It’s said that executive producer Mel Brooks found David Lynch to be so forthright and plain-spoken in his approach to film art, that when he first hired him to direct The Elephant Man he called him ‘James Stewart.’ Like a film-student version of It’s a Wonderful Life, Lynch experienced the daydream of every imaginative but not-particularly well connected young filmmaker. In the late 1970s he jumped from obscure A.F.I. fellow, to night-crawling midnight screening mystery man — and then directly to the front rank of international filmmakers.
At first we couldn’t connect the Mel Brooks we knew with his visionary support of David Lynch. The comic legend behind Young Frankenstein proved his commitment to screen horror with a film that extends and perhaps transcends the genre. Everybody understands that Frankenstein’s monster is a sympathetic creation, but how many horror movies have really explored the crisis of humanity in monster-dom? By 1980 most screen horror concerned gore-porn zombies, razor-wielding maniacs or vomit-wrenching possession sagas. The Made-in-England The Elephant Man has a different agenda. It’s the best Hammer Film that Hammer never made, with a superb script, top-rank performers and a return to the camera by the artist that filmed Sons and Lovers and The Innocents.
The film roughly follows the true story of Joseph Merrick, renamed as John Merrick (John Hurt), a revoltingly deformed young man who must wear a hood in public. He cannot walk straight or even lie down without risking asphyxiation. Surgeon Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) performs progressive work with anesthetics at a London Hospital. He takes an interest in Merrick when he sees him exhibited as a sideshow freak, by the scurrilous mountebank Bytes (Freddie Jones). Treves ‘rents’ Merrick for some study and a medical conference, but loses track of him after the abusive Bytes takes his show to France. Merrick eventually escapes his owner and makes his way back to London. Treves secures him residence in the hospital, winning the approval of the House Governor (John Gielgud) and head nurse (Wendy Hiller). Cleaned up and treated with respect, John shows himself to be a sensitive gentleman and even a bit vain. Publicity surrounding his case attracts the attention of London’s charitable class. John is visited by royalty and celebrities like actress Mrs. Kendal (Anne Bancroft), but he falls victim to an exploitative, thuggish night porter (Michael Elphick). Treves begins to question his own motivations. Is he merely a more gentlemanly version of Bytes, using Merrick’s notoriety to advance his own career?
David Lynch’s nightmare film Eraserhead is a contemplation of misery and isolation in a dank industrial environment, that strikes us as more original and more affecting with every viewing. The same sub-surface dark visions are a big part of this second feature produced in the commercial mainstream. The gratifying thing is that David Lynch proved capable of sharing and communicating his ideas to others, to expand his small-scale visions into big productions. In The Elephant Man he orchestrates some of England’s best filmmaking talent. The great cinematographer Freddie Francis was induced to take his place behind the camera again… after sixteen full years.
The script puts the institutions of the Victorian world in a rather good light. We at first think that John Gielgud’s refined, high-toned House Governor will banish John Merrick from his hospital at the first opportunity. But the Governor and Wendy Hiller’s head nurse are not small-minded functionaries. They immediately respond to the challenge of a special patient, an ‘exceptional case.’ Anthony Hopkins plays Dr. Treves as learned and decent, but also a self-promoter and a little aloof. Treves discovers his own sensitivity through Merrick, eventually coming to question the nature of charity and goodwill. He confesses to his own wife his fear that he may not be a good person at all, that he may have only invented a new way of exploiting his fellow man. This self-questioning is The Elephant Man’s best aspect; I can’t think of another mass-audience film about such delicate concerns … The Nun’s Story, perhaps?
With its concentration on moral values and spiritual worth, The Elephant Man expands the definition of a great horror movie. Although comparisons to Hammer Films are natural, Lynch’s show is too original to be an homage to anything. This ‘monster’ suffers at the hands of the venal and ignorant, but the movie’s also celebrates responsible charity based on respect for the individual — even if it takes a visit from a member of the royal family to push the scale in John Merrick’s favor. With just a little kindness John Merrick transcends his affliction and blooms into a beautiful soul.
It’s still a David Lynch vision all the way. The squalor and depravity of the lower depths of Whitehall are given sobering attention. Beyond the genteel gaslights and lace lurk creepy montages with superstitious visions of dark ideas, such as Bytes’ promotion of the idea that his elephant freak is the result of bestial rape. Merrick endures in a horror world of beatings and abuse, utterly without hope. Universal’s Gothic horror classics pictured society at large as an unenlightened mob. But when an outraged, uncomprehending crowd corners Merrick in the lavatory of a train station, decent law and order comes to the rescue via a dutiful London policeman. When John Merrick is victimized by the brutal hospital porter we recognize another link to the Hammer Films legacy, as best represented in the charity ward corruption in The Revenge of Frankenstein.
For every scene that relates to horror film tradition, Elephant Man gives us something wholly unique. Merrick reportedly loved attending stage shows. Imagery from a Victorian fantasy play feeds John Merrick’s ominous dreams — and seems connected to the surreal mystery stage presentations in later David Lynch films. Merrick’s celebrity status prompted a few brave notables to pay social calls on the shut-away young man. Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Kendal glides into John’s company with a grace and composure that would transform any movie monster into an ardent admirer. Bancroft’s appearance feels triumphant, an endorsement of the acting profession and an expression of pure heartfelt charity.
David Lynch has said that his inspiration to make movies had as much to do with sound as it did images. Relentless droning noises inform the oppressive environment of Eraserhead. The Elephant Man is also enclosed within a Lynchian soundtrack of throbbing machinery and sub-tonal industrial rumblings. In the very first scene, Treves states his hate of the age of machines. He reveals himself as a closet romantic, looking for truth and beauty in places as unlikely as a dirty circus sideshow. He’s a horror hero, like Lynch, convinced that the loathsome but God-created crawling things to be found under mossy stones must hide the secret of some greater grace.
Was Lynch the luckiest experimental filmmaker ever to be given a big production? The near-comatose English film industry yielded fine performers delighted to find roles more worthy than was normally up for offer. Every London cabbie or nurse-trainee that makes the briefest appearance is expertly played, to thoughtful effect. The Nurse Superior role would be a walk-on in a Hammer film, but Wendy Hiller (I Know Where I’m Going!) sketches a portrait of a harsh professional committed to her values — which include empathy and understanding. Freddie Jones (Dune, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Juggernaut) gives the mountebank Bytes layers of predatory malice, engendered by brutal degradation. Bytes’ filmic lineage traces right back to the carnival showman Caligari, of the movies’ very first adult psychological horror film.
David Lynch was always best when contrasting ‘normality’ with dark and nightmarish fantasy worlds. Elephant Man gives him the London sideshow, the dreamlike French circus, and John Merrick’s mysterious phantasmagorical inner life. Freddie Francis’s evocative camerawork and the superb art direction also lend Lynch’s vision period realism. We can sense the attempt to be antiseptic in Dr. Treves primitive surgical theater. The cramped, clammy streets and the cozy salons shape an entire world. The street life is more detailed and less exploitative than Elephant’s nearest English horror competition in B&W, the very good The Flesh and the Fiends, which also made use of an occasional stock shot of an industrial London long gone.
