In the scene where Todd is at the London docks watching people disembark from the ships he offers his services to one man. The man asks him, 'Is your shop near here Mr Todd?'. Todd replies, 'Just around the corner.'
Yet he was Sweeney Todd, barber of Fleet Street. The nearest docks to Fleet Street are just beyond the Tower of London, a mile and a half away. Hardly around the corner is it?
Such petty details were far beneath (or above) the considerations of the ultra-cheap quickie melodramas made by George King Productions with that ripe old theatrical ham Tod Slaughter. If anyone had noticed the mistake during shooting, no way would a reshoot have been considered: they just didn't care. There's an even better piece of "Accuracy? Schmaccuracy!" in the 1931 Dracula, where a party guest asks Dracula if it's true he's going to live in Whitby. "Yes," Bela Lugosi purrs, "so convenient for London." Whitby is about 150 miles north of London ... not so convenient even for someone who can turn himself in to a bat. It's all part of the fun.
shareThere were docks much further upriver in the eighteenth century anyway.
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Whoa literalists! These are not mistakes. These are the seductive lies of fiends trying to lure their victims to their deaths. Do you think that Sweeney Todd, or for that matter, Dracula would lie to an intended "meal"? NEVER! That would be committing an 'historical inaccuracy'. Besides, Dracula can be forgiven for his "inaccuracies" since his milage estimates are 'as the bat flies'. Much more AMAZING are the liberties Sondheim took when changing Sweeney Todds character from one driven by pure greed and lust to a poor man driven mad by the sorrow caused by a more villanous 'judge' who wrongly convicted him and sent him away in order to have his wife and his child for his own. I guess it gave him (Sondheim) more material to write songs about, but I think he should be sued for ruining one of the most dispicable and enjoyable characters in the history of melodrama.
shareSondheim didn't take those liberties. His musical was based off of the rewrite by Christopher Bond.
And That is why the Lord created ME!!!
Official Bastard
Todd may have said that his shop was "just around the corner" to lull his intended victims to their doom.
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