I need to retract or adjust my statement in
my review of Mystery of Edwin Drood that Americans should leave Dickens to
the English. This is an American production which MGM gives the razzmatazz
treatment and it is very good with a brilliant first half (David as a child)
and a decent second half (with David as an adult). It is loaded with talent
from top to bottom. It was produced by David Selznick who loved the book
and talked Louis B Mayer, the head of the studio, to sign off on it. Selznick
immediately turned to one of their best character ensemble directors at MGM
- George Cukor who already had such films as Dinner at Eight and Little Women
on his resume. And the cast? Zowie - a wet dream of stars and character actors
- some of my very favorites.
Dickens wrote that this was his favorite book - and that may be because parts
of it were autobiographical. It is a complex tale in which multitudes of
characters and sub-plots are woven in and out of the narrative. Told in first
person narrative by Copperfield from his birth to his manhood. Along the
way he meets some bad and some good; faces adversity and overcomes it. Falls
in love and sees tragedy. The film simplifies a lot of this, dropping characters
and sub-plots but the gist of it is here and as it is it runs slightly over
two hours. Dickens was really made for the mini-series format to do it justice.
It begins on a windy day as a female figure clad in black with a ramrod back
approaches a house. She peeks in through the window and we realize it is
Edna May Oliver and a slight glee gurgles up from within me. I love her in
films. She got stuck playing haughty nose in the air older ladies with a
hidden but kind heart in many parts. Here she is the aunt to David Copperfield
Sr, who passed away six months previously and left his wife pregnant. Aunt
Betsey (Oliver) declares it will be a girl and when she hears it is instead
a boy, she marches out of the house without a word - not to be seen - till
years later. The boy is named David (Freddie Bartholomew - who was to become
a huge child star after this) and he grows up in a happy home with his mother
and their housekeeper Peggotty (Jessie Ralph).
But it all turns around when he is about eight when his mother brings a husband
home. Played with cold cruel perfection by Basil Rathbone. When his mother
dies in childbirth the step-father (wonderfully named Murdstone) unloads
him to work in a business in London and to lodge with Mr. Micawber and his
family. Micawber is played by none other than W.C. Fields which may seem
at first glance to be an enormously inappropriate choice. It was to have
been Charles Laughton but he quit after two days because he thought the make-up
made him look like a pedophile. He recommended Fields who he said was a Dicken's
scholar. Fields was suppose to take on an English accent but that quickly
went by the wayside and so we get one of the more famous characters in literature
speaking like W.C. Fields always does. And it kind of works - he makes the
character his own though Laughton would have been great as well. But you
keep waiting for him to say something like "Anyone who hates children and
animals can't be all bad".
Micawber ends up in debtor prison - a theme that runs through a lot of his
books - and after getting out has to leave London leaving David on his own.
The only refuge he can think of is Aunt Betsey in Dover and he walks all
the way there. She grumbles but on the advice of her muddled friend Mr. Dick
takes him in. Mr Dick is played by a fellow who is the spitting image of
Benny Hill. When Murdstone comes to collect David it is perhaps the best
scene in the film when Aunt Betsey tells him off and kicks him out. A scene
made for Edna May Oliver. Many more characters come into David's life - he
boards with Mr. Wickfield (Lewis Stone) and his daughter (Madge Evans) who
have an assistant with what was to became a famous name - Uriah Heep played
by Roland Young as if he was auditioning for Gollum. Lovely performance.
Also coming into the film is Peggotty's family led by Lionel Barrymore and
later David falls in love with a bubble-head but a cute one in Maureen O'Sullivan.
The film is literally divided in half as David as a child and him as an adult
(Frank Lawton) and the first half is near perfection - Bartholomew in his
debut is great, Lawton less interesting - but the story does as well as Copperfield
really becomes more an observer than a doer - he becomes a writer. Nothing
really interesting happens in his life. Others with small parts are Herbert
Mundin as Peggotty's man, Elsa Lanchester as part of Micaber's family and
Una O'Conner as part of the Peggoty family. It has been enjoyable watching
these Dicken's films. Much faster than reading them - a couple of which I
did about a hundred years ago it seems. A tutorial of sorts in Dickens. Will
get to Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist at some
later date. 8 for the first half, 6 for the second.
