Freaktana A Major Disappointment

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Bob 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.

dla_one Fairly incredible achievement in filmmaking for this early date carried largely by the excellent performance by John Barrymore. Like many silent films it is not the most literal rendering of time and place, the story takes place in a sort of whimsical fantasy London that doesn't seem to be any particular real life incarnation of the city (note the outfits of the servants and policemen). Barrymore's Mr. Hyde is one of the best to ever darken the screen. He created a timeless nefarious baddie that looks incredibly twisted and cool even today. Martha Mansfield looks like an Alphonse Mucha drawing come to life as Jekyll's love interest Millicent Carew. Sadly the love story as well as many other plot elements are not as well developed as other feature film adaptations, although this may be a limitation of the silent medium. Specifically the reasoning for Jekyll turning into Hyde didn't really make much sense to me. It simplifies the story into a tale of the corruption of a promising young man, rather than a warning against tampering with the nature of the soul.With the movie now going on 100 years old it's fairly amazing that it still stands as one of the best and most entertaining movies made of the Robert Louis Stevenson story.

bkoganbing I've always thought that the popularization of Sigmund Freud's theory of the ego and the id helped directly with the popularity of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. Nowhere will you see it better expressed without voice than by John Barrymore in the silent screen version of the classic.In fact no player since Richard Mansfield who originated the acting role on stage was better acclaimed than Barrymore up to that time. Even without the use of his magnificent vocal instrument along with some superb makeup he carries off both the decent scientist Jekyll and the beast within he calls Hyde. No accident Stevenson chose that name. Hyde is something we do with that part of our nature.This is a short feature film for its time, still all the elements of the story are contained. The women in Jekyll/Hyde's life are Marian Mansfield as the decent girl he's engaged to and Nita Naldi as the Music Hall entertainer who Hyde tortures beyond endurance.One of John Barrymore's best silent films. Do not miss this version of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.

Bill Slocum Next to comedy, horror movies seem to hold their value best in the realm of silent cinema. Dark shadows, flickering lights, unintelligible conversations, and a pervading sense of time's unrelenting passage lend an uneasy quality of the macabre.That said, "Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde," the pioneering U. S. horror film starring John Barrymore, still comes off as boring and frustrating, not to mention more than a bit hokey. It manages to take a fine story and flatten it out into a handful of striking images and a lot of waiting in-between.Jekyll (Barrymore) is a good doctor in a bad spot. Ridiculed by his friends for his upright ways, he decides to embrace his own dark side by means of an experiment, with himself as the lab rat. He discovers a chemical that transforms him into a brute named Hyde, and runs wild in London's poorer quarters. But getting back to Jekyll proves difficult.There are a lot of allowances that have to be made in watching this century-old film, beginning with the histrionic qualities of the lead. Barrymore as the nasty Hyde is over-the-top. Overemoting was more in style then, but Barrymore pushes the envelope more than you might expect. I couldn't really adjust to it.A central problem is we are basically watching a stage play being adapted for film by a stage director (John S. Robertson) and starring a stage idol. Film was in its infancy, cameras were stationary and there were no pans, zooms, or crane shots. Other directors with more of a cinematic flair found ways to add dynamism without said tools. Robertson for the most part does not.Static composition adds to the problem of the first third, which is very slow and hokey. Dialogue is excessive and exposition-laden, really brutal in a silent. (Jekyll: "I tell you, Lanyon, we haven't begun to discover what science can do with the body and mind of man!" Lanyon: "You're tampering with the supernatural.") For long stretches, Barrymore as Jekyll stares at the camera, with a deer-in-headlights expression like Andrew McCarthy in a Brat Pack movie. Pains are taken to introduce characters with little or no bearing on the film's outcome.The film makes a big deal out of introducing two women, Martha Mansfield as Jekyll's upright lover Millicent, and Nita Naldi as Miss Gina, who draws Jekyll to the dark side merely by wiggling her hips and waving her arms in a very stiff dance number. But Millicent is left on the sidelines for most of the film, while Miss Gina disappears after Hyde rejects her.She may appear later in a bar scene; I'm not sure. There are a lot of odd moments in this film that left me confused, like the fate of a boy Hyde runs over. Robertson leans on the title cards so much you come to look for them at every plot point.There is great atmosphere in this movie; whoever did the lighting and set dressing did their job. Robertson does manage to get some eerie shots of Hyde late in the film, menacing Millicent from an up-tilted camera angle that shows real flair. You feel the London fog pressing in on all sides, and that is a good thing.But as a cinematic entertainment, and not a historical document, "Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde" fails to connect. At least it does with me. The best I can say for it is it shows why movies like "Nosferatu" and "The Golem" are so great, because they push the envelope in ways that are still startling and engaging. Two words, I fear, that can't be used here.

Lee Eisenberg One of the early adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel casts John Barrymore as the eponymous doctor whose potion releases his evil side. Specifically, this version has Jekyll curious about the existence of a malevolent personality in every person and wanting to be able to make said personality exist on its own...but, we all know what happens.Early on, I thought that the movie was moving kind of slowly since it seemed like the characters were merely having discussions about Jekyll's experiments. But once the good doc drinks his potion, the fun starts. As can be expected, Hyde is one nasty dude.All in all, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" has truly stood the test of time. A veritable piece of cinema history. Also starring Brandon Hurst, Martha Mansfield and Nita Naldi.