Jekyll and Hyde

Mamoulian's version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is widely regarded as the greatest film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886. Much of the success of the film is the result of Mamoulian's technique. The film is full of both obvious and not so obvious point of view shots, allowing the viewer to get a sense of the subjective view of certain characters …

… one that recurs many times in the film; where the camera starts out wide and zooms or tracks into an image much in the way a microscope might. This final pull back might seem like a calming endpoint, a return to order, but the relentlessly boiling pot in the foreground, with all its primitive overtones and undertones, suggests that what has been disturbed cannot be bottled back up through the death of one man.