Every film fan and movie collector knows that the best thing about it is constantly making new discoveries. Of course, one of the worst things about it is . . . also constantly making new discoveries. It's bad for your bank balance, it's bad for any physical space being eaten away by any collection, and it's bad for your sense of self as you figure out yet another big gap in your knowledge highlighted by some lovely boxset that you've just bought. This is what happened to me when I picked up a lovely Tod Slaughter set earlier this year (accompanied by a fine tome I have yet to start reading).
Not knowing where to begin with any of his films, but knowing that he was celebrated for some fantastic stage work that was also translated into movies in the 1930s (although his career spanned more than just that decade, of course), I decided to take what I saw as the safest option, diving in to a film with a very familiar storyline, and one I have loved since seeing it played out in a wonderful coin-operated machine that used to be the highlight of Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood.
Thanks to other movie versions, and also the enduring appeal of this macabre tale, I expect that everyone knows what this is about. Sweeney Todd (Slaughter) is a barber who gets into the habit of killing certain victims who end up in his chair, and then turning the chair on a trapdoor mechanism to deliver the body into the underbelly of Mrs. Lovatt (Stella Rho), who then turns them into pies. Things get more tense between the two when Todd sets his sights on the lovely Johanna Oakley (Eve Lister), but Johanna hopes to soon be reunited with her love, Mark (Bruce Setton), who is spending some time at sea as he tries to improve his lot in life.
Making use of an amusing framing device (a man waking into a barbershop where he is told this story), this is an unsurprisingly brisk 76 minutes, the perfect pacing helped by the absolutely superb lead performances from Slaughter and Rho. John Singer plays a young apprentice named Tobias, which provides a way to both show how our deadly duo operate and add some extra tension in the escalation of the third act.
Although this feels very much like a Tod Slaughter film ahead of anything else, director George King deserves credit for his work, as do the writers, including the creator of the stage material serving as the source, George Dibdin-Pitt, dialogue contributor H. F. Malibu, and Frederick Hayward. Everything plays perfectly, including the specific allusions to the content of the pies, the fun set design, and the moments that provide a glimpse of what happens to the unwitting victims as they are polished off by the titular villain.
It is Slaughter’s film though, no doubt about it, and his performance is the highlight of the whole thing. That’s why it’s pleasantly surprising to find that his co-stars do their best to match him. Yes, Lister and Setton may be stuck with the weaker roles, but they have great energy and attitude when being placed in peril in time for the grand finale. Singer is very enjoyable as the kind of Dickensian urchin usually seen in, well, Charles Dickens tales, and Davina Craig and Jerry Verno provide supporting turns that feel useful to the narrative, yet also provide some comic relief from the dastardly dealings. Rho is the other real star though, holding her own opposite Slaughter in a number of scenes that show the turbulence of their arrangement as the power dynamics start to tilt favourably from one to the other.
I expected something stagey, a bit creaky, and maybe just a bit too old-fashioned to be truly entertaining. What I got was something that managed to avoid claustrophobia (one or two different settings help to occasionally get us out of Todd’s “lair”) while always providing viewers with an absolute feast of eyebrow-wiggling, finger-twirling, twinkly-eyed devilry. Which is what you should really want from a Sweeney Todd movie. It ostensibly felt like a film version of that coin-operated machine I fell in love with as a kid, which means that I slightly fell in love with this too.
8/10
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