NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 440, 28 November 1947, Page 15

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

(Ealing-Rank)

] SUPPOSE if the truth be told, that the chief thing wrong with this new British production by Michael Balcon is that it isn’t Great Expecta-

4 tions, the film by which all picturegoers, with a few exceptions, will now judge screen versions of Dickens. It is, in fact, a much better film than the average, and for that reason alone can be recommended; it telescopes (so I am informed, for I must confess to not having read the original) most of the situations in "the novel, and ingludes a large proportion of its 52 characters; and it has been "assembled and directed by Cavalcanti a with great professional skill. But on this occasion, I am afraid, Cavalcanti has missed the mark. He has failed to capture the essential spirit of Dickens, which-as I said when writing about Great Expectations-surely is that, although his characters and situations are almost invariably larger than life-size, they are nevertheless full-blooded and alive. A modern reader or a modern audience recognises their warm humanity in spite of their fancy dress, and the fantastic situations and coincidences in which they are involved. It may be because Cavalcanti is a foreigner that he has missed this essential quality in Dickens, At any rate he gives me the impression of having too obviously striven to create an effect and an atmosphere, instead of letting the effect and the atmosphere derive mostly from the telling of the tale. The result is a conscious eccentricity and theatricalism, extending almost at times to the point of being precious: the characters behave in a correct "period" manner, the settings are often most artistically composed and skilfully photographedbut time and again you feel that the characters are little more than puppets and that the settings are contrived. As I say, I haven’t read the book, but surely there is more to Mantilini than this puppet-like figure which jerks briefly across the screen and then disappears for good; surely the Cheerybles have more substance than this? This is perhaps an unfair complaint, since Cavalcanti had to get Dickens’s 450,000 words into the compass of 103 minutes, and in such condensation one must expect some of the life to be squeezed out and some characters to be spilled away altogether. But, after all, Great Expectations went through the same process, and retained a sense of superabundant vitality and overflowing inventiveness. It could have been done again. Still, though it hasn’t been done, let us give Nicholas Nickleby the credit for some very good bits. While the action in general is erratic and almost episodic, there’s an unmitigated malevolence about the Squeers’ household and Dotheboys’ Hall which makes one glad to be living, with all its drawbacks, in the atomic age; and the Crummleses, though they appear only briefly on the scene, ere there long enough to spread their warmth around. ; The performances, with some notable exceptions, are not highly impressiveat least not by the inevitable Great

Expectations criterion. The notable exceptions are provided by Alfred Drayton as Squeers, a malignant blot of a man, Stanley Holloway as ‘Vincent Crummles, and Bernard Miles as Newman Noggs (the second time he has played one of Dickens’s homely good fairies to a young man in distress: he recently graced the role of Joe Gargery). On the other hand, Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Wicked Uncle Ralph Nickleby, Derek Bond as Nicholas, and the various damsels-in-distress might fit well enough into a series of pretty, touching, and terrifying tableaux vivants from the Victorian era, but they’re somehow ill at ease in the context of a movie which should flow along with smoothness and unity.