Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920 Paramount film) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920 Paramount film) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a 1920 horror silent film produced by Famous Players-Lasky and released through Paramount/Artcraft. The film, which stars John Barrymore, is based on the 1886 novella "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson. John S. Robertson directed the production, and Clara Beranger wrote this adaptation's screenplay or “scenario”. The story, set in late Victorian London, portrays the tragic consequences of a doctor's experiments in separating the dual personalities he thinks defines all humans: one good, the other evil. The film is
Robert Louis Stevenson I, and many Stevenson documents were auctioned off in 1918. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but he was seen for much of the 20th century as a second-class writer. He became relegated to children's literature and horror genres, condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf (daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen) and her husband Leonard Woolf, and he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion reached its nadir in the 1973 2,000-page "Oxford Anthology of English Literature" where he was entirely unmentioned, and "The Norton Anthology of English Literature"