Notes:
Dr. Henry Jekyll / Mr. Hyde: John Barrymore
Millicent Carew: Martha Mansfield
Sir George Carew: Brandon Hurst
Dr. Richard Lanyon: Charles Lane
Edward Enfield: Cecil Clovelly

Directed: John S. Robertson

Summary: "In each of us, two natures are at war--the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our hands lies the power to choose--what we want most to be, we are."

Dr. Lanyon visits Dr. Jekyll and objects to his microscopic investigations: "Damn it! I don't like it! You're tampering with the supernatural!" Jekyll visits his clinic, a "human repair shop." Meanwhile, an odious Sir George Carew awaits Jekyll with a table of guests and his daughter Millicent. Carew is suspicious: "No man could be as good as he looks." He badgers Jekyll once he does arrive: "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." He sneers at Jekyll's self-denial, insisting he "should live!" He takes Jekyll to a seedy nightclub where the "h'Italian dancer, Miss Gina" entertains and comes on to Jekyll.

Jekyll had "awakened" to his "baser nature," apparently, and begins wondering about the two impulses being housed separately, but a friend says, "that's sacrilege. Man would be both God and Devil!"

But he proceeds, drinks, is transformed. He looks demented and his hands are elongated. He restores himself quickly. But with a mirror brought to the lab, "Hyde set forth on a sea of license." Hyde visits Miss Gina and learns of a ring she owns which was once used to store poison. Meanwhile, Millicent is turning down the proposal from a suitor.

Jekyll makes Hyde his beneficiary in his will. Hyde leaves a trail "strewn with the victims of his depravity." He throws Gina out. Jekyll is bored with Millicent's piano noodlings, but resolves to be true, and Hyde disappears for a while. Hyde "long caged burst forth" though, visiting a seedy bar and finding a new girl. Gina appears haggard. While the Carews are concerned about "Jekyll's disappearance," Hyde tramples a boy, is pursued, flithers through papers in Jekyll's lab, and brings a check to the victim's family." Jekyll realizes that his "evil nature . . . threatened to dominate his whole life."

Carew questions Jekyll about the Hyde connection and objects to his intended marriage with Millicent. Jekyll blames Carew, whose cynicism "made me ashamed of my goodness." He transforms involuntarily, beats Carew to death, and flees. Police search Soho, while another draught brings back Jekyll. But "outraged Nature took her hideous revenge": while asleep, an illusory giant tarantula creeps onto Jekyll, and he transforms into Hyde involuntarily again. He soon has run out of the drug to restore Jekyll, so as Jekyll, he locks himself in the lab and sends his servant Poole to chemists. He prays violently.

Millicent comes to the door. He turns into Hyde and attacks her, but has some kind of seizure as she escapes. Hyde turns into Jekyll in death--he had taken poison from Gina's ring in suicidal desperation. Millicent is told that "Hyde has killed Jekyll."

Commentary: Initially, Barrymore contorts his face for the transformation, but eventually more make-up and physical deformities are added. This Hyde is made to look like a tarantula, or as James Twitchell says in Dreadful Pleasures, "rather like an albino coconut with dark bangs" (246). Twitchell also notes that the "splitting of the female role at last allows us to see what was lurking in Stevenson's text; Hyde's aggression is sexual and its object is displaced from Jekyll's porcelain madonna to the fleshy tramp" (247), but he finds the spider image inappropriate to what should be Hyde's virility.