Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5045 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-10-27
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Formats: PAL, Colour, HiFi Sound
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 380 minutes

Synopsis
A drama based on the novel by Charles Dickens which tells the story of Arthur Clennam who is thrown into a debtor's prison. There he meets a young seamstress whose father has been imprisoned for twenty-five years.

Review
About LITTLE DORRIT in ICONS IN THE FIRE by Alexander Walker, 2001 The decade s most eccentric film, Little Dorrit, was produced, appropriately, in the area of London whose economic difficulties simultaneously foreshadowed the recession of the early 1990s. Little Dorrit, a six-hour-long, two-part version of Charles Dickens s novel, was made in studios at Rotherhithe, on the very same swath of the Thames, known as Docklands, where developers were holding their corporate breath to see if the strapped-for-cash yuppies could fork out the cash to pay for their new riverside homes as the property boom reached an unheard-of peak, 27 per cent higher than in 1986, while the stock market went into free fall in October 1987. Apart from Abel Gance s Napoleon, few film makers attempted what Christine Edzard did or with so few resources except abundant human talent. Her film was compared at the time with the populous stage production of Nicholas Nickleby. A poor comparison. With her producer husband Richard Goodwin, and his partner John Brabourne, she made Victorian London arise in all its greatness and meanness under the ships timbers that still held up her warehouse studios roof. The other miracle was one of imagination, not construction: she did not let the movie sink under the logistical weight of its own populous authenticity. She made it live. Such numbers, such faces and figures, and such performances. After Lean and some said better than Lean it is the best Dickens film. Or films since, aping the Victorian stereopticon toy, Edzard filmed the story in double vision. By aligning two separate viewpoints on its characters and events the first entitled Nobody s Fault , being that of a good-hearted but weak young man, while the second, called Little Dorrit , being seen through the eyes of a resilient and strong-willed girl Edzard produced a single stand-out view of era, place and people. The Thatcherite values were implicitly under attack in the first 177 minutes: corruption, heartlessness, get-rich-quick fever of the speculative classes were contrasted with the inner-city desolation of the poor caught in the debt trap. The cast was contemporary, in attitude if not apparel: slum landlords, crook financiers, uncaring bureaucrats, ruined speculators and front-page suicides. In its edifice, in which the indolent and incompetent served their time and filled their places, the Circumlocution Office had its parallel in present-day Whitehall. But just sas one is lying back, drained and exhilarated by people s misfortunes and miracles like the Dorrit family released from the crumbling hive of the Marshalsea Prison, a boarding house with bars for bad-debtors Edzard proceeded to tell the same storyover again, from a fresh angle, filling in the gaps, fleshing out the characters, all in ways that shaped the political focus and altered the perspective on the social scene. With 211 named players, the cast list was like a National Gallery of all the talents: too many to name or even to apologise to for not naming. Pre-eminent, though, was Alec Guinness as William Dorrit, the haughty gentleman-sponge. Among Guiness s six best screen performances, it is at the very top. He has never held us so breathless as during Dorrit s dementia at his elder daughter s sumptuous wedding feast, when the old lag in him, shifty but without shame, his mind wandering back to his prison cell and genteel knavery, bids the throng of titled grandees, Welcome to the Marshalsea . Edzard released in Guinness what other directors, including Lean, never managed to reach: his instinct for self-dissimulation as a cover-up of himself from himself. In the part of William Dorrit , Guinness later said, I probably exploited unpleasant things in myself . --Dennis Grunes Wordpress.com

Review
Having launched his screen career with memorable performances as Herbert Pocket and Fagin in David Lean s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), it was somewhat apt that Alec Guinness should give his last display of cinematic excellence in another Dickens adaptation. Capturing the shabby grandiosity and brazen duplicity of William Dorrit, the Oscar-nominated Guinness provides a touchstone of flawed humanity that stands between the dutiful virtue of Sarah Pickering s Amy and the meek benevolence of Derek Jacobi s Arthur Clennam and the less shaded perfidy of Bill Fraser s Casby, Max Wall s Flintwinch and Joan Greenwood s pitiless matriarch. For all the brilliance of the ensemble playing, the strength of this fourth film version of Charles Dickens s eleventh novel lies in Christine Edzard s Oscar-nominated screenplay and the pacing and control of her direction. Originally published in 19 instalments between December 1855 and June 1857, the sprawling story exposed the inadequacies of the penal system, the iniquities of class division, the inefficiencies of government bureaucracy and the impossibility of family unity. Yet while George Bernard Shaw could call the book Dickens masterpiece among many masterpieces , it could also be used to validate George Orwell s contention that his writing combined rotten architecture and wonderful gargoyles . By dividing the narrative into two parts, Nobody s Fault and Little Dorrit s Story, Edzard rectified some of the weaknesses in the original structure. Her re-ordering allows us to get to know the characters before they become embroiled in the drama and allows us to sample the contrasting atmospheres of the Marshalsea debtors prison, the grindingly poor hovels of Bleeding Heart Yard, the oppressively gloomy Clennam resisdence and the soul-destroying corridors of the Circumlocution Office. So, whether watched in consecutive three-hour segments, in two parts or broken down into nightly episodes across a week, this stands as the most ambitious and considered take on any Dickens novel. Andrew Davies s forthcoming 16-week reworking for the BBC, therefore, has some act to follow. --David Parkinson

