This film is somewhat interesting for comparison to later screen adaptations, but it's probably not worth watching otherwise. It's only one reel, however, so it's not a waste of time, either. There's a lot of condensing of the story, of course, to fit the one-reel standard. (For the one-reel format, I tend to prefer the original scenarios to the adaptations, due to this subtraction.) The plot here is reduced to mostly just the transformations. The most interesting element, otherwise, is how they film those transformations. The first two are done with substitution-splicing (or stop-substitutions), but after that, the other ones are done with direct cuts, crosscutting scenes (i.e. scene of Jekyll cuts to spatially separate action, then cuts back to prior scene with Jekyll now as Hyde).
Additionally, one actor plays Jekyll and a different actor plays Hyde (at least in some scenes). I don't recall that being done in any other screen adaptations of Stevenson's novella. Thanhouser, at the time, gave sole star credit to the one playing Jekyll, James Cruze. Hyde is the meatier role here, though.
