It is a performances centric movie

Great Film overall

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

In Victorian London, Dr. Henry Jekyll (Fredric March) investigates the duality of human being. He develops a drug and creates an alternate violent personality Edward Hyde inside himself.This is generally good as far old classic horror. The standout is the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde, and Fredric March's visceral performance as the unhinged Hyde. That grotesque face is a horror icon. The story does drag a little at times and meanders in its melodrama. It is heightened every time Hyde is on the screen. The movie is truly Jekyll and Hyde.

Less a horror film than a morality fable (you can choose evil but then you cannot choose good again), this entry of Stevenson's story is sublime. Supremely endowed by Mamoulian's directorial prowess and effective proclivity to innovation, the film towers above its own dated restrictions freeing itself to an aesthetic highland where even pose and verbose dialogue cannot hinder its virtues.March is neurotically fierce as Jekyll and grotesquely fearsome as the Neanderthalian Hyde, Hopkins does her usual superlative work and, above all, Mamoulian brings it home thundering his well-honed, yet experimental, mastery (pov narration, split screen imagery, pioneering use of sound, camera movement, editing pace, visual effects, you name it..). A master('s)work.

Yes, it creaks a bit here and there and has sometimes the look more of a silent film, but this is an easy talkie and a pre-code one at that. In fact there is much innovation here with audacious camera work and bold wipes from one scene to another. It is some time since I last saw this but it still retains its power. And its vigour! I was surprised all over again at the near nakedness of Miriam Hopkins in her scenes of seduction - that is seduction by her of all things. Later she will suffer as her resonating call to return echoes in the mind of Jekyll/Hyde. There is much talk at first of the true nature of man, the seeming duality of the noble and the base and the social hypocrisies and if in the end it becomes a little more farcical it still retains its power. It will be many years until the issues of sex and violence are so vividly portrayed or explored and this version of the book, albeit more based upon an early stage play will forever remain an essential cinema classic.

Robert Louis Stevenson's old Victorian, horror-in-the-smog horror classic gets its first sound movie adaptation.In the hands of director Rouben Mamoulian, it is a sexy, sophisticated and stylish affair - but with the odd melodramatic creak along the way (no surprises considering the script is based on a stage adaptation from the 1800's).Fredric March gives spirited and energetic performance(s) in the titular roles and he is more than matched by the cheap, tarty, indolent sexuality of Miriam Hopkins as the bubbly swilling object of Hyde's lustful attentions.Brilliant camera-work and make-up jiggery-pokery are the icing on the cinematic cake for this movie tour de force.