Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

Directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Starring Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart, Halliwell Hobbes, Holmes Herbert, Edgar Norton, Tempe Pigott.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “strange” tale gets its first synchronized sound treatment, shaped into a flamboyant if stagy horror melodrama. In his efforts to separate the conflicting human impulses toward good and evil, Victorian-era Dr. Jekyll unleashes his ferocious id in the form of a hulking, feral brute known as Mr. Hyde. Both parts are played by March, and alongside the combined photographic effects and techniques of director Mamoulian and photographer Karl Struss (with a nod toward subjectivity and expressionism), they’re practically the whole show. Exploration of the duality of man is a good one even in a reductive “penny dreadful” form. The transitions are static, and the simian makeup makes Hyde look like Planet of the Apes by way of “The Twilight Zone,” but its March’s theatricality that sells the monster inside and out. His efforts earned him an Academy Award (shared with Wallace Beery for The Champ); leggy Hopkins, meanwhile, makes a go of it, but she’s not very believable as a brazen bar singer. Was the motion picture that kicked off an event that had never been tried before: a film festival (held in Venice).

74/100