Top 10 Post-Black-and-White-Era Black-and-White Movies

It’s ironic that director David Lynch’s most human (and humane) film would have as its subject a poor soul afflicted with a monstrous deformity. (Or that one of its three producers was Mel Brooks. Yes, that Mel Brooks.) John Merrick (played by John Hurt), the movie’s title character, has endured a miserable existence as a sideshow freak in Victorian London. He attracts the attention of kindly surgeon Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), who befriends Merrick and eventually arranges for him to live at the hospital. Lynch and veteran cinematographer Freddie Francis give the film an undercurrent of anxiety, and a dreamy uneasiness lurks in the many shadows. “I always thought of [The Elephant Man] as a black-and-white film,” Lynch would later observe. “Black and white immediately takes you out of the real world.”

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