Nicholas Nickleby (1947) (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Nov 05, 2024
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
(Alberto) CavalcantiRelease Date(s)
1947 (August 13, 2024)Studio(s)
Ealing Studios (Kino Classics)- Film/Program Grade: A
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
For far too long Ealing Studios’ marvelous The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947) has lived in the shadow of other, better-known Charles Dickens adaptations of the period, particularly David Lean’s rightly celebrated Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), whose releases sandwiched this production, as well as the somewhat later, beloved Scrooge (1951), with Alastair Sim. Great Expectations is, without question, one of the greatest films of all-time; that Nicholas Nickleby is merely very, very excellent should not have elicited the negative comparisons made when it was new.
Indeed, most of Great Expectations’ qualities manifest in the Ealing film also, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, billed onscreen as just “Cavalcanti.” Both films have superb art direction, costumes, and cinematography, and their fine casts overflow with top British talent, many unbilled. While Cavalcanti’s work is perhaps less aggressively cinematic than Lean’s, it definitely has its moments, particularly during the exciting climax.
Dickens’s third novel, first published in serial form 1838-39, has 65 chapters and runs nearly a thousand pages, but the movie, condensing the material to 108 minutes of running time, doesn’t feel rushed, confused, or overly abridged. (A celebrated 1980 London stage version ran 8 ½ hours.)
After the death of his father, Nicholas Nickleby (Derek Bond), along with his mother (Mary Merrall) and younger sister, Kate (Sally Ann Howes), turn to their wealthy but cold-hearted, moneylender uncle, Ralph Nickleby (Cedric Hardwicke) for help. Uncharitable even toward blood relatives, he arranges for the educated Nicholas to be hired as a tutor at a school, actually a pitiful dumping ground for unwanted little boys that’s more like a prison-workhouse, managed by Wackford Squeers (Alfred Drayton) and his family of grotesques. Ralph agrees to provide cheap housing for the women, with Kate forced to work at a sweatshop as a seamstress.
Horrified by the conditions and Squeers’s abusive treatment of the boys, especially the forgotten, scarecrow like 20-year-old Smike (Aubrey Woods, decades later Bill the Candy Man in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), Nicholas gives Squeers a taste of his own medicine, beating him savagely and Nicholas escapes, taking the physically fragile Smike with him. Aided by Ralph Nickleby’s sympathetic, alcoholic clerk, Newman Noggs (Bernard Miles), Nicholas and Smike fall in with extravagantly extroverted and theatrical Vincent Crummles (Stanley Holloway), an actor-manager of a theatrical troupe, who casts them in his latest production of Romeo and Juliet. Nicholas also has several encounters and falls in love with Madeline Bray (Jill Balcon), who looks after her father in debtor’s prison.
Soon after, Nicholas receives a letter from Noggs, warning him that Uncle Ralph is making plans to effectively sell Kate to one of two clients of Ralph’s, the decades-older Sir Mulberry Hawk (Cecil Ramage) and frog-like Lord Verisopht (Timothy Bateson), Ralph breaking his promise to Nicholas to keep the women safe. He rushes back to London in hopes of saving her.
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (its on-screen title) is a complete, if at times harrowing, delight from beginning to end, marked by many extraordinary performances. Derek Bond, while conventionally handsome in the late-1940s English manner, nonetheless makes a splendid Nicholas. Co-lead Cedric Hardwicke, a prominent supporting actor in British films of the 1930s, moved to Hollywood near the end of the decade, finding good roles at first (e.g., as Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame) but soon was wasted in potboilers like The Ghost of Frankenstein. Nicholas Nickleby may have offered the actor his best movie role. As a kind of irredeemable Ebenezer Scrooge, Hardwicke plays Ralph Nickleby as a heartless man completely bereft of empathy and basic humanity, who uses polite, gentlemanly language and perverse reasoning to justify his incredible cruelty while delighting in the suffering of others. Like Great Expectations’ shocking revelation about Pip’s benefactor, Nicholas Nickleby has a neat plot twist greatly enhancing Hardwicke’s character.
Many of Hardwicke’s scenes are with Bernard Miles, so sweetly charming as the illiterate, warm-hearted but socially awkward Joe Gargery. Here, Miles’s portrait of the former gentleman who loses his station through alcoholism and forced to work as Ralph’s clerk, he’s warmer and wiser than he first appears, delighting in his master’s eventual comeuppance.
Yet the film is packed with many delightful performances: Stanley Holloway’s broadly gregarious one coming at just the point when the story desperately needs some uplift; Jill Balcon (mother of Daniel Day-Lewis) is lovely as Madeline; Vida Hope is hilarious as Squeers’s sex-starved daughter, Fanny; James Hayter is a delight as Ned and Charles Cheerybles, twin brothers. The only performance I didn’t care for was by Mary Merrall, who as Nicholas’s mother seems to be channeling Billie Burke but comes off as merely irritating.
So crammed is the picture, many recognizable faces appear in small or even one-line roles, many unbilled: Guy Rolfe as an actor in Crummles’s troupe, Jean Marsh making her film debut as a fellow seamstress, Hattie Jacques delivering one line in a short subplot where Nicholas tries teaching an obnoxious brood of pampered children. There are many others.
The exceptional production and costume design capture the opulence of England’s rich, but more impressively the appallingly bleak conditions of England’s poor, living in dimly-lit, cramped, sooty, odd-shaped rooms, wearing ill-fitting clothes half-worn to pieces. The well-chosen cast and their makeups and hair, some quite elaborate, capture the grotesque caricature nature of the descriptions found in Dickens’s novels (accentuated by their colorful, descriptive names); they really look like people of the first-half of the 19th century do in the earliest photographs, something that would seem almost impossible to capture today.
Kino Classics’ Blu-ray of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby looks terrific, close to the Blu-ray versions of other Dickens adaptations of the period. There is some minor age-related damage, but nothing to speak of in this 1.33:1 transfer, while the DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is more than adequate. Region “A” encoded.
Extras are limited but all worthwhile. Included is a very brief (less than three minutes) film of Nicholas Nickleby, a 1903 silent just long enough to show Nicholas’s rebellion at the boy’s school. The main extra is an excellent interview, really a discussion, with BFI Dickens Season curators Adrian Wootton and Michael Eaton, who like me champion this grossly underrated film. A British trailer in excellent condition rounds out the supplements.
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, more than 75 years on, is just as immensely engrossing as when it was new. I can’t recommend it enough.
- Stuart Galbraith IV