The Head of Janus (ger. Der Januskopf) was a 1920 silent film directed by F. W. Murnau. This adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was one of the earliest to reach film.
Released on September 17, 1920 by the Lipow Co., this is one of Murnau's lost films. The screenplay was written by Hans Janowitz, who collaborated with Carl Mayer on the script for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). While the film...
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The Head of Janus (ger. Der Januskopf) was a 1920 silent film directed by F. W. Murnau. This adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was one of the earliest to reach film.
Released on September 17, 1920 by the Lipow Co., this is one of Murnau's lost films. The screenplay was written by Hans Janowitz, who collaborated with Carl Mayer on the script for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). While the film itself does not survive, the scripts and related production notes do – and some of the more salient points of the plot can be pieced together from these scripts and production notes.
Conrad Veidt plays Dr. Warren (the Dr. Jekyll character) who changes into Mr. O'Connor (a parallel of Mr. Hyde). This transformation is brought about, not by experimentation with chemicals as in Stevenson's original, but through the supernatural agency of a bust of Janus (the Roman god of the doorway), which Warren / O'Connor purchases in the opening sequence as...
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