Film

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931)

Director: Rouben Mamoulian

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Still the best version of Stevenson's novella, shot in pre-Hayes Code days and therefore able to trace Jekyll's troubles to their source in sexual repression. Jekyll's frustration over the enforced delay in his marriage becomes a reiterated motif in the dialogue, and just in case anyone misses the point, it is underlined by diagonal wipes linking him to his fiancée at moments of stress preceding transformation. Cunningly, Mamoulian opens the film with a lengthy subjective sequence, so that our first real view of Jekyll (an admirable performance from March) is when he embarks on his lecture on the possibility of separating the two natures of man: a ploy which simultaneously arouses curiosity about this man, indicates his soaring intellectual arrogance, and divorces him from society as represented by his distinguished, disapproving audience. The rest, stunningly shot by Karl Strauss as a visual tour de force, is both superb and slyly subversive.

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