Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)

John S. Robertson, John Barrymore, Martha Mansfield, Brandon Hurst · 1920 · 82 min

John Barrymore performs the first transformation in front of the camera with no cuts and no makeup — he simply contorts his face and hands until he is someone else, and it is more unsettling than any of the prosthetics that came later. The best of the several 1920 versions. Barrymore's Hyde is a spider of a man, all elongated fingers and forward lean, and the theatrical staginess around him only sharpens him.

Chosen print (2026-08-23): Archive.org item rec-20231117041024 — 720x480 @ 3.9 Mbps, 2.39 GB, 82.2 min.

Selected by a catalogue-wide print sweep, which scores candidates on resolution and bits per pixel and rejects broadcast captures, AI upscales, colorised and frame-interpolated copies, wrong cuts, and frames whose shape the film never had. The downloaded file was verified byte-for-byte against Archive.org's published size and MD5, and the torrent was generated from that exact file.

Silent-era runtimes are advisory — projection speed was never standardised, so the same print runs materially longer or shorter depending on the transfer's frame rate. Runtime was weighed accordingly rather than used as a hard filter.

Watched end to end (2026-08-25). The bytes prove we fetched the file the report names; the watch confirmed it is the right print.

Public domain in the United States by expiry of the full copyright term: published 1920, and every work published that year entered the US public domain on January 1, 2016, at the end of the 95-year term — renewal history is moot. The picture and its accompaniment are verified separately: whatever score the chosen print carries is a separate work on its own clock, cleared at print selection and documented in the Print Report before this page ships a torrent.