The Elephant Man

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.