Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936 film) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936 film) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a 1936 British drama horror film produced and directed by George King, and written by Frederick Hayward, H.F. Maltby, and George Dibdin-Pitt. The film features actor Tod Slaughter in one of his most famous roles as the barber Sweeney Todd. The film starts in 1936 as a barber tells a patron the story of the infamous Sweeney Todd. Sweeney Todd (Tod Slaughter) is a barber with a shop near the docks of London. One day, as the mercantile ship The Golden
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street of the story. In the play, Sweeney Todd’s mental collapse and the subsequent plan for Lovett's meat pies take place in less than half a page of dialogue, much too quickly to convey the full psychological impact, in the view of scholar Larry A. Brown. Sondheim's version more carefully reveals the developing ideas in Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett's demented minds. Sondheim has often said that his "Sweeney Todd" was about obsession – and close friends seemed to instinctually agree. When Sondheim first played songs from an early version of the show for Judy Prince (wife of the show's director),