Six-hour Dickensian epic film wins rave reviews

Press, 4 January 1988, Page 17

Six-hour Dickensian epic film wins rave reviews

By

MICHAEL RANK

NZPA-Reuter London

A six-hour epic film of Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit,” with a starstudded cast including Sir Alec Guinness and Derek Jacobi, is winning rave reviews for a portrayal of the grinding poverty and colourful characters of Victorian London. The film, in two parts, has been praised for vivid evocation of Dickensian England and for the consummate skill with which the director, Christine Edzard, handles an enormous cast that includes many of Britain’s bestknown actors. Derek Malcolm, film critic of the “Guardian,” said the film “displays the virtuosity and depth of British acting talent... The essence of Dickens’ majestic panorama of weakness, gullibility and hypocrisy is all present” in Guinness and Jacobi’s performances. “The Times” cinema critic, David Robinson, praised the film’s epic quality and the authenticity of the sets and costumes. “Nor does it overlook the parallels to our own times, in this new industrial society bedevilled by greed, passion for investment, embezzling moguls and the insolence of bureaucracy. Edzard does justice to Charles Dickens,” Robinson

added. French-born Edzard said "Little Dorrit” was her favourite Dickens’ novel, even though it is not one of his most widely read, and that to film it had been a long-standing ambition. "I wanted to film the whole book, which is why it had to be so long. I wouldn’t have touched it otherwise, because I couldn’t have done it justice,” she said. "Everyone said it was quite impossible,” said Edzard, even though the film’s £4.9 million ($13.8 million) budget is modest by Hollywood standards. "We got it (the finance) almost by accident. We went ahead and started making it on our own,” said the director, who is married to the film’s coproducer, Richard Goodwin. This is only the second feature film Edzard has made. Her first, “Biddy,” about a Victorian nanny, did not attract large audiences. The two parts of “Little Dorrit” daringly tell the same story through two pairs of eyes — once through those of the dreamy but well-meaning Arthur Clennam (Derek Jacobi) and once through those of Amy Dorrit (Sarah Pickering), a young girl born and brought up in Marshalsea debtors’ prison. The story begins with

Arthur Clennam’s return to London and his grim, reclusive mother (the late Joan Greenwood) after 20 years in China. He takes pity on Amy, or Little Dorrit as she is called, who is working as a seamstress for his mother, and he tries, rather ineffectually, to help her. Clennam’s vague dogooding backfires in a failed business venture and he lands in the Marshalsea from which William Dorrit, the heroine’s father and a long-time inmate, has been released after unexpectedly inheriting a fortune. With their positions reversed, it is left to Little Dorrit to try to help Clennam. John Carey, professor of English literature at Oxford, writes in the programme that "The mere lighting of a candle, which sheds a gaunt and sickly pallor in Arthur’s half of the film, is a joyous outburst in Amy’s.” In Little Dorrit’s eyes the mansion of Mrs Clennam (Arthur’s mother) is filled with sunlight, Carey wrote. “It is, we realise, a stately and beautiful house, with its polished woods and ornate moulded ceiling. Yet Arthur has seen only darkness and decay.” London film-goers must buy separate tickets for each part, but they can

either see both parts in one day, with a two-hour interval, or they can view each half on different days. Guinness plays with shabby grandeur the part of the feckless William Dorrit. The character is based to a large extent on Dickens’ own father, who also served time in the Marshalsea. “I’ve never enjoyed anything so much,” Guinness, aged 73, said in a recent interview on the set of the film, which was shot entirely in a studio in Rotherhithe in East London. “I love the atmosphere here... and the whole ramshackle oddity of it: the fact that it’s on the Thames, down from Tower Bridge, with the river flowing, the tide coming in and out. “That gives it all a curious life," said Guinness, an old hand at Dickens films who made his screen debut in David Lean’s version of “Great Expectations” in 1947 and was a memorable Fagin in “Oliver Twist” the next year. For Jacobi, the film crowns a series of smash hits on television and on the stage, including a British Best Actor of the Year nomination for “Breaking the Code” which recently transferred to Broadway after a highly successful' run in London’s West End.