Nicholas Nickleby (1947) - film review

Ralph Nickleby, a mean-spirited usurer, is not pleased when he learns that he is expected to make provision for his sister-in-law and her two grown-up children, Nicholas and Kate, after the death of his brother.  Grudgingly, he finds work for Kate as a seamstress in a London fashion house and has Nicholas take up the post of an assistant schoolmaster at a private school for boys in Yorkshire.  The young Nicholas is appalled at the way in which his employer, Mr Squeers, treats the boys, particularly Smike, who is beaten like a dog and worked like a slave.   After a violent confrontation with Squeers, Nicholas flees the school with Smike and they set about trying to find gainful employment elsewhere.  Fortune smiles on them and they soon find work with a travelling theatre company run by the kindly Mr Crummles.  Kate is less fortunate and finds herself being used by her unscrupulous uncle to entertain his business clients...

Of all Charles Dickens’ novels, the one which poses the greatest challenge for anyone wishing to make a decent film adaptation of it is probably Nicholas Nickleby.  Lacking a strong central theme and burdened with a rambling episodic narrative that is populated with dozens of secondary characters, it would appear that the novel was written specifically to defy any attempt at dramatisation.  This could explain why to date there have only been three screen adaptations – this brave attempt from Ealing Studios made just after the war and two previous silent versions, which are probably best forgotten.

Ealing’s adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby was further compromised by the fact it would inevitably be compared with David Lean’s superlative adaptation of Great Expectations, released one year before this film.   Lean and his team had a far easier job adapting Great Expectations, since the original novel was much shorter and far more focussed than the monumental tome that Ealing Studios lumbered themselves with.  With Lean’s masterpiece still fresh in everyone’s memory, Ealing’s Nicholas Nickleby was inevitably set up for a thrashing from the critics that even the cane-wielding Mr Squeers could not match.

But is the film really that bad?  Once we make allowance for the muddled plot, which attempts to compress too much of the source novel into the film, it actually stands up rather well.   In his last film for Ealing, director Alberto Cavalcanti shows an inspired use of chiaroscuro, achieving a startlingly realistic evocation of Dickens’ dark, dank world in which despicable villains prospered at the expense of the God-fearing poor.  The sequences in the boys’ school are the most memorable, looking like an expressionistic nightmare, with dark menacing shadows creating a spiders’ web effect which we know will forever imprison the boys in a life of penury and ignorance.

The film also offers some memorable turns from a high calibre cast of character actors, although some of these admittedly veer towards over-theatricality.  Cedric Hardwicke gives a standout performance as the villainous Ralph Nickleby, the archetypal Dickensian monster who takes great relish in tormenting widows and orphans.   Derek Bond makes a sympathetic if over-earnest Nicholas Nickleby, although he would be far more successful with his portrayal of Captain Oates in Ealing’s subsequent Scott of the Antarctic (1948).   Some wonderfully over-the-top contributions from Bernard Miles and Stanley Holloway help to make up for the dry and somewhat confused narrative, which is the film’s only real failing.   Whilst it clearly isn’t up to the standard of David Lean’s faultless Dickens adaptations, Cavalcanti’s interpretation of Nicholas Nickleby still manages to be a stylish and strangely beguiling work, and a much darker film than you might expect from Ealing.

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