Without question, works by Charles Dickens continue to delight readers around the world. This program of films based on his novels represents a real treat for cinema lovers, as well as those who are mainly looking for pure quality entertainment


When we read books by Charles Dickens, we look directly into his world because, as many critics have agreed, he was an exceptionally visual author. Many of his works were published in installments. Every “episode” had its own story with an open ending, and his fans eagerly awaited each new installment. Dickens adored the theatre and was heavily influenced by it, which partly accounts for the fact that his works are so easily adaptable for screen or television. Indeed, his impressive visual style has resulted in many film and television adaptations of his works – the oldest film based on his novel, A Christmas Carol, was made in 1901, and more than a hundred years later his works are still made into films. Each of his fifteen novels has been made into a film at least twice and in total there are almost 400 TV series and films based on Dickens’ literary works. Many researchers and lovers of his work, as well as film critics and theoreticians, think that it is a real tragedy that he was born before the advent of film making. In addition to having such a great career as a novelist, he would be an ingenious screenwriter. Maybe he would even have ended up in Hollywood, some say, where the real money is today.

This year, we celebrate the two hundredth birthday of this Victorian author who created some of the most famous and beloved novels and characters in literature. In order to commemorate this important anniversary in a worthy manner, a website Dickens 2012 was created to provide information about celebrations of his life and work, mostly in the form of exhibitions, in England and throughout the rest of the world. “Even though he is an author from the Victorian era, Dickens’ work transcends his time, language and culture. He remains equally strong and influential throughout the world, and his writing is still a great inspiration for film, television, literature and the university community”, note the authors of the website Dickens 2012.

Film is an important element of this celebration and that is why this year we will have the opportunity to see the newest version of Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, which along with Oliver Twist is one of his most popular works. This celebratory Expectations was directed by Mike Newell, Ralph Fiennes plays Magwitch, Jeremy Irvine is Pip, Helena Bonham Carter is Miss Havisham, and Robbie Coltrane is Jaggers. In January this year, British television BBC2 showed the adaptation of his work The Mystery of Edwin Drood directed by Gwyneth Hughes. Although synonymous with realism in depicting the poverty that the lower middle class and poor endured in Victorian England, Dickens was still often quite sentimental in portraying them, and some severe critics hold that against him. Recently, there have been many articles published about last year’s BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, starring Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham. A critic of the Daily Telegraph wrote that she looks like a combination of Courtney Love and Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter, while Douglas Booth as Pip looks like the front man of a boy band, rather than Dickens’ original characterization, with ordinary looks that distinguished him from all the freaks and weirdoes he was surrounded by. Nevertheless, this adaptation also shows how vital and inspirational Dickens is to the many interpretations of his works.

Charles Dickens was born in Landport on February 7, 1812 as the second of eight children in a lower middle class family. His father was a poor government clerk. When Charles was still a boy, his father ended up in Marshalsea Prison because of too many unpaid debts. Thus, the twelve year-old had to leave school and start working in a factory, later taking a position as a junior clerk for a barrister and then as a newspaper reporter.1836 was an important year for the writer. He published his first book, Sketches by Boz, a collection of all the newspaper articles he had written up to that point. In that same year, he married Catherine Hogarth, (the daughter of a colleague), with whom he ultimately had ten children. Additionally, he published the first monthly installment of his excellent novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which was begun when Dickens accepted the job of penning the text to compliment drawings done by the caricaturist Seymour about the adventures of a sports club, which quickly brought him fame. Dickens is considered one of the liveliest portraitists of the British middle and lower middle class, as well as the father of literary social realism. His most famous novels include Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickelby, A Christmas Carol, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Cricket on the Hearth and others. He died at the age of fifty nine, in 1871, while working on the novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Published in December 1843, A Christmas Carol tells the story about the pathological miser Ebenezer Scrooge and his transformation after experiencing surreal, phantasmagoric visits from his deceased business partner Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. The novel earned excellent critical reviews and is considered one of his finest creations.

Thus, it is wonderful for us to have the opportunity to watch A Christmas Carol (1951) by Brian Desmond Hurst and starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge, in the program of films based on Dickens’ works in the Zagreb’s Tuškanac film theatre. In addition, another great hit will be shown, Oliver Twist (1922) by Frank Lloyd, who is also famous for directing Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable. This classic story, legendary among teenagers and grown up readers alike, is a typical Dickensian mixture of harshly dramatic realism and sentimentally depicted characters. Oliver’s mother, a poor woman from the brinks of society, dies in childbirth and Oliver is raised in an orphanage. Before coming of age, he ends up in London and joins a gang of pickpockets whose leader befriends him purely for selfish reasons. Along the way, Oliver discovers the secrets of his family. Oliver is portrayed by Jackie Coogan – the best child actor in the world according to critics at the time of the film’s release. The film deserved, then and now, excellent reviews for its skillful interplay of slapstick and pathos, which achieves a flawless visual parallel with the contrasting comic and tragic elements of Dickens’ literary style. In addition, Lloyd’s adaptation manages to portray Oliver as an embodiment of good, just as Dickens envisioned him. In his interpretation of Oliver, Jackie Coogan plays him less as a drifter and bum than as a small vaudeville comedian turned loose on 19th century London. He is resilient, graceful in suffering and pain, like a clown who laughs even as he gets hit in the face with a pie. He was truly the perfect choice for the role of the young and fragile but at the same time tough hero. The year before Lloyd’s adaptation was made, in 1921, Coogan had starred with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid, which was inspired by Oliver Twist. His success in both roles established a trend. In the years to come it became a standard practice to hire the same actors for the same roles in different productions.

