Touches You

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

This scene occurs during a story being told by Nita Naldi - a flashback about a ring which was meant to contain poison. For some reason the scene was cut and the film was ruined. it appears in some prints and not others. Its crucial to the story because the ring has significance later on.The restored scene is of inferior quality and does not match the rest of the film.A man of princely fashion is lured to the table of a beautiful woman. Then his drink is switched with one in which the ring was used. A toast was made and the prince died thru poisoning. The Image disc has the scene I know that much.

Fairly incredible achievement in filmmaking for this early date carried largely by the excellent performance by John Barrymore. Like many silent films it is not the most literal rendering of time and place, the story takes place in a sort of whimsical fantasy London that doesn't seem to be any particular real life incarnation of the city (note the outfits of the servants and policemen). Barrymore's Mr. Hyde is one of the best to ever darken the screen. He created a timeless nefarious baddie that looks incredibly twisted and cool even today. Martha Mansfield looks like an Alphonse Mucha drawing come to life as Jekyll's love interest Millicent Carew. Sadly the love story as well as many other plot elements are not as well developed as other feature film adaptations, although this may be a limitation of the silent medium. Specifically the reasoning for Jekyll turning into Hyde didn't really make much sense to me. It simplifies the story into a tale of the corruption of a promising young man, rather than a warning against tampering with the nature of the soul.With the movie now going on 100 years old it's fairly amazing that it still stands as one of the best and most entertaining movies made of the Robert Louis Stevenson story.

Well I never read the novel and my knowledge about this story was pretty low before I watched this movie. Well yes the story is pretty straightforward and the characters are introduced in a minimalistic way. Except for Dr. Jekyll we don't get to know most of the characters for real, they look pretty cardboard doing what they are supposed to do. There is little surprises since almost everything that will happen is announced by the title cards. For me a silent is more effective when intertitles are mostly used for dialog while the visuals, the gestures and expressions of the cast should do the rest. That said John Barrymore looks really nasty as Mr. Hyde (now that was some nice piece of horror) and it's incredible both the good Jekyll and the evil Mr. Hyde were played by the same actor. The spider scene was memorable but overall the storytelling was rather choppy and dull.

This is the first silent film I've watched since they used to show Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd on the telly before the telly became a huge pile of crap and to be honest with you, they need to show more films like this rather than programmes like 'Real housewives of Accrington', 'Whelk Catchers' and 'The Only Way is Grimsby'. This film was made in what seems like an impossible time ago, 1920, so in our age of information, where we're barraged with noise and data almost everywhere we go, how can a film with no audible dialogue stand up?Actually, it stands up quite well. The copy I had came with a terrible music soundtrack, so instead I watched the film while listening to Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 2. That seemed to work nicely.John Barrowmore is Dr Jekyll, man of the people, helping the poor and spending what marginal time he was with his girlfriend. Trouble is, his mates think he's boring. They think he needs to get out to some bars, hang around with some loose women, and generally blow off some steam. Jekyll seems to take this on board, but, being a man of science, comes up with a plan. If he can become someone else in order to get involved in a bit of debauchery, then he's in the clear guilt wise with his missus. Makes sense, right? Jekyll necks his new formula and before you know it, he's Mr Hyde. Mr Hyde likes his hooch, and likes his women, but he's also as mean as hell. Worse still, he's becoming the dominant personality and folks are noticing that Jekyll doesn't seem to be around that much any more. This might be some allegory on the duality of man and the struggle ever person faces with doing what's good and what's wrong. I don't know much about that, but I sure loved the bit where he stomped on that kid and then paid off the family. Or how about that bit where he beat the guy to death? Or the bit where Jekyll dreams about a genuinely creepy spider-guy crawling up his bed (I wasn't expecting that and was well impressed)?John Barrowmore was pretty good as both characters, going from a pale-faced, innocent Doctor to a gurning, hunched wretch. The film zips by pretty quickly (not much time for long drawn out dialogue in silent films) and has some genuinely unsettling moments, from the spider bit above to the bit in the bar where Hyde man handles two hookers. I was glad I broke my silent movie duck on this one.