Word: stevensons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Just about gone are the days of Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and their good old-fashioned horror pictures. Occasionally one of them crops up again with a week-kneed off-shoot of Frankenstein, but every effort fails to recapture the mood. Originally, Stevenson's "Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" was one of the standout pictures of this melodramatic school; in today's guise, it is merely another problem in psychology...
...Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Metro Goldwyn-Mayer) is such a pretentious resurrection of Robert Louis Stevenson's ghoulish classic that it might well serve as a final mausoleum for the bones of the ill-fated Harley Street medico and his test-tube twin...
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde early in 1886. At the time he was living in Bournemouth, England, ill with tuberculosis, suffering recurrent hemorrhages of the lungs. Friends could visit him for no more than a quarter-hour at a stretch. One night his wife woke him from a particularly violent nightmare. "I was dreaming a fine bogey tale," he told her, and at once began sketching out the story of Jekyll and his evil companion-up to the transformation scene, where he had been awakened...
...Stevenson's story of the dual nature of man and the tendency of evil to triumph over good was no instant gift of a dream. It began in his childhood home in Edinburgh. There were a bookcase and a chest of drawers in his room made by a notorious split personality called Deacon Brodie-a respectable cabinetmaker by day who used his nights for thievery. The author never forgot the stories his nurse made up for him around the Deacon's furniture. These, together with a Frenchman's treatise on the subconscious, which he read years later...
Miss Lee, who is the wife of RKO Director Robert Stevenson, thought she had retired from the cinema when Milestone saw her in a British picture and cabled London to get her for Caroline. London told him to see Stevenson in Hollywood. He did. Milestone: "This cablegram says you know something about a woman named Anna Lee. I think she's what we want for my picture. Where is she?" Stevenson: "About four feet away from you. You have your back...