"My present condition of mind is much inferior in strength and solidity to what might have been had I not given loose reins to my lustful appetites. I have been ruined and enervated by a life of effeminacy and slothful indulgence."
John Coldstream, marine zoologist, 1830. Quoted in Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, Rebecca Stott (Spiegel and Grau, 2012)
When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" in 1886 it was the Victorian era, when scientists were often clergymen and doctors and struggled to reconcile ideas of God and man's nature, especially after the publication of Darwin's controversial Origin of the Species in 1859. By 1920, when John Barrymore played Jekyll and Hyde in John Robertson's film, there had been several film versions of Stevenson's story and at this point there are over one hundred film versions, the best ones being Rouben Mamoulian's pre-code version with Frederic March in 1931 and Victor Fleming's 1941 version with Spencer Tracy (both of which will be shown on Turner Classic Movies in December) ; my own favorites are Roy Ward Baker's Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor (1963).
John Robertson's 1920 version is fairly stagy, based, as most early versions were, on the 1886 stage play by Thomas Russell Sullivan, but it does have an extraordinary performance by John Barrymore, who changes from Jekyll to Hyde at first without makeup, though in later scenes grotesque makeup is used in dissolving from Jekyll to Hyde as Hyde descends into debauchery, ignoring his sweet fiancee (played by Millicent Carewe) for temptress Gina (Nita Naldi) and hanging out with prostitutes in opium dens. Jekyll had made the mistake of thinking he could change to Hyde "without touching his soul," eventually running out of the drug he needs to change back.
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