The first three hours of Christine Edzard's six-hour adaptation of Dickens's Little Dorrit -- and you needn't see the second three to know it is mostly a big bore. Mostly but not wholly. Part of the problem, which should come as no surprise, lies with the original author. Dickens was not often a great storyteller; he was quite often a great teller, though what he was a great teller of was not stories: isolated scenes, yes, and characters, descriptions, details. (And needless to say, much of what is right with the movie, like much of what is wrong with it, is also traceable to Dickens or to his "spirit.") But at eight or nine hundred pages of closely packed print you require nothing less than a great storyteller. (But great storytellers, in turn, don't require eight or nine hundreds of pages.) And whatever goes for eight or nine hundred pages goes as well for a boil-down of those pages into six hours of celluloid. To be thus given the bare story without the enveloping language, or at any rate the non-dialogue language, seems a rather bad bargain, even figuring in the hours you are saved in the process. Not just any old pictures will always be worth a thousand words each. Not if a man of Dickens's class wrote them. Derek Jacobi, Sarah Pickering, Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Miriam Margoyles. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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