The Original Sweeney Todd aka The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)

The story of Sweeney Todd goes all the way back to 1847 when it first appeared as a serial in British penny dreadful's (an early form of campy or melodramatic pulp fiction) but it has arguably never been as famous or popular as it has been in the last 30 years or so. The most well known portrayals of this classic story of "the demon barber" are the tony award winning Stephen Soundheim musical version, and the Tim Burton Johnny Depp (2007) film version of said musical . But before either of those versions there was a film version made in 1936. If you are not familiar with the story, Sweeney Todd is the name of an English Barber in London who murders his customers and gives them to the little lady next door, who butchers them and makes them into her famous meat pies. It's gruesome to be sure, but its the story's ghastliness that has made it stick in pop culture for so long. Back in the 1930s Hollywood's biggest leading men in Horror were the Hungarian Bela Lugosi, and the British Boris Karloff. While Karloff was the most famous English man in Horror at the time, there was another man of the day who was just as big as Karloff in the UK; Tod Slaughter. Slaughter made many horror films in England back in the 30s and 40s, but his fame didn't quite transfer across the Atlantic he remained and remains still, largely unknown. He was famous for playing over the top madmen in Victorian melodramas,

his most famous of which was Sweeney Todd. He did influence many future famous names in horror such as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, both most famous for the many gothic British melodramatic films they made with Hammer Studios. Overall the film is decent. Slaughter is brilliantly chilling in the title role and reminds me a bit of Mark Hamil's interpretation of The Joker in Batman: the animated series. Unlike the famous musical and film version, Todd is not an empathetic character in the story here and is only the villain, not the kind of antihero portrayed in later versions with a much more complex story-line. The movie never goes into the background of Todd or why he murders these people, and that mystery makes the character all the more chilling. Overall it's a purely entertaining film with nothing too deep to it, but who says it has to be anything more? Obviously the production values of the film are more than a little dated being almost 80 years old, but Slaughter's portrayal of the character is still somewhat frightening even by today's standards. I give the film a 4/5. You can watch entire film on youtube here.