David Lynch’s 1980 film arrived with a tagline promising “A true story of courage and human dignity,” and for once the marketing was not overselling. The Elephant Man runs 124 minutes, shot in black-and-white by Freddie Francis, and it takes a story most filmmakers would have turned into a carnival and treats it as a study of what people do to one another in the name of science, profit or simple curiosity.
Trailer, via MUBI.
John Merrick at the London Hospital
The film follows Frederick Treves, a surgeon at the London Hospital, played by Anthony Hopkins. Treves finds John Merrick in a Victorian freak show in London’s East End, kept by Mr. Bytes, a brutish ringmaster who takes payment from Treves to bring Merrick to the hospital for examination. Merrick’s head stays hooded outside of shows. Bytes assumes Merrick is intellectually disabled because he does not speak.
Treves presents Merrick to his colleagues and points out his physical abnormalities. The deformed skull forces Merrick to sleep with his head on his knees against a pile of pillows, because lying down would asphyxiate him. On Merrick’s return, Bytes beats him so badly that his errand boy has to call Treves for medical help. Treves brings Merrick back to the hospital, where matron Mrs. Mothershead, played by Wendy Hiller, tends to him because the other nurses are too frightened.
Carr Gomm and the 23rd Psalm
John Gielgud plays Francis Carr Gomm, the hospital’s administrator, who opposes housing Merrick on the grounds that the hospital does not accept “incurables.” Treves encourages Merrick to speak and finds him intellectually competent. To prove Merrick can make progress, Treves trains him to say a few conversational sentences and part of the 23rd Psalm.
Carr Gomm sees through the ruse. But as he is leaving, Merrick begins to recite the whole of the Psalm. Merrick tells the doctors he knows how to read and memorized the 23rd Psalm because it is his favorite. Carr Gomm lets him stay.
That scene is the hinge of the film, and it works because Lynch refuses to underline it. Hurt plays Merrick’s intelligence as a fact rather than a revelation. The audience gets there at the same moment Carr Gomm does.
“We’re always going to be looking to see where the Elephant Man ends and Dustin Hoffman begins”
That line comes from producer Jonathan Sanger, explaining why he turned Dustin Hoffman down for the part.
John Hurt and the Cast Around Him
Dustin Hoffman wanted the role of Merrick, but Sanger rejected the idea. Lynch considered his friend Jack Nance, who he had worked with on Eraserhead, but cast John Hurt after seeing The Naked Civil Servant. Hurt was still making Heaven’s Gate at the time, a production that had fallen badly behind schedule under director Michael Cimino’s perfectionism. Hurt waited so long for something to do that he performed Merrick in the interim before returning to finish Heaven’s Gate.
The make-up work by Christopher Tucker is the film’s other lead performance. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences drew widespread criticism for failing to honor the make-up effects.
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director | David Lynch |
| Runtime | 124 minutes |
| Make-up | Christopher Tucker |
| Producer | Jonathan Sanger |
| Executive producer | Mel Brooks (uncredited) |
Mel Brooks executive produced the film uncredited, to avoid audiences expecting the film to be like his usual comedic works, though his company Brooksfilms appears in the opening credits. That decision looks smarter every year.
Anne Bancroft and the World Outside
Anne Bancroft plays the Victorian actress Madge Kendal, one of the figures who brings Merrick into contact with a world beyond the hospital. At tea with Treves and his wife, Ann, played by Hannah Gordon, Merrick views photos of their family and shows them his mother’s picture in return. He believes he must have been a disappointment to her, but hopes she would be proud to see him with friends.
Merrick begins to take guests in his room. He spends his time building a model of a cathedral he can partially see from his window. Freddie Jones plays Bytes as a ruthless, alcoholic showman who exploits his acts, a character based on Tom Norman. Michael Elphick plays Jim Renshaw, an unscrupulous, disgraced night porter.
The screenplay was adapted by Lynch, Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren from Frederick Treves’ The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, published in 1923, and Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, published in 1971. It mixes historical and fictionalized material with Lynch’s surrealist sequences, an unusual approach for a biographical film.
The BAFTA Awards and the Academy Nominations
The Elephant Man was a critical and commercial success. It won three BAFTA Awards, including Best Film, and earned nominations for eight Academy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards. The film is a co-production between the United Kingdom and the United States.
The tagline calls it a true story of courage and human dignity, and the film earns that phrase without ever saying it out loud. The horror here is not Merrick’s body. It is Bytes counting coins, the nurses who will not enter the room, the night porter whose presence in the story is a stain on the hospital that employs him.
Lynch’s decision to shoot in black-and-white was not nostalgia. It strips the Victorian setting of the postcard prettiness that period films usually reach for, and it makes Tucker’s make-up read as sculpture rather than spectacle. The film trusts Hurt to carry scenes with his eyes alone.
What the Film Gets Right
The one weakness is the film’s occasional drift into surrealist interludes that sit apart from the rest. They are unmistakably Lynch, and they are the least persuasive passages in the picture. The story does not need them. Merrick’s real circumstances are strange enough.
The Elephant Man is named for a man who was called one, and the film’s achievement is that it never treats him as one. It treats him as a person whose intelligence and sensitivity were revealed the moment someone bothered to look. That is a small idea told with unusual care.
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