Next to the works of Shakespeare and Arthur
Conan Doyle's enduringly popular Sherlock Holmes, Dickens' rich narratives and
characters must surely rank as one of the most popular sources of material for
filmmakers since the cinema's beginnings.
As film technology developed during the late
Victorian era, early cinema took on many of the cultural mores of that period as
a natural expression of the times in which it arose - the use of melodrama being
a clear example - and so Dickens's popularity among early filmmakers - and not
just British ones - was assured.
As early as 1897, The Death of Nancy
Sykes (US) was shot as a stand-alone scene from the popular novel Oliver
Twist. In fact there were nearly 100 versions of Dickens' novels and stories
made in the silent era alone. In 1901, a version of A Christmas Carol -
re-titled Scrooge; or, Marley's Ghost (d. W.R. Booth) for the film
audience - offered a simple but entertaining tableaux of feature scenes from the
book, although the surviving fragment suggests the bulk of the narrative is
omitted. The Christmas books seemed to be popular choices for the adapters in
the early part of the last century; D.W. Griffith, who would later be
permanently yoked to Dickens because of their similar use of 'parallel montage',
made a simple, surprisingly formulaic version of The Cricket on the
Hearth (US, 1909), while A Christmas Carol was filmed again in 1911
(as Scrooge, d. Bantock Leadham) and 1914 (as A Christmas Carol, d. Harold
Shaw).
By 1913, with Cecil Hepworth and
Thomas Bentley's production of David Copperfield, we begin to see
a much more sophisticated attempt at dealing with the complexity of a Dickens
text. Hepworth and Bentley take 108 minutes to relate the
narrative visually. To a modern audience, the speed of the telling seems at times
to undermine all coherence. As film historian Brian MacFarlane notes: "[The
film's] speed is not due to fluent camera work or editing but to its dispensing
with character elaboration and its reducing of narrative to a skeleton
framework, sometimes at the expense of motivation and logical development." But
such criticisms are essentially borne of historical disjunction and if we bear
in mind that many magic lantern shows would have narrated a Dickens tale in 12
or at most 24 separate slides - not dissimilar in essence to the 1901
Scrooge - we can begin to see how David Copperfield might have
appeared a spectacular and more meaningful affair to an Edwardian
audience.
It is arguably not until the 1940s that
filmmakers began to tackle the breadth of Dickens' work with a style and
confidence later filmmakers have often lacked. Alberto Cavalcanti's
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby (1947) and the two
adaptations by David Lean, Great Expectations (1946), with John
Mills, Alec Guinness and Jean Simmons, and Oliver Twist
(1948), with Guinness as a memorable Fagin, stand as examples of strong
visual storytelling and manage to say something of relevance to their
contemporary audiences. The final scenes of Great Expectations, for
example, with Pip tearing opening the boarded windows of Satis House, have often
been cited as a powerful metaphor for the feelings of hope and freedom in
postwar Britain.
A Tale of Two Cities (d. Ralph Thomas,
1958) seems pale beside Lean's efforts, yet it repays
a second viewing and is certainly a faithful adaptation in that it follows in a
simple, straightforward manner (thanks to screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke) the
narrative line of the book.
Oliver! (1968), directed by Carol
Reed with a verve and energy that surprised his many critics at the time, is
a colourful adaptation of Lionel Bart's musical, with a cast including an
impressive Ron Moody as Fagin and Oliver Reed as a frighteningly
misanthropic Bill Sykes.
In Joseph Hardy's Great Expectations
(1974), solid performances by Michael York and Joss Ackland make it a very
watchable, if somewhat visually uninspiring take on what seems to be an
enduringly relevant tale.
Dickens is a great inspiration for actors
looking for a deep range of possible character interpretations. His characters
exude three-dimensional personality, and often it is the minor characters who
offer the most scope for memorable and even scene-stealing performances. This
helps explain why both film and television versions of Dickens' work regularly
attract prestigious ensemble casts, as in the recent adaptation of Nicholas
Nickleby (US/UK, d. Douglas McGrath, 2002), which suggests that film's
continuing interest in Dickens shows no sign of
diminishing. David Parker
Further Reading:
Pointer, Michael, Charles Dickens On the Screen: the film, television, and video adaptations (Scarecrow Press, 1996) Smith, Grahame, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2003)
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