Old Curiosity Shop [DVD]

I bought this Old Curiosity Shop with some apprehension, because other reviewers had led me to expect something so quaint as to be scarcely watchable. My fears were needless.

For one thing, the source print (although not pristine) is still in pretty good shape for such an obscure movie. You get a good impression of what it loked like when it was first shown.

While it is not as lavish as MGM's roughly contemporary David Copperfield and Tale of Two Cities, it is still far from the poverty row 'quota quickie' I was expecting. The production design is modelled very closely on the original illustrations and is often superb. It does use matt paintings and painted backdrops for pictorial effect rather than verisimilitude, but the sets are brilliantly designed and constructed and blend well with the backgrounds to take you into the heightened reality of Dickens's world. It looks far better than (for example) the mediocre 1995 Disney TV version with Peter Ustinov.

The acting is robust in the somewhat stagey way that Dickens is often acted, but it is by no means the crude gesticulating that one reviewer has reported. The key performance is Hay Petrie's near-definitive Quilp. It is a massive, energetic, unrestrained, barnstorming, firework display of a performance. His Quilp is exactly the hyper-active, dancing, grimacing demonic little Imp that Dickens described (but Tom Courtney steered away from in the 1995 version - probably at the behest of the Disney Corporation). For me it also edges out Trevor Peacock's 1979 Quilp. More problematic is Little Nell's cut-glass, stage school accent (as was noted at the time).

My only reservation is the length. It is actually a clever consdensation of the novel, but 90 minutes really doesn't give this picaresque story time to breathe. Not only are some good scenes missing altogether, but the picture tends to leap from one big moment to the next without the necessary transitions. I find this frustrating, because it was not unusual for 'A' pictures at that time to run for two hours or more and that is what this movie is crying out for.

For me, this Old Curiosity Shop is a viable piece of entertainment that can be enjoyed in its own right, without any apologies for its age or its style. It is far from being the worst Dickens drama in my growing collection.

In short it is a fun movie, not just a dusty museum piece or a curiosity of mild historical interest only.

1934's The Old Curiosity Shop was director and former actor (characters from Dickens a speciality) Thomas Bentley's third adaptation of Dickens' oft-mocked novel - it was of the death of one character that Oscar Wilde famously observed `it would take a heart of stone not to laugh' - and his only talking picture of any of the author's works after making his name with silent versions of Barnaby Rudge and The Pickwick Papers. Its rambling episodic plot that Dickens was desperately making up as he went along to meet a weekly magazine deadline has been well condensed into a slightly more orderly and unhurried hour-and-a-half, but it's still one that's problematic for many modern viewers as it follows the wholesome Little Nell and her weak grandfather as they try to escape the clutches of evil hunchbacked moneylender Mister Quilp. Yet despite being made in a more genteel age, there's an interesting undercurrent suggesting that Bentley sees it as the story of a girl caught between two monsters who want to destroy her in different ways, the lecherous Quilp and her compulsive gambler of a grandfather who constantly ruins her chances of a stable life in the name of winning enough money to ensure the future he's stealing from her. Bentley even makes the link overt in a scene where a nightmare vision of Quilp stepping out from behind waxworks is immediately followed by a shot of the grandfather doing exactly the same en route to robbing their benefactors so he can gamble their money away.

Bentley clearly understands Dickens, not just in the production design's faithful recreations of the original drawings accompanying the serial but also the author's balance of the grotesque and the honestly sentimental. He knows when to go big with the performances and when to render those decent folk who help Nell and her grandfather along their way in a down to Earth matter of fact fashion to avoid cloying, which is a serious pitfall in this particular story. Although she may be terribly well spoken, Elaine Benson plays Nell with common sense as much the dominant characteristic as kindness, never playing it to the gallery. That's left to Hay Petrie's remarkable Quilp, and in his case it's entirely the right choice for Dickens' most grotesque villain. Petrie gives the grasping moneylender a simian quality as he leaps about the furniture, perching on chairs like a monkey yet at the same time convincingly larger than life. There's also a memorable turn on the sidelines from Gibb McLaughlin playing crooked lawyer Samson Brass like a young Ernest Thesiger, if such a thing is imaginable.

It's certainly not a great film, but it's a very satisfying one, perhaps today more to Dickensians than general viewers, and it's easy to see why Bentley was considered the benchmark for Dickens adaptations before David Lean entered the scene (sadly, seven of Bentley's other silent Dickens adaptations are lost, with only 1915's David Copperfield surviving). And that death scene? Surprisingly Bentley pulls it off magnificently and very affectingly as a quietly underplayed moment of madness and denial. Even Oscar might have felt a small tear well up.

StudioCanal's UK DVD is a very decent effort of restoration: not perfect and veering to slightly overexposed in some scenes, but the DNR has been applied intelligently where needed so the image isn't smothered and it's a fairly sharp transfer. There's a fair extras package too -1924 short Dickens' London visiting many of the London locations for Dickens' novels, including the Old Curiosity Shop, and ending with the Artful Dodger picking David Copperfield's pocket on a bus driven by Mr Pickwick (this is the same print with Neil Brand soundtrack that can be found on the BFI's Dickens Before Sound collection), a couple of new talking heads featurettes providing background to both the novel and Bentley's career and a stills gallery.