Customer Reviews

Little Dorrit
Christine Ezeard has allowed time, in her wonderful adaptation of Dickens' masterpiece 'Little Dorrit', for us to savour scenes, to understand character, motive and history. In some unique way she has exactly caught what we understand, from his writings, to be Dickens' perception of his world. It is as though a camera has been set up in the mid-Victorian world that is the background to the novel and somehow we are offered an insight into the mind of people of that time. The camera observes and does not attempt to manipulate the viewer. In this way Dickens' intent and the symbolism of this dark novel is plain and unadorned. All characters and scenes are unforgettable: Pancks, Flora, Afferty and Flintwich, Mrs Clennam, the Dorrits and all the other remarkable characters; the men lounging against the Marshalsea wall, the Clennam house slowly disintegrating, Bleeding Heart Yard...this is an adaptation which is quite unique. There is not one piece of acting in this fine film. It is being, the cast having the ability here to flesh out charcters straight from the writer's pages. We have not been offerd a modern interpretation of this story, there are no flashy camera angles, no fast cutting, no snatches designed for our time's alleged inability to cope with anything longer than a few minutes. Having experienced this version of Little Dorrit you will never want to see another. Remarkably we are able to watch the same story twice, from Clennam's perspective and from Little Dorrit and her father's perspective. Buy, watch and savour.

Not everyone's cup of tea but an outstanding adaptation
Christine Edzard's films (note the plural) of "Little Dorrit" make up perhaps the greatest and most comprehensive adaptation of Dickens ever produced for the big screen. I use the plural because the work comes in the form of two 3-hour films called "Nobody's Fault" and "Little Dorrit's Story". To get the best out of them, both must be viewed and in that order.

The film is studded with great names - Derek Jacobi, Alec Guinness, Cyril Cusack, Joan Greenwood (in her last film appearance) and a host of mostly British acting talent including Robert Morley, Michael Elphick, Bill Fraser and Eleanor Bron, all in little more than bit parts. But for me, the star of the show has to be Sarah Pickering, the unknown actress entrusted with the title role. I have tried, without success, to find just one other film in which she appeared.

The film is set mostly in the notorious Marshalsea debtors prison in Borough, south London, where Dickens' own father was once incarcerated. A debtors prison is a perfect example of what Joseph Heller would later dub "catch 22". A person imprisoned for debt was denied the right to work, hence had no means of earning the money to pay off the debt(s) of which he/she was accused.

The film is essentially a story of the love between Arthur Clennam, a man in his 40s (Jacobi) and Amy Dorrit, usually called Little Dorrit, a young woman of 22 though, according to Dickens, she looked half that age (Pickering). It is set in the period preceding the Reform Act of 1855, and indeed, the novel contributed in no small way to the debate leading up to that piece of legislation. It is a very complex plot (this is, after all, based on a Dickens novel) but one of the devices used is a government department called the Circumlocution Office, in which Dickens and the film makers parody bureaucratic processes by taking them to extremes. Dickens did not go as far as Kafka, who saw authority as actively plotting the destruction of its victims, but he savagely attacks the processes and procedures whereby government is carried out and the means whereby people found their way into high office. At that time, progress through a civil service career was mostly through family connections, a process that enabled illiterates to attain high office.

Edzard's 1987/99 adaptation of the novel is lovingly crafted and filmed exclusively on sets created for the purpose, i.e. there was no location shooting. The background music is adapted from the work of Dickens' Italian contemporary Guiseppe Verdi.

This is not for everyone, but for those who like Dickens and like to see attempts to be true to his work it is an absolute must. Only now (2008) has it appeared on DVD, remastered from the negatives by the original production company. Guinness, Greenwood and Cusack are, sadly, no longer with us, but this serves as a wonderful reminder of the quality of their work

Applause, Applause
I have attended two films - and only two - where at the conclusion of the film the audience stood up and applauded. One was 'Lawrence of Arabia', the other was both parts of this interpretation of 'Little Dorrit'.
I appeal to those who can make it happen to release this magnificent film on DVD.
Little Dorrit is, in my opinion, not only The greatest novel that Dickens wrote (having a slight edge over Bleak house, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend) but the greatest novel in the English language. It is assuredly a worthy competitor to the works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Flaubert.
It seems to me that although the film takes 'liberties' with the text and has major omissions the spirit of the book prevails. The idea of 'splitting' the film into two parts - one giving Arthur Clenham's view, the other the view of Little Dorrit - is the work of genius.
See the film, read the book and I defy you not to admit that your perspective on life has not been altered. This is a work of art not to be missed.