The opening sequence of Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) is shot entirely from the protagonist's first-person point of view, intending to reproduce "a real a vicarious experience," according to the director; "The audience does not see him-they are him" (Robinson 1961, 125). Mamoulian's film is arguably the very first Hollywood production to employ the first-person point of view shot with such extensive stylistic bravado. Consequently, Mamoulian's theoretical understanding of the technique, and its ostensible reproduction of subjective experience, is widely accepted as intuitive and self-evident. Film critic Michael Sevastakis wholeheartedly accepts the spectatorial implications of Mamoulian's technique, describing the viewer as a "participant of the action through the subjective camera, who intimately shares the protagonist's experiences" (1993, 125). Thomas here argue that the opposite is true: The extended use of the point of view shot, interspersed throughout Mamoulian's film, actually distances the spectator from identifying with Henry Jekyll. More specifically, identification with the character in this opening sequence is quite impossible, at least until Jekyll looks into a mirror, a full 1 minute and 38 seconds into the lengthy setpiece. While the mirror functions as a concrete device, tactfully employed to reveal the face of Fredric March as Henry Jekyll, the mirror in Mamoulian's film also underscores how we understand the cinema itself, specifically with regard to the dynamics of identification and the spectatorial gaze.