I can’t say I ever heard of director Raymond Bernard before this Eclipse release, and while we’re not dealing with anyone operating at the level of Vigo or early Renoir, there’s plenty of interest here. Certainly the almost five hours taken to adapt Hugo’s novel allows it to spend more time on eisodes that other shorter versions skip over – it’s fascinating, for example, how much time is given over to the student revolutionaries’ construction of their barricades. But this is a film that you have to make allowances for because of its age. It suffers from the slow pace of early mainstream sound cinema where huge pauses sit between simple exchanges of dialogue. And although the male leads are great – Harry Baur’s huge hulking Jean Valjean, Charles Vanel’s tightly wound-up Inspector Javert, and Charles Dullin’s wonderfully theatrically villanous Thénardier -, the female roles are all played awfully, with an unbalanced emotionalism. Given that Orane Demazis, for example, is so different in the Fanny films, it seems that Bernard simply couldn’t get as good performances out of his females actors as his males ones – or perhaps he concentrated too much on all the cantered angles the film is full of.
by Ian Johnston | Source: Eclipse Series 4 DVD
18 Aug 2007 7:10 AM | Submit Comment
