John S. Robertson | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / 1920

henry jekyll meets dorian gray

by Douglas Messerli

 

Clara Beranger (screenplay and intertitles, based on the play by Thomas Russell Sullivan and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson), John S. Robertson (director) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / 1920

 

While in the years leading up to his writing of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Stevenson was mulling over the significance of the murders of his former drinking companion Eugene Chantrelle and reading through the latest French theories of young male hysterics, the British general public just prior to the publication of his book were being treated to a far more sensational story published in the July 1885 issues of W. T. Stead’s The Pall Mall Gazette: “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” serialized in several sections some of which were six newspaper-sized pages in length with titles such as “The Violation of Virgins,” “The Confessions of a Brothel-Keeper,” “How Girls Were Bought and Ruined,” and “Strapping Girls Down,” together taking up the issue of child prostitution, “the abduction, procurement and sale of young English virgins to Continental ‘pleasure palaces.’”

     According to Stevenson biographer Jeremy Hodges the Pall Mall Gazette (P.M.G.) sold a million and a half copies of the issues about the “The Maiden Tribute” despite the fact that the owner of the greatest number of newsstands, W. H. Smith, refused to sell them given their lurid and prurient content such as the following passage:

 

“The examination [to confirm virginity] was very brief and completely satisfactory. But the youth, the complete innocence of the girl, extorted pity even from the hardened heart of the old abortionist. ‘The poor little thing,’ she exclaimed. ‘She is so small, her pain will be extreme. I hope you will not be too cruel with her’ – as if to lust when fully roused the very acme of agony on the part of the victim has not a fierce delight. To quiet the old lady the agent of the purchaser asked if she could supply anything to dull the pain. She produced a small phial of chloroform...

     From the midwife’s the innocent girl was taken to a house of ill fame, No. - , P - - -street, Regent-street, where, notwithstanding her extreme youth, she was admitted without question. She was taken upstairs, undressed, and put to bed, the woman who bought her putting her to sleep. She was rather restless, but under the influence of chloroform she soon went over. Then the woman withdrew. All was quiet and still. A few moments later the door opened, and the purchaser entered the bedroom. He closed and locked the door. There was a brief silence. And then there rose a wild and piteous cry – not a loud shriek, but a helpless, startled scream like the bleat of a frightened lamb. And the child’s voice was heard crying, in accents of terror, ‘There’s a man in the room! Take me home; oh, take me home!’ And then all once more was still.” (Pall Mall Gazette, July 6, 1885)

 

     The girls being described ranged from the ages of 12 to 14. Sir William Harcourt, the Home Secretary was so fearful of riots on a national scale, Hodges tells us, that he begged Stead to stop publication, to no avail.

     Stevenson, convalescing in Skerryvore, his home in Bournemouth, Dorset named after the lighthouse built by his great-uncle Alan, was sent copies of the newspaper by his friend William Ernest Henley, the model for Treasure Island’s one-legged Long John Silver, to whom he replied rather jocularly about what the rest of Scotland and England were reading with shock and dismay, ‘”The P.M.G. is wonderful; the simplicity of C. Morley [the paper’s manager] in person: a kind of impudent innocence, as of an inexperienced devil, or one of his own virgins. But maybe there is some truth in some of the things; and if there is, I suppose it’s worth doing. Anyway, it’s worth doing for the P.M.G.”

     No matter that the nightmare world he would soon create would be an all-male affair, as Hodges observes: “Louis did not need to outline what Mr Hyde did on his nocturnal adventures around Soho—thanks to Stead, all Britain knew and was gripped by a prurient frisson of horror and hysteria.”

     Within only a few months, after long delays going back to 1882, Britain would enact the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16, and also re-criminalized homosexual acts, most notably Section 11 introduced by MP Henry Labouchère, the so-called Labouchère Amendment I describe above, which provided for a term of

imprisonment “not exceeding two years,” with or without hard labor for any man found guilty of “gross indecency with another male, whether “in public or in private”—the definition of “gross indecency” evidently, as it is in so many such laws, up to the justice system, but generally interpreted as any male homosexual behavior short of sodomy, which remained a separate and far more serious crime.

