Four decades on, John Hurt’s performance gives this biopic a poignancy that marks it apart from the rest of director’s work

This beautiful, measured and rather atypical movie by David Lynch from 1980 is now on re-release, written for the screen by Lynch with Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren. It tells the story of John Merrick, the “Elephant Man”, a Victorian-era person with disfigurements who was rescued from a cruel fairground show by the concerned physician Frederick Treves and established as a fashionable figure in London society, despite nagging fears that Merrick had simply become a grander and more acceptable form of freak attraction[…] Continue reading →