Description
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.
Details
Released: Wed 6 Sep 2006
Catalogue Number: 0783412
Rating: 
Region: 4 - Suitable for Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, South America, Central America, Pacific Islands and Caribbean
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Availability
Estimated despatch 5-10 days after ordering.