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Nicholas Nickleby (1977)
I just realised that I forget to do a fanfic rec last Sunday and there won’t be one today either, as I’m going to do some reccing on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
calufrax next week.
I watched Nicholas Nickleby from 1977 this weekend. I liked it, but I suspect that the main reason for that is because this is one of the few Dickens novels I haven’t read. I saw it on telly in my early teens with Roger Rees as Nicholas, so I only had a hazy idea of the plot. So it was fun to watch to see how the plot unfolded. I also really liked the friendship between Nicholas (Nigel Havers) and Smike (Peter Bourke). And I was delighted to see Pauline Moran, who is Miss Lemon in Poirot, as an actress. Clearly not a high budget series, though. Almost all scenes, even out of doors, was filmed in a studio and the costumes were quite dreary.
And talk about hammy acting! I know, I know, many of Dickens characters are caricatures, but it can be a bit tiresome when every single actor in a scene chews on the scenery. I didn’t mind Nicholas and his sister Kate (Kate Nicholls) to be very emotional because they are teenagers, and they were, really, not that hammy all things considered. Then we had a few actors who didn’t ham it up at all, most notably the evil uncle Ralph Nickleby (Derek Godfrey) and Sir Mulberry Hawk (Anthony Ainley), which made for an almost too great a contrast to all those over the top acting. I can well imagine that this is the role that led to Ainley playing the Master, because Sir Mulberry is as an evil man. Uncle Ralph isn’t nice either, he uses Kate as bait for a dinner with his business associates. Sir Mulberry flirts with her in an extremely coarse way, upsetting the very young and sheltered Kate to a point that she leaves the dinner party. He follows her, proceeds to be extremely blunt and telling her that a no from a woman means yes and then try to force her to kiss him. Being a Victorian novel, this is shorthand for attempted rape. She is saved by her uncle, but only,, as Sir Mulberry points out, because he wanted a richer man than Sir Mulberry to show an interest in her. Then he continues to harass her, eventually leading him and Nicholas to have a fight and eventually he kills one of his former friends in a duel. And all this in a rather understated soft voiced way that makes your skin crawl.
So well worth seeing just for Ainley’s character, even though I enjoyed it as a whole. But perhaps I wouldn’t have done that so much if I had seen other adaptions more recently
calufrax next week.I watched Nicholas Nickleby from 1977 this weekend. I liked it, but I suspect that the main reason for that is because this is one of the few Dickens novels I haven’t read. I saw it on telly in my early teens with Roger Rees as Nicholas, so I only had a hazy idea of the plot. So it was fun to watch to see how the plot unfolded. I also really liked the friendship between Nicholas (Nigel Havers) and Smike (Peter Bourke). And I was delighted to see Pauline Moran, who is Miss Lemon in Poirot, as an actress. Clearly not a high budget series, though. Almost all scenes, even out of doors, was filmed in a studio and the costumes were quite dreary.
And talk about hammy acting! I know, I know, many of Dickens characters are caricatures, but it can be a bit tiresome when every single actor in a scene chews on the scenery. I didn’t mind Nicholas and his sister Kate (Kate Nicholls) to be very emotional because they are teenagers, and they were, really, not that hammy all things considered. Then we had a few actors who didn’t ham it up at all, most notably the evil uncle Ralph Nickleby (Derek Godfrey) and Sir Mulberry Hawk (Anthony Ainley), which made for an almost too great a contrast to all those over the top acting. I can well imagine that this is the role that led to Ainley playing the Master, because Sir Mulberry is as an evil man. Uncle Ralph isn’t nice either, he uses Kate as bait for a dinner with his business associates. Sir Mulberry flirts with her in an extremely coarse way, upsetting the very young and sheltered Kate to a point that she leaves the dinner party. He follows her, proceeds to be extremely blunt and telling her that a no from a woman means yes and then try to force her to kiss him. Being a Victorian novel, this is shorthand for attempted rape. She is saved by her uncle, but only,, as Sir Mulberry points out, because he wanted a richer man than Sir Mulberry to show an interest in her. Then he continues to harass her, eventually leading him and Nicholas to have a fight and eventually he kills one of his former friends in a duel. And all this in a rather understated soft voiced way that makes your skin crawl.
So well worth seeing just for Ainley’s character, even though I enjoyed it as a whole. But perhaps I wouldn’t have done that so much if I had seen other adaptions more recently