      It should be no wonder then that by 1920 when Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky decided to film a silent version of the now famed Stevenson tale, they chose the stage version with its female romantic introductions as their model instead of returning to the more controversial all-male cast. Their audiences who had by this time assimilated the tastes of notorious Victorian heterosexual males such as Stead had described and Jack the Ripper had made world-famous, would almost have expected that Mr. Hyde’s craven nights had something to do with equally brazen females; while the good Doctor would naturally have by this time in his life found the friendship and desired companionship of a suitable, similarly class-oriented woman.

     Even in pre-code Hollywood, homosexuality was not a proper subject matter for a serious motion picture. Yet even here their female screenwriter, Clara Beranger, found ways to introduce subjects closer to the original by coding them through literary references and their structures in a manner that would be apparent only to a select group of viewers. And surely her scenario and presumably the play’s plot on which the film was based (I offer up the effort of comparing the play to the 1920 film to some younger researcher and essayist, since I don’t know the location of a manuscript and have not read it) will leave Stevenson’s populist audience—who were convinced they knew of what Hyde’s nocturnal activities consisted—in some confusion and disappointment. For neither Jekyll nor Hyde seems truly interested in the female sex.

     In the film, unlike the fiction, the young and beautiful girl of “sheltered innocence,” Millicent Carewe (Martha Mansfield), the daughter of a gentleman in Henry Jekyll’s circle of friends, is clearly in love with the young idealist Jekyll (John Barrymore), who not only is a noted doctor and scientist exploring areas which another of his peers, Dr. Richard Lanyon (Charles Willis Lane) finds abhorrent and dangerous, perhaps relating to the “supernatural”—Lanyon appears to be even  afraid to peer into the lens of his friend’s microscope for fear what he might see there—but runs a free clinic for the poor to which he devotes most of his off hours. Because of his work at the clinic, Jekyll shows up after dinner at the first party of the film, leaving Millicent very much alone, having to rebuff the vaguely romantic attentions of yet another gentlemen of their circle, the lawyer John Utterson (J. Malcolm Dunn), the original narrator of Stevenson’s work.

      One might describe Millicent as a figure entirely in suspension until the very last frames of the film when she suddenly springs into action by appearing at his laboratory door, a motion that results in his suicide through the poison he has kept within the ring Edward Hyde has stolen from Gina’s finger on their first meeting. If Hyde and Gina might ever have been described as a couple, the metaphor of the poisonous ring should make evident that it stands as a total inversion of the wedding ceremony.

      Although Hyde takes up living with the Italian music hall dancer Gina (Nita Naldi), we are given little evidence of sexual contact, as she too seems to be left pretty much alone despite the fact that the intertitles tell us that Hyde is racking up “the victims of his depravity.”

     Who these victims are and what kinds of depravity Hyde is engaged in, we’re never told, but it is evidently not of the heterosexual kind he might have with Gina. Indeed, the only time we observe returning to their apartment is when he tells her that their relationship is over and demands that she immediately leave. In the film he sees her only one other time when, after attempting to resist drinking the potion which releases Hyde, he finds himself again unable to resist temptation, releasing Hyde to visit his own neighborhood haunts where he meets up with Gina and a far younger girl at a bar, demanding that if she might imagine that we would return to her she need only compare herself with the prettier woman to which he shows a brief attraction, again through a mirror image focusing on the outer visage rather than what lies within. Moreover, he soon leaves both of them to visit an opium den, apparently disinterested in whatever either of them might have to offer him.

     In sum, the introduction of female figures hardly seems to create any deep sense of romance in the 1920 film as opposed to Jekyll’s passionate need for his fiancée’s love in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version of Stevenson’s haunting tale.

     In fact, it forces us to wonder even more about the sexuality of both Jekyll and Hyde. As in Stevenson’s work, Jekyll, inexplicably to the outside world leaves his entire estate and the permission to come and go at will to his friend Edward Hyde, much to the wonderment of his butler Poole, his lawyer Utterson, and the other friends with whom Utterson discusses the matter. They do not, as in the novella, speculate that Hyde may be blackmailing their friend nor do they even wonder if the many long periods of absence by Jekyll and the odd nighttime comings and goings of Hyde represent something located on “Queer Street.” They are only stunned by the fact that Jekyll would have such a crude and deformed friend, although in this film version Barrymore does not attach any appliances to his face, but merely extends his hands into long monstrous-like paws, and wears his suddenly long hair in a kind of stringy pageboy cut.  In fact, they find it hard to even catch a glimpse of Hyde until Millicent’s father, Sir George Carewe (Brandon Hurst) makes an unannounced visit and is beaten to death for his bother.

