The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm
This screening is the first in a selection of films presented by actor and screenwriter Reece Shearsmith, an occasional series that will see him share his cinematic influences. It will be fascinating to discover the others from one of the creators of League of Gentlemen and Inside No 9 TV programmes.
Time Out review:
More accessible than Lynch's enigmatically disturbing Eraserhead, The Elephant Man has much the same limpidly moving humanism as Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage in
describing how the unfortunate John Merrick, brutalised by a childhood
in which he was hideously abused as an inhuman freak, was gradually
coaxed into revealing a soul of such delicacy and refinement that he
became a lion of Victorian society. But that is only half the story the
film tells. The darker side, underpinned by an evocation of the steamy,
smoky hell that still underlies a London facelifted by the Industrial
Revolution, is crystallised by the wonderful sequence in which Merrick
is persuaded by a celebrated actress to read Romeo to her Juliet. A
tender, touching scene ('Oh, Mr Merrick, you're not an elephant man at
all. No, you're Romeo'), it nevertheless begs the question of what
passions, inevitably doomed to frustration, have been roused in this
presumably normally-sexed Elephant Man. Appearances are all, and like
the proverbial Victorian piano, he can make the social grade only if his
ruder appendages are hidden from sensitive eyes; hence what is
effectively, at his time of greatest happiness, his suicide. A
marvellous movie, shot in stunning black-and-white by Freddie Francis.
Tom Milne
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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