Little Dorrit [1987] [DVD]

Description

Product Description Two-part TV adaptation of Dickens' novel. The Dorrit family have spent years in a debtors' prison due to the financial mess in which father William (Alec Guinness) managed to land himself as a youth. Youngest daughter Amy (known as Little Dorrit) finds work with the wealthy Mrs Clenham but knows that her father will, in all probability, spend the remainder of his life in gaol. However, when Arthur Clenham (Derek Jacobi), recently returned from abroad, comes to suspect that his late father was in part responsible for the Dorrits' plight, he becomes determined to make amends. But as he continues to delve into the mysteries of the Dorrits' and his parents' shared past, he is unaware that his own mother's house has been placed in peril by the arrival of a sinister stranger. Review About LITTLE DORRIT in ICONS IN THE FIRE by Alexander Walker, 2001 The decade s most eccentric film, Little Dorrit, was produced, appropriately, in the area of London whose economic difficulties simultaneously foreshadowed the recession of the early 1990s. Little Dorrit, a six-hour-long, two-part version of Charles Dickens s novel, was made in studios at Rotherhithe, on the very same swath of the Thames, known as Docklands, where developers were holding their corporate breath to see if the strapped-for-cash yuppies could fork out the cash to pay for their new riverside homes as the property boom reached an unheard-of peak, 27 per cent higher than in 1986, while the stock market went into free fall in October 1987. Apart from Abel Gance s Napoleon, few film makers attempted what Christine Edzard did or with so few resources except abundant human talent. Her film was compared at the time with the populous stage production of Nicholas Nickleby. A poor comparison. With her producer husband Richard Goodwin, and his partner John Brabourne, she made Victorian London arise in all its greatness and meanness under the ships timbers that still held up her warehouse studios roof. The other miracle was one of imagination, not construction: she did not let the movie sink under the logistical weight of its own populous authenticity. She made it live. Such numbers, such faces and figures, and such performances. After Lean and some said better than Lean it is the best Dickens film. Or films since, aping the Victorian stereopticon toy, Edzard filmed the story in double vision. By aligning two separate viewpoints on its characters and events the first entitled Nobody s Fault , being that of a good-hearted but weak young man, while the second, called Little Dorrit , being seen through the eyes of a resilient and strong-willed girl Edzard produced a single stand-out view of era, place and people. The Thatcherite values were implicitly under attack in the first 177 minutes: corruption, heartlessness, get-rich-quick fever of the speculative classes were contrasted with the inner-city desolation of the poor caught in the debt trap. The cast was contemporary, in attitude if not apparel: slum landlords, crook financiers, uncaring bureaucrats, ruined speculators and front-page suicides. In its edifice, in which the indolent and incompetent served their time and filled their places, the Circumlocution Office had its parallel in present-day Whitehall. But just sas one is lying back, drained and exhilarated by people s misfortunes and miracles like the Dorrit family released from the crumbling hive of the Marshalsea Prison, a boarding house with bars for bad-debtors Edzard proceeded to tell the same storyover again, from a fresh angle, filling in the gaps, fleshing out the characters, all in ways that shaped the political focus and altered the perspective on the social scene. With 211 named players, the cast list was like a National Gallery of all the talents: too many to name or even to apologise to for not naming. Pre-eminent, though, was Alec Guinness as William Dorrit, the haughty gentleman-sponge. Among Guiness s six best screen performances, it is at the very top. He has never held us so breathless as during Dorrit s dementia at his elder daughter s sumptuous wedding feast, when the old lag in him, shifty but without shame, his mind wandering back to his prison cell and genteel knavery, bids the throng of titled grandees, Welcome to the Marshalsea . Edzard released in Guinness what other directors, including Lean, never managed to reach: his instinct for self-dissimulation as a cover-up of himself from himself. In the part of William Dorrit , Guinness later said, I probably exploited unpleasant things in myself . --Dennis Grunes Wordpress.comHaving launched his screen career with memorable performances as Herbert Pocket and Fagin in David Lean s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), it was somewhat apt that Alec Guinness should give his last display of cinematic excellence in another Dickens adaptation. Capturing the shabby grandiosity and brazen duplicity of William Dorrit, the Oscar-nominated Guinness provides a touchstone of flawed humanity that stands between the dutiful virtue of Sarah Pickering s Amy and the meek benevolence of Derek Jacobi s Arthur Clennam and the less shaded perfidy of Bill Fraser s Casby, Max Wall s Flintwinch and Joan Greenwood s pitiless matriarch. For all the brilliance of the ensemble playing, the strength of this fourth film version of Charles Dickens s eleventh novel lies in Christine Edzard s Oscar-nominated screenplay and the pacing and control of her direction. Originally published in 19 instalments between December 1855 and June 1857, the sprawling story exposed the inadequacies of the penal system, the iniquities of class division, the inefficiencies of government bureaucracy and the impossibility of family unity. Yet while George Bernard Shaw could call the book Dickens masterpiece among many masterpieces , it could also be used to validate George Orwell s contention that his writing combined rotten architecture and wonderful gargoyles . By dividing the narrative into two parts, Nobody s Fault and Little Dorrit s Story, Edzard rectified some of the weaknesses in the original structure. Her re-ordering allows us to get to know the characters before they become embroiled in the drama and allows us to sample the contrasting atmospheres of the Marshalsea debtors prison, the grindingly poor hovels of Bleeding Heart Yard, the oppressively gloomy Clennam resisdence and the soul-destroying corridors of the Circumlocution Office. So, whether watched in consecutive three-hour segments, in two parts or broken down into nightly episodes across a week, this stands as the most ambitious and considered take on any Dickens novel. Andrew Davies s forthcoming 16-week reworking for the BBC, therefore, has some act to follow. --David Parkinson