A Doll's House

A Doll's House/***(G) Movie Review May 4th, 1973 With the voices of: Nora Helmer: Claire Bloom Torvald Helmer: Anthony Hopkins Dr.Rank: Ralph Richardson Krogstad: Denholm Elliott Kristine Linde: Anna Massey Anne-Marie: Edith Evans

By Kyle Thompson Film Critic

A Doll's House, a play taking place in the household of Torvald Helmer, Nora Helmer, and their three kids, is set during Christmas time in 1879. Being set in the late 1800's, it is a time in which men were dominant over women, and it was socially acceptable for them to be.

As the play starts with a happy, cheerful family, it soon takes a turn for the worst. I believe that it is difficult for people in our era today to understand how things were in that time, and that adds to the opinion I have on the play. I think it is a well filmed, and well thought out play, but I do believe that there are scenes in which the characters act a bit too dramatic for what would actually in those situations.

The play begins to unfold when Nora is called out on forging her rich father's signature in order to receive a loan to pay for her sick husband's trip to Europe in order to recover. The man who wants to bring Nora down, wants his job back at the bank, (Torvald is the higher up at the bank) and wants Torvald to give him his job back, and then some. Nora admits to the forgery, and tries to persuade her husband to give Krogstad his job back. Torvald does not take the bait, and this leads Krogstad to blackmail Nora about the forgery, which is a criminal act she has committed. The play then gets very dramatic when Torvald finds out the motives of his wife, and the climax of the play takes place.

The music, clothing, and speech of the characters is all fit to how they dressed and spoke in the 1800's, which adds a human element to the play. I thought the characters filled their roles well, and engulfed themselves within the play to become the character that they truly were. The camera angles are very good for when the play took place, but the lighting sort of fits to the mood of the play, which is somber and argumentative. Overall, A Doll's House is a very dramatic film that depicts the ideals of marriage in the 1800's in a very realistic way.

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Yes, Clair Bloom, Anthony Hopkins, and Denholm Elliot are great, as is Sir Ralph Richardson as Dr. Rank. This first-rate acting, extended from Ibsen's wonderful realist play, is what holds our eyes on the screen. The play has been abridged for the movie, but having read the play, I wouldn't say I felt that I missed the deleted material.

The snow outside emphasizes how cold it gets inside, with Nora (Bloom) realizing that her fairy-tale marriage to Torvald (Hopkins) is a sham, that Torvald only wants his wife to be his little "squirrel" and not meddle in their family affairs. Nora will not take it anymore; she is an intelligent woman with influence, and cannot be confined to one house, one man, or one way of life. She becomes free, and Torvald is left wondering how he had ever been such a fool to think she would be with him forever.

Denholm Elliot drips with sleaze as Korgstad, Nora and Torvald's nemesis, and Richardson conveighs the appropriate frailty and senality as Dr. Rank.

One complaint: the film is static. There is almost no action set outside of the house (and the building) which, I suppose, gives us an effective claustrophobic feeling. The audience feels as trapped as Nora and Torvald do. But, film is a visual media, and this is essentially just a filmed play. The director does move his camera around a little, giving us close-ups, master-shots, composition of objects in the foreground/background, ect. But, the average viewer may fall asleep, just because the play is all talk. There is not much movement by the characters; there is nothing going on outside of their insulated lives. The movie does not open us up to the world outside of the Helmer household; it tells us that what matters is what is going on inside. Okay, I guess the static quality of the film works, but this is not a wholly cinematic film, it is more a play on film.

Maybe in the future, other directors will work to open up the play, and give us viewers other things to chew over besides the great acting and dialogue.

A Doll's House In the play A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen took place in the late 19th century a woman named Nora Helmer starts off the story buying Christmas presents for her family. But a year before this Nora committed a forgery on a loan in order to save the life of her husband. She was then blackmailed the man she took the loan from. He wanted her to convince her husband to allow him to keep his job. When Nora wasn't able to convince her husband, the man sent him a letter in the mail explaining how Nora owed him money that she borrowed from him a year before. Nora went a whole say trying to stop her husband from opening the letter, but when the truth comes out, Nora is shocked to learn where she really stands in her husband's esteem.

This play depicts how a woman in the 19th century was a controlled by her husband. Nora was treated just like every other woman during this time. Woman had little to no say with anything other than house work. They were forced to do whatever their husbands told them to do and they weren't allowed to handle money unless it was given to them by their husbands. This shows that the world back then was against woman being their own person and they were controlled and used as property more instead of treated like an equal human being.

One of the two versions of this play filmed in 1973, this 'Doll's House' has a strong cast and looks like filmed theatre - not always a bad thing, and it works well enough here to keep the viewer interested.

Anthony Hopkins, prickly as Torvald; Claire Bloom, delicate and confused as Nora; with Ralph Richardson striking just the right note as Dr Rank. Anna Massey and Denholm Elliott complete the cast and are both very good indeed.

Not really cinema, but perhaps the best of the three versions of Ibsen's powerful play I've seen. In comparison with David Warner and Trevor Eve, Hopkins is just as effective; while Claire Bloom's Nora is sufficiently different from Jane Fonda and Juliet Stevenson to attract our interest and empathy.

Just as two competing films about Oscar Wilde came out in 1960, so in the spirit of the early seventies a rival version of Ibsen's play with Jane Fonda came out almost immediately after this.

Less cinematic and packing far less star power this is probably the more satisfactory of the two for preserving for posterity a performance of feline intensity by Claire Bloom at it's centre. The cast ironically includes Ralph Richardson who was also in the lesser of the two Wilde films.