Never heard of this. Just watched the trailer. It's streaming on Amazon Prime.
Thanks! Gonna check it out.
The source material for The Professor and the Madman is The Surgeon of Cawthorne, a very good piece of popular history. The good doctor had a fascinating personal history.
He had spent his early childhood somewhere in the South Seas (I forget which “tropical paradise”) where his patrician New England parents had embarked to live the rest of their lives as missionaries. He was then sent back to live with relatives for a proper starched collar New England education. He was superbly educated and was a proper, medical school educated physician, not the still common apprenticeship track doc.
He became an Army surgeon during the Civil War and chose to stay in the Army — surprising because of his elite education (in something other than engineering) — apparently because he was already having serious psychiatric problems and wanted the discipline and structure.
His brother officers and fellow Army docs recognized that something was amiss. The Army gave him the best medical and psychiatric care available at the time, even committing him for a stint in St. Elizabeth’s hospital. Nothing helped and he had become clearly unfit for duty. At that point, however, he had never committed any acts of violence and did not seem to pose a threat, so the Army gave him a pension, wished him well, and turned him loose.
So far, so good ... but he eventually made his way to the UK. His condition worsened. He had a schizophrenic break in which he thought little men hiding under his bed, in his closets, under his floor and behind his walls were coming to kill him. He rushed outside and spotted one of his tormentors, pulled a gun, chased the poor man through the streets and shot him dead as he was going home to his wife and many children. That’s where the movie picks up the story.
U.S. Army doctor murders honest English working man!!!! The newspapers had a field day with it.
The court heard the evidence, realized he was mad as a hatter, and had him locked up in Broadmoor, which was not a pleasant place to be, as some of the current treatments for the insane were quite tortuous. However, he was clearly a brilliant man, well educated, and when lucid read voraciously. He saw the OED advertisement asking for readers to help in tracking down the origins of words for an historical dictionary, a new idea. Having time on his hands, he became one of the most prolific early contributors.
The director of the OED project had no idea that his valued collaborator was clinically insane. Until he requested a meeting to personally think his genius penpal ... and undoubtedly got the surprise of his life.
Sean Penn and Mel Gibson are both superb in it.