David Lean, the legendary director of British cinema, directed some of the best and most influential film adaptations of Dickens’ novels: Oliver Twist (1948) and Great Expectations (1946). Lean’s version of Oliver Twist was additionally spiced up by the masterful portrayal of Fagin by Alec Guiness. Pip, the hero of Great Expectations, is a good boy, an orphan like Oliver, who lives with the Gargery family. Joe, his father, is a kind man, but his mother, “Mrs Joe” is harsh and grasping. In a nearby swamp, Pip finds two runaway convicts who threaten to murder him unless he brings them food. He helps them and with the aid of his father takes off their chains. Nevertheless, they soon get caught and the one with more of a conscience takes the blame and admits to having stolen food. Some time passes and Pip gets invited to the estate of the incredibly rich Miss Havisham to keep her arrogant adopted daughter Estelle company. While Pip is the very picture of goodness and kindness, Estelle is a beautiful ice queen who breaks the boy’s heart. Being the only beautiful girl he has ever seen, Pip is captivated by Estelle’s beauty and remains in love with her even after he goes away to the best schools and receives a monthly allowance (thanks to a mysterious benefactor acting through a lawyer). It is difficult to think of any other writer as skillful at plot development as Dickens was. One of the most delicious twists in the story succeeds perfectly because the audience, like Pip and his family, takes it for granted that Miss Havisham is the mysterious benefactor. In the end it is a great surprise to all when it is revealed that the great benefactor is actually Magwitch, one of the criminals from the beginning of the story, who is eternally thankful to Pip for helping him when he was a fugitive. By doing so, Dickens of course managed to make Pip’s somewhat snobbish aspirations to become a gentleman appear a bit absurd and even distasteful, given the source of his money. With this story, Dickens strongly criticized England of that time for its strictly divided social classes which, almost like castes, had little or no connection between each other.

Pickwick Papers (1952), directed by Noel Langley, is an excellent adaptation of the novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in which a sports club sends Mr. Pickwick (James Hayter) and a group of his friends traveling through England to report on the interesting things they experience along the way. During their mainly comical adventures, they constantly meet Mr. Jingle, a friendly man with a bad reputation who turns out to cause nothing but problems for everyone unlucky enough to meet him. Mr. Pickwick constantly experiences misunderstandings that put him into unfavorable positions, including problems with the law. During his career, Langley directed only four films, but worked on more as a screenwriter (he was the screenwriter of Hurst’s A Christmas Carol).

In 1958, Ralph Thomas directed A Tale of Two Cities, based on Dickens’ novel by the same title. During the French revolution, Lucie Manette meets and falls in love with an Englishman, Charles Darnay, who is hiding his true identity as a member of the aristocratic French Evremonde family. One of his family members, the old marquis St. Evremonde was an especially cruel man who had sentenced Lucie’s father, Dr. Alexandre Manette, to the Bastille prison for eighteen years. An alcoholic English lawyer, Sydney Carton, enters their lives… T.E.B. Clarke wrote the screenplay for this film. The leading roles were given to the excellent Dirk Bogard, Dorothy Tutin and Cecil Parker.

The musical Oliver (1968) directed by Carol Reed, author of the legendary Third Man, holds a special place among film adaptations of Dickens’ works. This film won five Oscars – for Best Film, Director, Music, Set Design and Sound. The cast is excellent: Bill Sikes is played by Oliver Reed, Mark Lester is Oliver, Ron Moody is Fagin, Jack Wild is Artful Dodger, and Shani Wallis is Nancy… It is interesting to note that Carol Reed reproduced several scenes from David Lean’s Oliver Twist, almost shot for shot, but exchanged Lean’s stark realism for a Technicolor world in which it seems that no one could possibly walk down the street without eventually breaking into a song and dance routine.

As an illustration of what a visually convincing storyteller Dickens was, we refer you to an apocryphal tale about David Llewelyn Wark Griffith, an American director from the beginning of the 20th century known as a godfather of the cinematic arts. One of his first films, the 14-minute long The Cricket on the Hearth (1909), was based on Dickens’ novel. In it he did some early experiments with editing. When he expanded upon the same experiments in his next film, his director of cinematography is said to have criticized him for his revolutionary ideas, questioning how he could tell a story with such great narrative leaps. The story goes that Griffith simply replied: “Doesn’t Dickens write in the same way?” In any case, works by Charles Dickens continue to delight readers around the world. This program of films based on his novels represents a real treat for cinema lovers, as well as those who are mainly looking for pure quality entertainment.
(Alemka Lisinski)