First task when adapting Charles Dickens to film: What to cut? Unless it’s Dickens’ uncompleted last novel. Then it’s: What to add? But the missing second half hasn’t stopped a score of film & tv adaptations, including this 1935 version, faithful to Dickens as far as he got, before a quick wrap in spite of the twenty installments still unwritten when Dickens died. Scripter John L. Balderston (MUMMY; GASLIGHT; FRANKENSTEIN) gets a lot in, and finds reasonable closure in a short-cut resolution, but execution lets it down. Director Stuart Walker, fresh from an underachieving GREAT EXPECTATIONS/’34, never finds the story’s thru line. Good things jostle with bad, and the film bumps along as opium-addicted choirmaster Claude Rains finds he's unable to handle suppressed passions just as his nephew’s long-time fiancée sees her affections drifting toward a new stranger in town from Ceylon. That’s Douglass Montgomery, goony of voice, dusky of face as the hot-headed interloper; blandly smiling David Manners as the abiding putative bridegroom; and lovely young Heather Angel (such a Dickensian name!) as the girl everyone wants to take home. If only the filmmaking lived up to Albert S. D'Agostino‘s atmospheric sets this might have been canonical filmed Dickens.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Rains’ voice double on Handel’s ‘Where’er you walk?’ may not be a good vocal match, but the anonymous fellow sure has a heckuva voice.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: You can barely spot the shady ‘Ceylon’ makeup on Montgomery. Is he darker in the novel? Would the Production Code have let this romance continue had he been?
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Walker probably makes his best showing on THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK/’33. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-eagle-and-hawk-1933.html
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