4/5 Winstone shines, as usual.
  by Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)
Sweeney Todd (Dave Moore, 2006)

Sometime in the past decade or so, Ray Winstone has quietly gone from being a stock heavy (for example, in 1997's brilliant heist flick Face) to being one of Britain's best, and most versatile, actors. Nowhere has he shown this more than in Dave Moore's striking adaptation of Sweeney Todd, with Winstone playing the title character. A number of film versions of this story that I've seen have been simplified, glossing over some of the darker elements of the story (which is an odd thing to say about a story whose central figure is a serial killer), but Moore (Wallis and Edward) revels in the stuff that's outside the realm of the accepted, and it shows.

In case you've been living in a cave the past few hundred years, Sweeney Todd is a delicate, uplifting love story involving the title character (Winstone), a London barber (remember that back in the day, barbers also performed surgery) and the woman down the street, Mrs. Lovett (Girl with a Pearl Earring's Essie Davis), a former prostitute who now runs a pie shop. The two form a symbiotic relationship; Lovett refers folks to Todd. Todd kills them, then returns the bodies to Lovett, who makes them into pies. Free meat! Bigger profits, and it's probably better than you'd get from your local Megacorp. Needless to say, the police are concerned about the large number of disappearances, and Mrs. Lovett's husband, a nasty brute of a man, is starting to get suspicious. Needless to say, the bodies keep piling up. Didn't I say it was uplifting?

The Sweeney Todd bio has been done about a thousand times on stage and screen, with varying degrees of effectiveness. This one is done very well indeed, especially for a TV movie. Moore refuses to pull any punches, keeping within the bounds of television appropriateness by implying, rather than showing, many if the nastier bits. Still, if you record this thinking you're getting the Tim Burton version, be aware that this one, while not explicit, is still not for the smaller kiddies. For everyone else, though, it's an effective, wonderfully-acted treatment of the subject, and it's well worth watching. *** ½


4/5 Excellent performance by Winstone...
  by inframan (the lower depths)
By far the best I have ever seen him do, unusually subtle & restrained. In many scenes he bears an uncanny resemblance to Charles Laughton, a perfect touch for this part & a real improvement over doll-boy J. Depp.

The film itself is well-done, a somewhat different take, though it gets rather one-note-ish after a while. Still, a fascinating watch.

5/5 An Engrossing Variation on a Dark Legend of Love and Murder
  by Stephanie DePue (Carolina Beach, NC USA)
"Sweeney Todd: The Director's Cut," a 2006 television production of the classic horror story for the British Broadcasting Corporation, reached these shores as a DVD in 2007. It stars Ray Winstone (Sexy Beast,Beowulf), in the title role; was written by Joshua St. Johnston and directed by David Moore. As a director's cut, it includes footage not seen in the broadcast - beware, sensitive souls, it's intensely violent. It also boasts a Sweeney Todd background essay, cast filmographies, and, thank goodness, unadvertised closed captioning: characters in this movie are doing their best to speak early London English. The movie is set in eighteenth century London, where the first, Victorian treatment of this famous horror tale placed it; it runs about an hour and a half.

The award-winning Winstone, who is of cockney origins himself, and a former boxer, succeeds in making the demon barber of Fleet Street a believable human being. Essie Davis (Girl With a Pearl Earring) makes Mrs. Lovett into a lusty young woman, more sinned-against than sinning. And the veteran David Warner (Titanic, Tom Jones (1963),) makes his blind police chief Fielding quite credible, and moving.

The basic plot, of course, is known to all: in filthy, teeming, unsanitary, unhealthy eighteenth century London, Todd, the expert barber, murders the odd customer, whose flesh turns up in his neighbor Mrs. Lovett's meat pies, making them the delicious toast of London. In this treatment of the material, a substantial backstory has been given Todd, making his actions more explicable: he works and lives in the shadow of the hellhole London prison Newgate, where he grew up as a child, spending twenty years of his life there for a murder committed by his father - it's where he learned his trade. Upon his release, the advent of a brutal Newgate prison guard in his barber's chair sets loose his anger, and murderous impulses. And soon carved up bodies begin appearing in what remains of the once sparkling, pristine Fleet River, now known as the Fleet Ditch. Another quite interesting innovation of the script is to remind us that, in those days, barbers doubled as surgeons: the blood of that trade is what the red stood for in all those old-fashioned barber's red and white striped poles that we occasionally see. As a surgeon, Todd does, of course, see plenty of blood; he also must have a rough and ready knowledge of the human body, sufficient to operate, or to butcher.

The plot also gives us a brief homage to the earliest substantial literary treatment of Sweeney Todd, "The String of Pearls," an anonymously authored tale told in serial form in early Victorian days. We have a Mr. Thornhill with a string of beautiful pearls, a major actor in the first treatment. Todd's young boy apprentice continues to be called Tobias, as he first was, and generally still is. Praises be the icky star-crossed young lovers, major, and weakest ingredient of the original tale, are gone. The Sweeney Todd tale may be based on an urban myth, or there may, or may not be a real inspiration to it. Robert L. Mack, in his excellent book on the subject, (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, US & Canada Ed.), reviewed by me on its subject page, cites to an eighteenth century French newspaper.

What is certainly true is the fascinating, sad history of the Fleet River, treated by me, at greater length, in reviewing the Johnny Depp Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. We see the river here, narrowed to the width of a street, hemmed in by structures on both sides; and, briefly, at low tide, displaying a filthy, gruesome river bed. It is bridged here, but it was to be entirely bridged over, covered in wood so that it could be built over, and was so polluted it burst into flames, burning all around it. When the area was eventually rebuilt, the river's legacy was to be all those subterranean tunnels that proved so handy to Todd.

Winstone's powerful performance hoists this film well above the ordinary TV movie, though it does lack some of the richness of a film made for theatrical release. But it's an engrossing, and haunting variation on a dark legend of love and murder.


4/5 Totally Different
  by P. Huddleson (Syracuse)
This British version is totally different and not for everybody. No musical score - all drama. It's an extremely well-acted depiction of a descent into madness. Be warned.....it is bloody.

3/5 What about making a shave tonight?
  by C. Luciano Jr. (Sao Paulo, SP Brazil)
Of course, this film made from BBC Television doesn't have the same opulence in comparision with the musical version, starring Johnny Depp. Instead, it has a good cast and it is greatly performed as well. I liked it.