|
"That's fun, dancing near the edge." Dickens has his elemental side, here's George Cukor ahead of David Lean with howling wind for the nestling's birth, not a chiaroscuro canvas but a frisky dash of pantomime (Edna May Oliver as Aunt Betsy, nose pressed up against the glass window). Fanny and Alexander benefits mightily from the early passages, young David (Freddie Bartholomew) loses a mother (Elizabeth Allan) and gains a stepfather (Basil Rathbone), the whole of Victorian strictness rolled into a single unsolvable math problem. From Murdstone to Micawber, on London's rooftops with W.C. Fields and a taste for "a tureen of cock-a-leekie soup." (Bopped on his hat, he lets fly with a sharp Uncle Claude exclamation: "Shades of Nicodemus!") The walk to Dover is an acute Slavko Vorkapich montage, the reward at the end of the road is Lennox Pawle's pixilated smile as Mr. Dick. Celebration and ruination alternate and mingle on the path to adulthood (Frank Lawton), along the way there's the dippy bride in the opera box (Maureen O'Sullivan) and Uriah Heep (Roland Young) like a storeroom Nosferatu. "Copperfield, you perceive before you the shattered fragment of a temple once called Man." By turns a child's horror story, a marital comedy, a Gothic melodrama and an office intrigue, all along a writer's education (cp. Little Women). A Selznick superproduction blessed with Cukor's frankness and speed, illustrations as rich as Phiz's plus a shipwreck as ferocious as Turner's. (Hitchcock helps himself to it for Jamaica Inn and Rebecca, and there are studies in Truffaut's L'Histoire d'Adèle H. and Polanski's Tess.) "Nil desperandum," the screen that bulges from the pleasure of Dickens, the storybook abyss that ends with a wink. With Jessie Ralph, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone, Hugh Williams, Madge Evans, Una O'Connor, Elsa Lanchester, and Violet Kemble Cooper. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |