East of Elephant Rock East of Elephant Rock East of Elephant Rock is a 1977 British independent drama film directed by Don Boyd and starring John Hurt, Jeremy Kemp and Judi Bowker. It was Boyd's second feature film following his little-noticed 1975 "Intimate Reflections". Like William Somerset Maugham's 1927 play "The Letter" and two subsequent film adaptations, its narrative content depended on the 1911 Ethel Proudlock murder in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which became a "cause célèbre" scandalising British colonial society and which had been featured in a "Sunday Observer" article as recently as the year before. Boyd, drawing in part on his own experience
Seeing the elephant entitled "Seeing the Elephant," says the phrase came from a Philadelphia theatre "a few years" earlier. A play their theater was putting on was in need of an elephant but the few circulating circus elephants were not available and so they made a makeshift elephant and put a man inside to control the few movements the animal had to make. The audiences loved it and were extremely responsive. Unfortunately, the man they put inside was fond of his spirits, and one night he became so drunk he walked the elephant off the stage and into the music pit. The audience