     The only time when Utterson and his cousin Edward Enfield (Cecil Clovelly) actually encounter Hyde and deal with him for any length of time is when coming down the street where they are walking Hyde stumbles over a young boy playing in the street and instead of apologizing and attempting to help him up, cruses the kid and appears to lean into him even further in a kind of hurtful vengeance. Shocked by his behavior, they insist he pay the father a sum of money, which he is only happy to do, taking them to Jekyll’s house which he enters and exits with a signed check, the signature being Jekyll’s. When he attempts to simply hand it over as payment to the father, they remind him that it’s not written out in his name. Hyde insists that he will accompany the father to the bank, proving that it is still valid, startling Jekyll’s friends for the Doctor’s willingness to protect Hyde.

 

     Something similar with a young girl happens in Stevenson’s original novella. But here it is given further significance when we recall Jeykll’s own loving attention to two ill boys in his charity ward, one of which he carries, almost like beloved baby to his bed, the boy having evidently broken his leg. If there is any scene in this movie that might give us some small indication of what Hyde’s “depravities” might involve, we might only compare Jekyll’s loving, slightly pedophilic attentions to his sick young boys with Hyde’s outright abuse of them to render a possible clue. And surely that might accord with the child abuse that his newspaper-reading-fans might have imagined the original Hyde was involved with, even if the gender were to be reversed.

      In a sense, it doesn’t entirely matter since the film and presumably play also overlaid the structural pattern of another homosexual work woven into Stevenson’s deeply coded one. One of the new characters introduced into this film, Sir George Carewe, may have kept his beautiful daughter pure, as one of Jeykll’s circle jokes, “as only a man of the world could,” suggesting that having lived, as Carewe himself admits, his life to the fullest, he is determined to see that his daughter doesn’t. In short, Carewe is a sexist cad who spouts—particularly when Jekyll joins the group—a series of outrageous aphorisms and epigrams that might make even the witty Lord Henry Wotton of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray blush.

      In this version, it is Carewe, the figure at the center of their male bachelor’s club, who first mouths the challenges to conventional behavior, not Jekyll as in Stevenson’s work, making Barrymore’s Jekyll a kind of youthful purist who Carewe and the others gladly corrupt. Having heard of Jekyll’s numerous good deeds and his high moral values to which a couple of his guests attest, when Jekyll arrives late, Carewe takes out his pique against the young man he has previously mentioned by challenging him in several statements.

       In this silent film a considerable amount of intertitles are devoted to their conversation:

 

                              Carewe: In devoting yourself to others, Jekyll, aren’t you

                                            neglecting the development of your own life?

                              Jekyll:  Isn’t it by serving others that one develops oneself,

                                           Sir George?

                              Carewe: Which self? A man has two—as he has two hands.

                                            Because I use my right hand, should I never use 

                                            my left?

                              Jekyll:  Your really strong man fears nothing. It is the weak

                                           one who is afraid of—experience.

                              Carewe: A man cannot destroy the savage in him by

                                            denying its impulses. The only way to get rid of

                                            a temptation is to yield to it.

 

     Before the evening is over, Carewe has dragged Jekyll to a music hall where he introduces him to the Italian dancer Gina, Jekyll repulsed the very idea. Carewe further challenges him, asking if he is afraid of “temptation,” but Jekyll leaves with Lanyon, returning home to stew over the challenges that Sir George has set out before him.

 

    It is those dinner table and late-night incidents which set Jekyll on a scientific search to see if through chemical potions he might separate the two beings within every man, allowing the good and honorable man the protection for his other, baser self to give in and experience all temptations. As we know, he believes he succeeds by creating his friend Hyde.

