Movie Review – Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1912)
Principal Cast : James Cruze, Florence La Badie, Marie Eline, Jane Gail, Marguerite Snow, Harry Benham.
Synopsis: Dr. Henry Jekyll experiments with scientific means of revealing the hidden, dark side of man and releases a murderer from within himself.
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As a brisk 10-minute silent short from 1912, Lucius Henderson’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic literary work is essentially a condensed, Cliff Notes version brought to life on screen. Anyone familiar with the story—a doctor drinks a mysterious potion that inadvertently transforms him into a monstrous rage-beast, leading to a spree of mayhem—will recognise the core motifs of the fable. The duality of man, torn between virtue and evil, is at play here, though the single-reel short lacks much in the way of coherence or genuine narrative depth. Still, it remains an interesting piece of cinematic history.
James Cruze takes on both the Jekyll and Hyde roles, transforming into a wild, fang-toothed monster after ingesting the ominous liquid, only to revert back to his mild-mannered self after drinking an antidote. Unfortunately for Jekyll, Hyde’s emergence becomes more persistent, leading to tragedy when he murders the father of Jekyll’s romantic interest (Florence La Badie), a local minister. What follows is a very brief chase before Hyde, realising he is doomed to remain a monster forever, drinks poison and kills himself. All very tragic, and all played at breakneck pace thanks to Henderson’s perfunctory, low-budget direction.
As one might expect from a 10-minute silent short made in the early 20th century, there’s little in the way of “visual effects” beyond some rudimentary transformation sequences. Cruze’s shift from Jekyll to Hyde is achieved through simple snap-cuts between his “good” and “evil” personas whenever the plot demands it. The quality of the surviving film print is, unsurprisingly, in rough shape—the original negative lost to time—but it remains an intriguing watch for fans of early cinema. The set design is rudimentary at best: Jekyll’s laboratory resembles a glorified broom closet, and the outdoor scenes seem to have been shot simply by rotating the camera on a tripod, eliminating any real sense of depth or scale.
Performance-wise, the acting is similarly simplistic. Cruze plays Hyde as a screeching, spastic ghoul, his exaggerated movements cutting through the film’s silence, while the largely uncredited supporting cast does what they can with limited material. It’s hardly a showcase of virtuoso filmmaking, but as an early attempt at adapting Stevenson’s novella, it holds a certain scrappy charm—albeit one best appreciated by cinephiles rather than casual viewers.
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