Cannibals and Capital: George King'sSweeney Todd(1936) and Representations of Class, Empire and Wealth

Abstract

The story of Sweeney Todd has its origins in the era of Victorian stage melodrama, a form with well-documented connections to critiques of Victorian class structures and economic hardship. As well, the musical versions of the story by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler (1979), including the 2007 film by Tim Burton, have been identified with anti-capitalist sentiment. In all the discussions of Sweeney Todd and class, however, surprisingly little scholarly attention is paid to the first sound film version of the story, which appeared in Britain at the height of the economic crisis of the 1930s: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936), directed by George King and starring Tod Slaughter. The King-Slaughter collaborations converting Victorian stage melodramas to screen were part of the body of 1930s films identified as ‘quota quickies’, which have been characterised as cheap and badly made. Scholars such as Rachel Low and, more recently, David Pirie dismissed the quota quickies as films unworthy of close attention, but this article joins the revisionist trend that takes issue with these judgements both of 1930s quota quickies and the films of King and Slaughter. King's Sweeney Todd responds to the bleak economic experience and anxieties of its audiences through its narrative and generic changes to its Victorian precursors, as well as through its limited but creative uses of film form. Specifically, King's film challenges the idea of the naturalised authority of the wealthy, questions the origins of wealth and the function of labour, and transforms the abject body of the horror genre into a metaphor for the circulation of capital.