     This film’s kinship with Wilde’s famed fiction does not end here moreover. Unlike Stevenson’s work, director John S. Robertson and writer Beranger add yet another Dorian Gray twist to their story as each time Hyde escapes from Jekyll’s psyche he becomes more vile and physically more hideous, serving Jekyll in the same role as the portrait does Gray, the double image representing all the moral decay of the beast within while the outer shell, Jekyll, retains his handsome visage.

     It is for this very reason and the fact that Hyde increasingly takes over Jekyll’s body that in the 1920 film version Jekyll gives up communication with nearly all his former acquaintances, increasing their worry about him and their speculations concerning what may be happening in the dark confines of his home and laboratory. When Carewe finally visits him, Hyde kills him arguing oddly enough from Jekyll’s viewpoint, that it was he who corrupted him in the first place. For that moment before Hyde chases down the elderly roué and beats him to death, it is hard to know whether the action belongs to Hyde or Jekyll; and there is some passing satisfaction rather than utter horror in the fact that Carewe is finally meeting with his punishment for his deviant and selfish life.

      By this time in the film, however, we have come to realize that there is very little difference between the two men except how they appear to the world. And Jekyll realizes that in the struggle to control the vessel of his body, Hyde has won; Jekyll has no choice but to destroy what is left of himself, denying Hyde any further access to the world around him. That he transmutes after death back into the visage of Jekyll permits Utterson to declare to that Hyde has killed Jekyll, while we know that, in fact, Jekyll has destroyed his hidden existence.

     By introducing these elements of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, both director and writer make it even clearer that, as with Dorian Gray, Hyde’s depravities may have involved women, by they have surely also included homosexual events. Indeed, the only murder we witness is of a male “friend.” And in that respect, Robertson’s film remains somewhat truer to Stevenson’s original despite its introduction of women and presumed romance, both of which seem to be cancelled out by Jekyll’s and Hyde’s numerous other activities.

     Although this film was well received in its day, after Mamoulian’s 1931 version premiered the latter was long believed to be the superior work of cinema, something which is still difficult to argue against. Yet over the years, Robertson’s film has begun to be rethought and newly appreciated. There are some certainly wonderful cinematic scenes, particularly when Carewe takes Jekyll for a night on the town, the scenes for which are tinted in dark blue for the outside scenes, and light pink for the musical hall dances with Gina.

     To watch Barrymore undergo his transformations without the absurd applications of prosthetics and costumes that actor Fredric March was forced to suffer, moreover, is a pleasure, Barrymore acting out the potion’s effects instead of relying on camera tricks. And Barrymore, although just as terrifying as Hyde does not need to resort to the literal monkey shenanigans that March is forced to enact.

      The scene where Hyde tramples the young boy is quite brilliantly conceived. And observing Jekyll rush back and forth from his laboratory to his drawing room to the full-length mirror which he eventually drags into his laboratory to watch over and perhaps even “enjoy” his transformations, startlingly reiterates Stevenson’s own description of the glass behind the door, “the very fortress of identity.”*

     Arguably, along with the foreign films of the 1920s, Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) and F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde not only helped to establish the horror film genre which would come into full fruition a decade later, but made it clear to filmmakers the coded sexual markers which were innate to the very structures of the genre with its “them and us,” “outsider and insider,” and other doubling elements that US writer Edgar Allan Poe had already hinted at—codes which would be particularly advantageous when nearly all openly sexual references, homosexual and heterosexual, came under the intense scrutiny of the Movie Production Code and other censoring organizations.

     The 1920 film, in short, attends to Stevenson’s original far more carefully, and accordingly is more complex and of interest to LGBTQ viewers than is Mamoulian’s more thoroughly hetero-sexualized movie where the formerly gay figure at the center of the work is not only killed but made to disappear.

 

*In the original manuscript version when Utterson breaks into Jekyll’s laboratory, the butler Poole comments on the mirror: “This glass has seen some queer doings,” (in the final text the word is changed to “strange”), making it is clear that in Jekyll’s constant peering into it he has become a kind of Narcissus staring into the odd beauty of himself as an “other,” someone he might kiss, love, and with whom he might even have sex were he not so very ugly to behold. Surely this is the same kind of experience that Dorian had in checking up from time to time on his hidden painting. 

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2021