Little Dorrit (1987) (original) (raw)
Synopsis
Amy Dorrit spends her days earning money for the family and looking after her proud father who is a long term inmate of Marshalsea debtors' prison in London. Amy and her family's world is transformed when her employer's son, Arthur Clennam, returns from overseas to solve his family's mysterious legacy and discovers that their lives are interlinked.
Cast
Popular reviews
1st Christine Edzard
My thanks to Yam for giving me a copy of this, helpfully split into four sections. Until OJ: Made in America, this was the longest film ever to be nominated for an Oscar, clocking in at an astonishing 343 minutes. That's nearly 5 and 3/4 hours, a monumental effort for anyone, but I decided to crack as much as I could of this in one sitting. To that end, I saw one half of part one on Saturday and the everything else on Sunday while preparing some quiz questions for next year. Somehow, the slightly diverted attention was extremely useful for the sheer length. I don't think I'd have managed complete attention for nearly four hours yesterday,…
Those among you who've actually read Little Dorritt know that a six-hour film (or tv shop in episodes) is the best thong to honour Dicken's rich, captivating and strong novel. It's a story of debt and debt-prison, love, class, self-deceit and wonder. Alec Guinness' Oscar nomination for his part was well deserved - he won't allow mannerism and repetitiveness in his parts, which enables him a kind of high-level versality. My advice: read the novel first and watch this version a couple of years afterwards.
David Thewlis Filmography Project Part II: Brief Apparitions
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#16 Little Dorrit
George Braddle = The Background Character
Number of apparitions: 1
Pros: Like many actors who now have fame and recognition David would have to ''make out'' at the beginning of his career with a character that only appears for almost 3 minutes in the second hour of the film with a character that if it had not been there in the crowd would not have affected the whole story. What can I say about this story that many do not know, a six-hour film, but divided into two parts where slowly and subtly tell us…
Christine Edzard’s epic drama about Little Dorrit’s early life, her education and her strength, and cementing her love for a young man, helping him overcome the deceit of his adopted mother.
The first part of a six-hour adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel of the same name, which was published in serial form in 1855 and 1857, begins with the return of Arthur Clennam (Derek Jacobi) to London after a number of years in China.
A strange watch left to him by his fading father separates him from his cold-hearted mother, but not before Arthur encounters her enigmatic young seamstress, Amy Dorrit (Sarah Pickering). Thinking that his mother is the reason Amy is existing in Marshalsea debtors' jail with her father…
Having just read Denton Welch's Journals, with his pleasingly doing nothing more on VE Day 1945 than continuing to restore a doll's house, this film chimes with it's landscape of miniatures set against ominous magnitude. Impromptu dance lessons in a back alley or tea & cake with loquacious Miss Finching occupy the same amount of time, care and attention as the moral injury inflicted upon poor Arthur Clennam or the financial fall of vainglorious William Dorrit. Wes Anderson, take note: toy theatre is the craft not the credo.
As ever with Charles Dickens it's the tellingly great and the sentimentally small. And this is Christine Edzard and Sands Films, so not dissimilar (Sands deserving its own history telling of an against-the-odds cottage…
Anybody trying this older version of "Little Dorrit" is in for a long chore or a great delight. Maybe both. At over six hours, at the time this was the longest Oscar-eligible movie ever. Somehow, people sat in the theater for six hours. I'm reading that they didn't just have an intermission; they had a *lunch break* for this one.
Despite the poor-looking quality of the current streaming version, this Little Dorrit might be my favorite Dickens adaptation. Director Christine Edzard has taken some of the syrupy sentimentality out of the original writer's vision, replacing it with an attempt at 19th century realism, more Balzac than melodrama. The results for me are an immersive 1840s England, as if parts of…
At 6 whole hours, 4 VHS tapes worth of Dickensian drama, Christine Edzard’s Little Dorrit is now officially the longest film I’ve ever seen, and I suspect it will hold that title for a long while (at least until I get around to Bondarchuk’s War and Peace). What’s strange is that even though it took me a whole day to watch (with short intermissions between tapes and a lunch break between parts 1 and 2) Little Dorrit never felt long the way other, much shorter movies have.
Whether that is a compliment or a criticism, I can’t tell. I happen to love the experience of a great, sweeping movie story. Little Dorrit, a great film, doesn’t work like that. It…
I only watched this cuz Alec Guinness got nominated for an Oscar for this movie this shit is almost 6 hours it’s actually insane way too long it’s a well made movie and yeah the acting is good but there is zero percent chance that any of the Oscars voters watched this
Very much the strangest film adaptation of a Dickens novel I have encountered, Little Dorrit was adapted and directed by Christine Edzard, a noted costume designer who has written and directed a few films, most of them far more obscure than this one. Her approach to the novel is fastidious in the detail of its costuming and in the suggestion of inner lives of the many, many extras and bit characters, but it diverges from virtually all Dickens films of my experience by an indiosyncratic editing style of recurrent freneticism, with jumpy cuts that abruptly abandon one scene for another, juxtaposed against fewer scenes in which calm and drawn-out observation are given foremost attention. A long film, over six hours…
Never mind the quality, feel the length. The running time is off-putting but of more relevance to enjoyment is pretty abysmal sound mixing which frequently renders dialogue inaudible due to street chatter/clanking machinery/crying babies. There are some truly excellent performances - Alec Guinness [SPOILER upcoming] gives one of the best death scenes I've ever seen - but quite a few substandard ones. And alas, one of those is of the title character.
I thought Christine Edzard's Little Dorrit was a TV show. However, I am slightly amazed to find out it is actually considered to be a film. A 350 minute film. It is on Netflix UK in two parts, nicely split as the first half is from Arthur Clennam's (Derek Jacobi) point of view and the second half is from Amy Dorrit's (Sarah Pickering).
Once you start watching it, you soon realise that yes it is a film. It is structured and presented like a film. It luxuriates in its run-time and brings Charles Dickens' plot and words to the screen. I really love the 2008 TV version with Claire Foy, but I think the lower-budget version is probably superior due…
Quite possibly the finest of all the Dickens adaptations, Christine Edzard's film takes six hours in two parts to present this tricky book, which focuses on a love story under the shadow of the bankrupt and the debtor's prison.
Derek Jacobi is exceptional as Arthur Clennam, and Sarah Pickering's titular Dorrit is very touching. A cast which includes Alec Guinness, Max Wall, Cyril Cusack, Joan Greenwood, Eleanor Bron and Patricia Hayes are guided through Edzard's excellent screenplay across the two halves of the story, observed first by Clennam and then by Dorrit, with different views of the same scenes.
Pickering only ever appeared on screen in this, and chose a different career path: a pity, on the evidence here. This may be somewhat theatrical in tone, but can Dickens be done any other way? And as much as I like the 2008 television version, this is the definitive Dorrit.