The City of Dreadful Night

Rating: 8/10 (3 December 2010)

Sweeney Todd is sometimes, wrongly, believed to have been a real historical character, but he appears to have been the creation of an otherwise obscure Victorian writer named Thomas Peckett Prest. Prest was a prolific author of what were known as "penny dreadfuls", lurid and sensational novels serialised in weekly magazines which cost one penny each, and it was in one such novel, entitled "The String of Pearls", that Todd first made his literary debut.
This film, however, is not based directly upon Prest's novel but upon Stephen Sondheim's musical adaptation. The action takes place in the London of 1846, the year in which the novel was first published but not the year in which it was set. (Prest set his tale in 1785). In this version "Sweeney Todd" is the alias adopted by Benjamin Barker, a barber who was transported to Australia after being framed for a crime he did not commit by the corrupt and evil Judge Turpin, who had cast his lustful eye upon Barker's attractive young wife Lucy. After fifteen years in exile Barker returns to London to discover that Lucy poisoned herself after being raped by the Judge and that his daughter Johanna, only a baby when he last saw her, is now a beautiful teenager and Turpin's ward.
Maddened by grief, Barker swears revenge not only upon Turpin but upon the human race as a whole. (His rationale is that death is a just punishment for the powerful and guilty and a welcome release for the powerless and innocent). Using the name Sweeney Todd he once again sets up in business as a barber and starts to murder his customers by slitting their throats with a razor. Disposing of the bodies is no problem; after killing his victims Todd delivers the bodies via a trap door to his accomplice, the pie-maker Mrs Lovett, who bakes them into her tasty meat pies.
In some ways this is an unexpected film; Tim Burton is not a director normally associated with musicals, and Sondheim is not a composer normally associated with the cinema. Despite the great success of his musicals on Broadway, only three of them, "West Side Story", "Gypsy" and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", have been made into feature films, and only for the last of those did Sondheim write both the music and lyrics. (For the first two he wrote the lyrics but not the music). The neglect of his work can partly be attributed to the decline in the popularity of the musical in the cinema (although it remains a highly popular form in the theatre), but it may also have something to do with the fact that his works are often dark and challenging, both in terms of musical style and in terms of plot. They have little in common with the warmth and lyricism of, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Burton, however, is a director whose films ("Edward Scissorhands", "Sleepy Hollow", his interpretation of "Batman") often concentrate on the Gothic and the macabre, and the bleakness which lies at the heart of "Sweeney Todd" made it a natural target for him. As one has come to expect from a Burton film (although "Big Fish" is something of an exception) the film is visually very sombre, with muted colours, a literal darkness reflecting the metaphorical darkness of the story. In his vision, Victorian London becomes the nineteenth-century equivalent of Burton's Gotham City, a City of Dreadful Night, a place of both physical and moral blackness.
The two leading roles of Todd and Mrs Lovett are taken by those two Burton stalwarts, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter; this was Depp's sixth collaboration with Burton and Bonham Carters' fifth. (Both were also to appear in his next film, "Alice in Wonderland"). Neither is an actor I would normally associate with musicals, and their singing here was criticised in some circles. To my mind, however, both have a quality of voice which, although it is not particularly polished, is well-suited to Sondheim's astringent music and his often cynical lyrics. (Their duet "A Little Priest", in which they discuss which types of people make the best eating, was the for me the musical highlight).
On the acting side, Depp has given some of his best performances in Burton films, such as "Scissorhands" and "Ed Wood", and he is excellent here, coping brilliantly with the difficult task of bringing out the dual sides of Todd's nature- on the one hand he is a bloodthirsty villain, on the other a tormented victim who has suffered much through no fault of his own. In previous films, even those made after he turned forty such as the various "Pirates of the Caribbean" adventures, Depp's youthful, boyish good looks have been an important part of his screen persona. The role of the middle-aged, careworn Sweeney Todd is perhaps his first older man's role. Bonham Carter is also excellent, as is that splendid villain Alan Rickman as the wicked Judge Turpin. (The name was presumably borrowed from the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin, but it also carries overtones of the word "turpitude", meaning moral depravity). There are also good contributions from Sacha Baron-Cohen as Todd's pseudo-Italian rival Pirelli and young Ed Sanders as his assistant Toby.
Burton is not always a great director, but is generally an original and interesting one. His work varies in quality, but he is capable of making some excellent films, and "Sweeney Todd" is one of his best; of those I have seen I would rate only "Big Fish" and "Scissorhands" more highly. It will doubtless be too gruesome for some, but for those with stronger appetites it makes a splendidly bleak and cynical horror-comedy. 8/10