Charles Dickens’ novel Nicholas Nickleby has been adapted at least eleven times for the screen, but there’s one version that I always turn to when I’m in the need for some high-class cinematic comfort food: the 1947 Ealing Studios film, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti and starring a real who’s who of a cast, including Cedric Hardwicke, Stanley Holloway, Cyril Fletcher, Fay Compton, Alfred Drayton, Derek Bond, Sally Ann Howes, and Sybil Thorndike.
If you like a good Dickens trope, you’ll love this film, which is positively crammed with them. The plucky hero is Nicholas (Bond), who along with his mother Catherine (Mary Merrall) and beautiful sister Kate (Howes) is facing penury following the death of the family breadwinner. Fortunately their rich but miserly uncle Ralph (Hardwicke) is able to arrange employment for Nicholas and Kate, as a tutor and seamstress respectively.
Unfortunately the school where Nicholas is employed, run by the cartoonishly villainous Mr. and Mrs. Squeers (Drayton and Thorndike), is an abusive hellhole from which Nicholas is only too happy to escape, liberating a crippled and somewhat saintly boy named Smike (Aubrey Woods) in the process. If you’re hearing echoes of Ebeneezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and Fan, you wouldn’t be wrong, except that the influence runs in the opposite direction, as Nicholas Nickleby (1838) was published five years before A Christmas Carol (1843).
Kate begins work at the shop of the foppish Mr. and Mrs. Mantalini (Fletcher and Compton), who owe money to Ralph, and encounters more than her fair share of trouble in the form of sexual harassment, which the male characters think is just exercising their natural rights. Meanwhile, Nicholas finds employment first with an acting company run by Vincent Crummles (Holloway), then as a clerk with the Cheeryble brothers (Emrys Jones and James Hayter). And a lot more stuff happens—damsels go in and out of distress, hidden connections among characters are revealed, and ultimately everyone gets their just deserts, because there’s nothing like tying up all the loose ends to keep the customers satisfied.
Much as I enjoy it, there’s more than a whiff of second-best around this version of Nicholas Nickleby, despite it having been directed by one of the postwar masters of British cinema. Upon initial release, it was often compared unfavorably to David Lean’s 1947 film version of Great Expectations, but that’s not really fair because Lean’s film is an unquestioned masterpiece, while this one is more of a workmanlike effort.
Screenwriter John Dighton certainly had his work cut out for him trying to turn Dickens’ sprawling, episodic novel into a conventional movie script, and so many characters pop in and out of the plot that even the best efforts of a fine crew of British actors can’t keep them from becoming confusing. Still, Gordon Dines’ cinematography, Michael Relph’s art direction, and Leslie Norman’s editing are all top of the line, and their professionalism helps make this film eminently watchable, even if it falls short of masterpiece status. | Sarah Boslaugh
Nicholas Nickleby is distributed on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. Extras on the disc include Alf Collins’ 1903 short film “Nicholas Nickleby” (3 min.), an interview with Adrian Wootton and Michael Eaton, curators of the BFI Dickens Season (9 min.), and the film’s original trailer.
