The story starts out talking about Hyde as if he were a true monster who had murdered his wife. It shows a furry-headed, heavy-browed Hyde running into a house which is then set ablaze by a pursuing mob. Jekyll, now looking like a normal human, steps out of an upper story window and falls to his death.
But (SPOILER!) thirty years later, his old friend Dr. Lanyon is revealed to have falsified Jekyll's notes in a scheme to drive the Son of Dr. Jekyll mad, so Lanyon can steal the Jekyll estate...to replace his own fortune lost defending Jekyll Sr.
Aside from the moral backflips Lanyon has to perform to go from valiant friend to chiseler and murderer, the movie never comes clean about who Mr. Hyde was. In order to make young Jekyll look insane, Lanyon fakes those notes and swaps "Acrostyn" for another chemical, so that Jekyll Jr. turns hairy and fanged - then faints - in the movie's only transformation scene. It's an odd medical breakthrough for Lanyon to have gone broke defending.
Or is young Jekyll only hallucinating his transformation? Lanyon even boasts that he only needed mob hysteria to turn Edward Jekyll into a "monster." But a hallucination would be an even bigger cheat - because the audience sees an actual transformation after Edward is unconscious.
Then the closing crawl smugly notes that both Jekyll's original notes and Lanyon's forgery are archived at Scotland Yard as a solution to the Jekyll/Hyde myth. Huh?? When did it become a myth? Opening crawl, meet end credits! The movie does get props for reusing Mamoulian's color-filter trick for revealing painted makeup in stages from the Fredric March 1932 version (actually, first used to "cleanse the lepers" in DeMille's 1927 King of Kings.) And Holmes Herbert from that film shows up here as a policeman. Lester Matthews (the hero of "The Werewolf of London") plays lawyer Utterson, a character from Stevenson's novella usually omitted in screen adaptations. Alexander Knox, the model of rectitude as "Wilson", is wonderfully manipulative as Lanyon.
Apparently, the idea was to make a monster movie with a minimum of expensive makeup sessions, and the script seems to have had numerous contradictory revisions. The production values are fairly threadbare, not many steps up from a 3 Stooges short of the era; at one point, Jekyll's "1890" home is clearly a modern 1951 house with flagstone facing. But the studio cleverly reuses the big fire scene from the opening to close the picture with a bang.
But that bang is still not loud enough to make you forget all the illogical and dishonest tricks the story plays on the viewer.
But (SPOILER!) thirty years later, his old friend Dr. Lanyon is revealed to have falsified Jekyll's notes in a scheme to drive the Son of Dr. Jekyll mad, so Lanyon can steal the Jekyll estate...to replace his own fortune lost defending Jekyll Sr.
Aside from the moral backflips Lanyon has to perform to go from valiant friend to chiseler and murderer, the movie never comes clean about who Mr. Hyde was. In order to make young Jekyll look insane, Lanyon fakes those notes and swaps "Acrostyn" for another chemical, so that Jekyll Jr. turns hairy and fanged - then faints - in the movie's only transformation scene. It's an odd medical breakthrough for Lanyon to have gone broke defending.
Or is young Jekyll only hallucinating his transformation? Lanyon even boasts that he only needed mob hysteria to turn Edward Jekyll into a "monster." But a hallucination would be an even bigger cheat - because the audience sees an actual transformation after Edward is unconscious.
Then the closing crawl smugly notes that both Jekyll's original notes and Lanyon's forgery are archived at Scotland Yard as a solution to the Jekyll/Hyde myth. Huh?? When did it become a myth? Opening crawl, meet end credits! The movie does get props for reusing Mamoulian's color-filter trick for revealing painted makeup in stages from the Fredric March 1932 version (actually, first used to "cleanse the lepers" in DeMille's 1927 King of Kings.) And Holmes Herbert from that film shows up here as a policeman. Lester Matthews (the hero of "The Werewolf of London") plays lawyer Utterson, a character from Stevenson's novella usually omitted in screen adaptations. Alexander Knox, the model of rectitude as "Wilson", is wonderfully manipulative as Lanyon.
Apparently, the idea was to make a monster movie with a minimum of expensive makeup sessions, and the script seems to have had numerous contradictory revisions. The production values are fairly threadbare, not many steps up from a 3 Stooges short of the era; at one point, Jekyll's "1890" home is clearly a modern 1951 house with flagstone facing. But the studio cleverly reuses the big fire scene from the opening to close the picture with a bang.
But that bang is still not loud enough to make you forget all the illogical and dishonest tricks the story plays on the viewer.