Choose your Hyde

Few monsters have proved as irresistible to cinema as Mr Hyde. Since Robert Louis Stevenson unleashed his respectable doctor’s murderous alter ego upon the world in 1886, the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has been repeatedly reinvented for the screen, and each time, the monster tells us something about the age that created him.

For Halloween, the Cinémathèque invites you to meet four very different Jekylls and Hydes. John S. Robertson’s silent 1920 classic turns the tale into a showcase for the extraordinary physical transformation of John Barrymore, while Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 masterpiece plunges into the sensual, feverish and forbidden, with Fredric March giving Hyde a feral life of his own. In 1941, Victor Fleming’s MGM production casts Spencer Tracy in the dual role, transforming the story into a darker psychological drama shaped by the constraints of Hollywood’s strict Production Code. And in Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (1959), Jean Renoir transports Stevenson’s Victorian nightmare to contemporary Paris, where Jean-Louis Barrault’s terrifying Opale seems to have escaped from the darkest corner of the human mind.

Four films, four visions of the same strange case:

A respected doctor discovers a way to separate the good and evil within himself. But when he unleashes his darker side, Dr Jekyll becomes Mr Hyde, a creature driven by desire, violence and an ever-growing appetite for freedom.

So, which Hyde will you choose…?