not nice to fool around with Mother Nature. The Greeks would have agreed and called it hubris. To demonstrate the animal instincts in Jekyll, his friends take him to a louche dance hall where the seductive Nita Naldi is doing her number on the stage. Jekyll goggles at her and undergoes what he might have called a parasympathetic reflex.Back in his home laboratory, he develops a drug that turns him for a few minutes into an evil-looking creep with long hair, a skull shaped like an ancient Peruvian Indian's, and a face that is going through spasms of theatrical torture, before another dose of the drug returns him to normal. Actually, he kind of liked how it felt to be evil. It's fun to be naughty. So he begins using the identity of Mr. Hyde regularly, hiring a shabby room, consorting with low lifes, and generally embarking on what the titles call "a sea of license" and the less literate of today would call "the hedonistic treadmill." I don't think I want to get into the plot too much further. Let's just say that any man who stomps a child in the street and bashes in the head of his future father-in-law can't be all bad.Stevenson's book was published in 1886 in Victorian England. I don't think the story would have had quite the same impact in any other period. It was such a priggish time. Lamb chops acquired little paper panties, furniture legs were draped with tiny skirts, and roast fowl had "white meat" and "dark meat" instead of b*****s and l**s. Nobody was supposed to have a Mister Hyde buried inside him. Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" was published in 1890 and gave the public a glimpse of another Mr. Hyde. Sigmund Freud didn't invent the unconscious but he was about to popularize it and examine it in detail. He called all those buried animal impulses "das Es" -- "the id." There's a moral lesson here. Before you try your experimental drug on yourself, try it on mice first.

This is the first silent film I've watched since they used to show Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd on the telly before the telly became a huge pile of crap and to be honest with you, they need to show more films like this rather than programmes like 'Real housewives of Accrington', 'Whelk Catchers' and 'The Only Way is Grimsby'. This film was made in what seems like an impossible time ago, 1920, so in our age of information, where we're barraged with noise and data almost everywhere we go, how can a film with no audible dialogue stand up?Actually, it stands up quite well. The copy I had came with a terrible music soundtrack, so instead I watched the film while listening to Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 2. That seemed to work nicely.John Barrowmore is Dr Jekyll, man of the people, helping the poor and spending what marginal time he was with his girlfriend. Trouble is, his mates think he's boring. They think he needs to get out to some bars, hang around with some loose women, and generally blow off some steam. Jekyll seems to take this on board, but, being a man of science, comes up with a plan. If he can become someone else in order to get involved in a bit of debauchery, then he's in the clear guilt wise with his missus. Makes sense, right? Jekyll necks his new formula and before you know it, he's Mr Hyde. Mr Hyde likes his hooch, and likes his women, but he's also as mean as hell. Worse still, he's becoming the dominant personality and folks are noticing that Jekyll doesn't seem to be around that much any more. This might be some allegory on the duality of man and the struggle ever person faces with doing what's good and what's wrong. I don't know much about that, but I sure loved the bit where he stomped on that kid and then paid off the family. Or how about that bit where he beat the guy to death? Or the bit where Jekyll dreams about a genuinely creepy spider-guy crawling up his bed (I wasn't expecting that and was well impressed)?John Barrowmore was pretty good as both characters, going from a pale-faced, innocent Doctor to a gurning, hunched wretch. The film zips by pretty quickly (not much time for long drawn out dialogue in silent films) and has some genuinely unsettling moments, from the spider bit above to the bit in the bar where Hyde man handles two hookers. I was glad I broke my silent movie duck on this one.