Dickens on Film

Interesting Arena documentary yesterday evening on film adaptations of Dickens. These have been pouring out from the earliest days of the cinematograph, and the production line is as busy as ever. The phenomenon is hardly surprising. Dickens considered himself a man of the theatre, and initially wanted to be an actor - a talent he was able to exercise in his stage readings. The novels themselves are composed of theatrical scenes and characters: somehow Dickens makes popular melodrama into high art. The programme was ingeniously made, cutting unexpectedly from one vintage clip to another, sometimes using voiced commentary, sometimes words on screen. In a clip from a lecture, novelist Angus Wilson explained that Dickens was a 'simple New Testament christian' whose novels distinguish clearly between good and evil, but also juxtapose these forces continuously. The ugly and beautiful, the demonic and angelic, constantly cohabit in the same sentences and paragraphs: Fagin and Oliver, Squeers and Smike, Quilp and Little Nell.  Film can recreate the half-real half-phantasmal world that Dickens's stories move in, and film and TV adaptations can rebuild something like the world which Dickens's readers knew but which has long gone now. For Our Mutual Friend, the Thames and its drab docklands had to be rebuilt in Cardiff. We were taken through silent treatments, early talkies, paused to admire the greats (David Lean), and thence were taken into the world of TV. This medium opened up the larger sprawling novels, which had been resistant to the compact sapce of a movie. Apparently Dickens at 5 on a Sunday afternoon was once a national institution (is there any reason why tapes of these can't be put online?). I didn't know that the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein on 'Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today' (in Film Form), praising Dickens's prescient use of montage and cutting between narrative threads to heighten mood. It's one thing to say a writer is cinematic, it's another to have it said by a genius of the cinema.

Great Expectations (BBC)

The BBC got started on the Dickens bicentenary just before 2012 with a three-part adaptation of Great Expectations (and also excerpts from Tomalin's recent biography nicely read by Mrs Crawley, sorry, Penelope Wilton). This treatment has drawn some critical ire for its rather free approach to the business of adaptation, and it was certainly surprising to see the plot actually being rewritten in the closing stages. All humour was bleached out (no Aged Parent, for example), and the verbal tags (Joe's 'What larks', Jaggers' 'Put the case') were largely excised.  Miss Havisham, played by Gillian Anderson, was much younger than usual, and moped around like the doped out survivor of a grunge rock band.  Biggest mistake was to make Pip (played by Daniel Booth) into a willowy fragrance model, with lean pale cheek and quivering upper lip - this might be the modern metromale in the Age of Beckham, but the idea that a blacksmith's apprentice would look anything like this after seven years in the forge reallis just absurd. Nor could we believe that this rather self-assured young man was inhibited by Estella, who in fact came over as the needier of the two. But from all these changes some of the emotional darkness and strangeness of the work surfaced. Joe, Jaggers, and Magwitch all took their turn as surrogate father in Pip's journey, and what was lost in humour was made up for with the sense of being hopelessly lost, stranded in a pretend self between the marshes and the murky London streets. There was also a real evil about Orlick, Drummles and Compesson which larks and merry evenings at the Wemmicks can obscure. In general the production reminded me of The Crimson Petal and the White, another exercise in new-look Victoriana, much possessed by questions of hysteria and identity. Great performances by Ray Winstone (Magwitch), David Suchet (Jaggers) among others. And plenty of BBC Dickensiana to look forward to.