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
Elephant (1989 film) to give way for traffic. The victims are shown for several seconds in a static shot of the body. As with several of Clarke's films, "Elephant" received high praise and attracted controversy. After watching the film, Clarke's contemporary David Leland wrote: "I remember lying in bed, watching it, thinking, 'Stop, Alan, you can't keep doing this.' And the cumulative effect is that you say, 'It's got to stop. The killing has got to stop.' Instinctively, without an intellectual process, it becomes a gut reaction." The film is a clear influence on Gus Van Sant's 2003 film "Elephant", based on the