Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

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one rashly impute dishonesty to the film producers, though abundant evidence of a coldly calculating outlook makes it much harder to believe in their good faith. Obvious difficulties complicate the task of transcribing a Dickens novel into film form. Phillips Holmes, who plays the grown-up Pip in Universal's Great Expectations, is reported in an interview to have described Dickens as a born script writer. This is nonsensical. His long, rambling stories, framed to meet the exigencies of serial publication, are clearly unfitted to survive foreshortening on the Procrustean bed of a .shooting-script. It is significant that the productions which capitalize the story — Universal's Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood—zxz much less successful than those which make characterisation their strong point — B.I.P.'s The Old Curiosity Shop and M.-G.-M.'s David Copperfield. By partially divesting Edwin Drood of its caricatured characters, Universal pull it down to the level of a second-rate thriller. Recognition that the strength of Dickens lies in his phenomenal gift for comic characterisation is the first essential, but it leaves unsolved the problem of how to present the characters. They must seem convincing and yet square with the popular conception of them, which is pretty generally founded on the Cruikshank illustrations. All four films very wisely evade the pitfall of trying to tone down their oddity. They are larger than life; they have intense reality so long as they are not pitchforked into a realistic setting. Thus it seems to me that criticism of the theatricality of Hay Petrie's Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop is ill-advised. His vivid, electric portrait is in itself justification of his defiance of the canons of screen acting. The conventional approach would have yielded much less satisfying results. So with the sharply defined character studies in Copperfield, some of which, notably W. C. Fields' Micawber, Edna May Oliver's Betsey Trotwood, and Lennox Pawle's Mr. Dick, suggest nothing so much as an animation of the original magazine engravings. The whole of Copperfield indeed is peculiarly reminiscent of old prints, and the final shot of the roguishly smiling Mr. Dick left at least one critic with the impression of having turned over the last page of an album. Much has been made of Hollywood's skill in evoking the authentic English atmosphere, but that is perhaps the slightest of the producer's difficulties, and it is worth noting that in all four films under review, the period background has been convincingly suggested. It is, after all, not a formidable task to reproduce half-timbered houses and inn courtyards. And a Hugh Walpole can always be brought from England as an insurance against the hypercriticism of Dickensians. It is at least arguable that if the eccentricities of the characters are well preserved, they create the correct atmosphere of themselves. 174