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Pushing the envelope ‘Now my arm is complete’ Johnny Depp sings as the ghoulish Sweeney Todd

That is because the movie is “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and the director is Tim Burton. The Burton-Depp combination has given us some of the most memorable cinematic moments.

Cinema history is peppered with creative combines like this, where one’s talent plays on and feeds of the other.

Where, for instance would Martin Scorsese’s intensely personal cinematic excursions into guilt and redemption be without Robert De Niro to flesh it out in the person of Travis Bickle (“Taxi Driver”), Jake La Motta (“Raging Bull”) , Sam Rothstein (“Casino”) or James Conway (“Good Fellas”)? And in the Hindi film industry, David Dhawan’s manic films found a face in chubby Govinda, who negotiated the most bizarre plot-holes with panache, a hysterical wardrobe and impeccable timing.

Depp and Burton first worked together in “Edward Scissorhands” (1990). The film was a subversive fairy tale of a man-child-monster with scissors for hands. Depp immersed himself in the role which required him to hide his rockstar good looks under loads of chalky make up and scars.

The film follows Edward from his castle hideaway into the pink and white xenophobic real world.

“Scissorhands” was followed by the black and white “Ed Wood” (1994). This film, a biopic of Ed Wood Jr., who made truly awful films including “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” was yet another unabashed paean to style.

In 1999, there came “Sleepy Hollow” where the legend of the Headless Horseman was given a cool twist. Never has decapitation, murderous trees and sundry witches looked as delectable as in the picture postcard perfect movie.

It was no surprise the film took home the Academy Award for art direction. Christopher Walken looked elegantly ghoulish as the horseman while Depp played detective Ichabod Crane on the right side of satire.

The year 2005 was marked by a Depp-Burton double bill. There was “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Corpse Bride” (animated). “Charlie”, based on Roald Dahl’s story had Depp play Willie Wonka with white make up, violet eyes, lipstick and a top hat eerily reminding us of Michael Jackson. Depp’s Wonka was no kind, jolly confectioner. He was positively sinister and seemed to take a kind of cold-hearted pleasure in the children’s troubles.

While Depp’s swishy, swaying kohl-lined Jack Sparrow in “The Pirates of the Caribbean” movies pushed him into blockbuster league, he still remains an Indie darling for his subversive revisionist take on the hero. Though Depp’s “Jack Sparrow” is a far cry from the regular swashbucklers of yore, it is Burton who gives the actor the space and the freedom to experiment.

So it is that the story of Sweeney Todd with all its familiar tropes of revenge, a happy family destroyed by a lascivious figure of authority and familiar anxieties of being in a vulnerable position (how many movies do we have of psychopathic dentists?) and not being sure of what we are eating, gets a whole new look and feel thanks to the duo’s vision.

The Sweeney Todd story began with the publication of “The String of Pearls: A Romance” by Thomas Peckett Prest in November 1846. For the longest time in popular culture, Sweeney Todd was an unscrupulous barber who murdered solely for profit. In 1973, British playwright Christopher Bond introduced the revenge theme which was the basis of Stephen Sondheim’s smash hit Broadway musical as well as the movie.

Both Depp and Burton have a penchant for pushing the generic envelope and each of their movies whether a fantasy, a fable, a period piece, a children’s story or a musical is guaranteed to be joyous subversion through the feverish imagination of the duo.

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