I don't do musicals, but I'll do Sweeney Todd, which is not so much a musical as a grand promenade through a Gothic Elysium. It's an instant midnight classic: Depp and Bonham-Carter are the king and queen of Goth, Tim Burton is its kingmaker. Had I seen this when I was 13, I'd have fallen in love and no doubt grown up with black hair and red smeary lips listening to Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux instead of the more healthsome Talking Heads and B-52s which passed as cutting edge music at my high school.
The demonic barber himself began life as an urban legend (the name was possibly inspired by Sawney Bean, the Scottish cannibal). Although Todd's story is set in Georgian times (think Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and dark, satanic mills), it didn't wend its way into print and onto the stage until Victoria was on her throne. Precursor to Jack the Ripper, Mr. Hyde and Stoker's Dracula, he first showed up in a penny dreadful, one of the original faces of gothic literature, behind the title the String of Pearls: a Romance. In it, Sweeney is a ghoulish and cackling monster without conscience or heart. The 1936 movie Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street follows in these footsteps, with Tod Slaughter in the lead, a man with a disturbing giggle who looks like he stepped out of an old Tenniel drawing from Alice in Wonderland, cravated and heavy-featured, huge-headed and ovoid like Humpty Dumpty.
Ray Winstone took a turn at the barber's chair a few years ago (Sweeney Todd, directed by Dave Moore for the BBC), a slower and less stylized look at a serial killer battling his demons. A barber at that time not only shaved your face but worked as a sort of emergency-room doctor for the lower classes, removing shot and kidney stones, amputating limbs. It was bloody work, and Winstone's Sweeney reminds you exactly how difficult and time-consuming it is to dismember a human body.
None of that heavy-limbed detail for the Burton tour-de-force, however. Customers slide down the chute, Mrs. Lovett drags them away, somehow her gowns aren't much sullied when she emerges from the cellar and she still has time to sing while she serves ale and pies between dismemberments and baking. Doesn't matter. Burton has created a world unto itself, a thing at which he excels, and given the Sondheim-penned musical a permanent home on the screen. The source material is fantastic: there's nothing insipid or Music Man about these songs. Weak as Depp and Bonham-Carter might have sounded on the stage, the intimacy of film magnifies them into crepuscular, creepy perfection. When they stand at the window, looking at passers-by and singing about the man-eat-man world, it's as spooky as any bloodletting. Sondheim has shaped the story into vastly more than a gorefest: blood there is, and buckets of it, but this is a tragedy in its deeper sense, and this particular Sweeney Todd paves the way to his downfall through his own hamartia. The final frames are perfect, a perfect culmination of Burton's parade of sanguinary aesthetics.
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