The Elephant Man
1980, 123 minutes, Rated M
The Elephant Man is as bizarre a story as anything Charles Dickens ever imagined. What is more, it's true. John Merrick (JOHN HURT) was the worst 'freak' case known to Victorian medicine. A hideous disease had distorted his face and body from birth into a physical parody of a pachyderm, and he remained a prize 'specimen' in a travelling sideshow until a young surgeon called Treves (ANTHONY HOPKINS) salvaged him from the circus tent and coaxed out of the swollen husk a strangely sweet and unembitted personality.
A finely attuned cast support Hopkins and Hurt: JOHN GIELGUD, ANNE BANCROFT and WENDY HILLER among them. And photographer Freddie Francis' black and white camera work, distancing us from the Technicolor present, registers a Victorian era of industrial pollution and human exploitation in which a case like Merrick's seems almost a mutation caused by the sacrilegious elements that turned men into machines and set machines against men. It is, in every sense of the word, a luminous film.
- Director:
- David Lynch [25],
- Starring:
- Wendy Hiller [9], Anne Bancroft [23], John Hurt [54], John Gielgud [39], Anthony Hopkins [60],
- Screen Formats:
- Widescreen
- Language and Sound:
- English Dolby Digital Stereo
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