the professor and the madman the surgeon of crowthorne

Minor is acquitted of murder on grounds of insanity and sent to Broadmoor. Driven maniacal by this, Minor ends up chasing an innocent man through the streets of London and shooting him dead on his doorstep in front of his family. He believes that he is being pursued by a man who is trying to kill him. The surgeon suffers delusions and hallucinations as a result of his traumatic experiences in the American Civil War. The film opens by showing how Minor (Penn) came to be institutionalised.

Sean Penn as William Chestor Minor in The Professor and the Madman (photograph via Transmission Films) While the problems are numerous, Safinia has infused his film with a great deal of heart and a strange, eccentric grace. However, The Professor and the Madman is no disaster. The film was released quietly in the United States in 2019 and met with reviews that ranged between dismissive and brutal. Acrimony surrounding the production became so bad that Gibson refused to participate in promotional activities, and Safinia did not lend his name to the project: the director is the fictional ‘PB Shemran’. The film’s backers, Voltage Pictures, refused, which prompted Gibson’s Icon Productions to unsuccessfully sue to prevent its release. Gibson, along with director Farhad Safinia ( Apocalypto), wanted to shoot further scenes at Oxford University after filming had wrapped in 2016, to add authenticity (Trinity College Dublin filled in for Oxford otherwise). There is further backstory to explain why the film has reached cinemas under something of a cloud.

This is an intriguing cinematic curiosity, elusive in tone, compelling at times, yet riddled with flaws. Twenty-two years later, the film has now reached us, with Gibson himself and Sean Penn in the lead roles. Lexicography was indeed made sufficiently cool for Mel Gibson to buy the film rights in 1998. Renamed The Professor and the Madman for US publication, Winchester’s book became a bestseller. Despite serious mental illness, Minor was a vital contributor to Murray’s gargantuan task of creating the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), an endeavour that began in 1879. The non-fiction work told the bizarre and oddly uplifting Victorian-era tale of the autodidactic linguist and scholar Sir James Murray and his relationship with William Chester Minor, a retired American army surgeon incarcerated at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. When the British author Simon Winchester published the book The Surgeon of Crowthorne in 1998, the idea was, according to his editor, to ‘ make lexicography cool’.

The professor and the madman the surgeon of crowthorne