The Old Curiosity Shop

Way too abridged and short at only 90 minutes. Doesn't make total sense unless you already know the story, it jus skis over the salient plot details with no time getting to know or care for the characters. Watch the 1979 version for the most thorough and true to novel version. The 1995 version is an excellent family friendly version too.

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I like this recent, surprisingly short (given the length of the novel) adaptation of Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop. There are a fair number of negative reviews and comments here and I really can't argue with them. Film is so much a matter of taste. I caught this one at the right time. It drew me in.

What impressed me most perhaps was less the story itself than the film's evocation of early 19th century London. Director Brian Percival and his associates deserve a lot of praise for the ambiance; and the actors and their costumes were well matched. This is (for me) a rare occasion as one of the reasons I seldom watch recent adaptations of classic fiction is that everything looks too modern; the actors don't look at ease in the setting; and there's always something contemporary feeling threatening to take the movie over entirely. I didn't get this here.

In terms of style and content this version of The Old Curiosity Shop evoked memories of the series of low budget horror films Val Lewton produced in Hollywood back some seventy years ago. It's not a horror picture, but what happens to the children in the story is often horrifying; and the tone is nearly seductively dark, with hints of all manner of perversion lurking on the sidelines. At its best the film plays like a first rate B movie. I mean that as a compliment. It's very good, not great, but then I don't sense that it was aiming that high.

Oops! The story. It's awfully complicated and would take nine more paragraphs to properly summarize. It's basically about how greed and poverty destroyed the innocence of children in the London of Dickens' era; and how good men doing bad things can do as much harm as bad men doing same. In other words, to paraphrase a famous thinker, all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing about it. Worse yet, if good men aren't pro-active in their virtue, vigilant about it, as the grandfather in this story is not, the terms of their lives shall be dictated by men up to no good. This is a lesson worth learning.

Dickens at his most compelling is about plot and character, and few films can capture both with any complexity. What is most effective in this 90 minute adaptation is the essence of the three leading characters--too often Grandfather is played as a senile bumbler, lost in his surroundings, losing his mind, feeble and thus not compelling; That reliable stalwart Derek Jacobi makes of him a man gripped by a compulsion--certainly smart enough to function but unable to control a nefarious habit. At the other end of humanity is one of the author's nastiest and most vulgar money-grubber, Daniel Quilt, who threatens to bite his wife and who eats hard-boiled eggs shell and all--with icky relish. One often wonders, too, at the gullibility and illness of Little Nell, played here a bit older than usual, a clever young woman trapped by circumstance but with an inherited inner will to survive. Much that is in the novel is omitted, 90 minutes hardly allowing all the detail for which the Victorian novelist is famous, but there is ample breathing room given many of one's favorites--Mrs. Jarley of the Waxworks, for example, or the innocent family that practically adopts Nell. An hour and a half with these splendid sets immersed in this dense Victorian period is well spent!

I thought the film was fine and I'm glad I watched it, but...

I just finished reading the book and almost nothing is based on the book.

They skipped the donkey, Kit's wonderful patrons, the relations between all the actors, the sisters at the girl's school.

Kit spent over a week in prison, in the book.

The single gentlemen's relationship is secret for months.

What about the single gent's friends who help to get Kit free from prison?

What about kit getting his job by being so honest about coming back a week later to work off his shilling advance?

And what happened to Tom? He wasn't even in the film at all.

They should have just made a new title and said it was based on The Old Curiosity Shop.

This new adaptation of Charles Dickens' most tragical novel is inferior to the great 1995 film with Tom Courtenay as Quilp which adhered better to the original. This film is shorter and much has been left out, and the film is reduced to something of an exposition of the novel without going too much into it. On the other hand, the music here is very good, and Derek Jacobi is always reliable although not quite up to Peter Ustinov's more formidable character. Also the dramatic composition here is more efficient, culminating in the inevitable end of the abominable Quilp and the overwhelming death passion of Little Nell with its unavoidable inundation of tears for all parts. However, Nell is a little too old and grown-up here to be quite convincing, while all the others are perfect. Both versions are equally indispensable as great realizations of Dickens at both his best and his worst.