David Copperfield was David O. Selznick’s passion project. He fell in love with Charles Dickens’ novel after his Russian father learned the English language in part from that book. But Louis B. Mayer did not share that enthusiasm for the material and tried to persuade his star producer from adapting it for the screen. When that failed, he shifted gears and insisted that child contract star Jackie Cooper lead the production in the role of the young Copperfield. But Selznick persisted and was allowed to open up a casting call that spanned Canada and Great Britain, eventually landing on young actor Freddie Bartholomew, who, at that time, was mainly unknown, having appeared in just a handful of short films, mostly uncredited. David Copperfield would change that for him, and he would go on to have a relatively successful career in films for the next sixteen years.
The filming of David Copperfield took place on the MGM backlot, dressed up to look like London. Additional scenes were filmed in Malibu, where the beaches doubled for the white cliffs of Dover. One drawback to this is that it gives the film an inauthentic look as well as a feel that what we are watching is entirely fabricated. There is very little that comes across as being in the outdoors, and when it is, it never feels like the real place. This may have worked for audiences in the 1930s, but it rings false to a more modern eye. Adding further difficulties to the suspension of disbelief is the myriad of accents, or lack thereof, that are on display. The worst offender is W.C. Fields, who is making no effort whatsoever to hide his American accent. Apparently, he was having trouble with the dialogue while putting on a British accent, so it was dropped. The final results of this are a performance that is neither convincing nor acceptable. W.C. Fields, who was considered a scholar of Charles Dickens, is all wrong for this film and calls attention to the fact every single time he is speaking.
Because this is an MGM film under the leadership of Louis B. Mayer, there is a sheen to the whole affair that is not realistic to the times or setting. MGM had a policy that everything needed to be glamorous and glitzy, a misguided assumption that people went to the movies to escape reality, so the fantasy must be heightened. While this is true to certain types of films, it is not true for other types. With David Copperfield, this means that most of the hardship the title character goes through has been scrubbed away. Gone are the scenes in the boarding house and most of the scenes where the young boy is working like a slave in the winery. We get about a minute of him being bullied by a fellow worker, and then that boy is sent packing, and all is well again.
On top of this are large segments of the book that are removed and/or relegated to a brief line of dialogue whenever their removal poses a problem to the overall narrative. Charles Dickens is a very dense writer with lots of plotting in his stories. The job of the screenwriter is to translate that to the screen without making it apparent that that has been done. This script does a poor job of that. We feel the cuts, and even without having read the novel, it is apparent several times throughout that key plot points are missing. This does not make it a bad film, but it does feel like an incomplete one, one riddled with compromises to meet a specific runtime. This would have benefited from an additional half hour or more to get this story right.
The boy David Copperfield (Freddie Bartholomew) is born to a widowed mother, and while he finds support in his mother (Elizabeth Allan) and their housekeeper Peggotty (Jessie Ralph), all of that is upended when his mother marries Mr. Murdstone (Basil Rathbone). Murdstone is a severe and insensitive man who, soon after marrying, invites his sister into the household. The sister is even more insensitive than her brother. When David’s mother, too, dies, Murdstone sends him off to London to work in his family’s wine bottling plant.
During this time, David is assisted by the Micawber family and forms a deep friendship with them. But Mr. Micawber (W.C. Fields) is unable to look properly after the expenses and cannot maintain the house. David eventually runs away and journeys on foot the seventy miles to Dover, where his great-aunt, Betsie Trotwood (Edna May Oliver), lives. She takes the young boy in and arranges for him to go to boarding school, where he is educated and grows up. Now matured, he meets a young woman, Dora (Maureen O’Sullivan), whom he falls in love with, much to the chagrin of another young woman, Agnes (Madge Evans), the daughter of a lawyer whom David is renting a room with. The story also includes a nefarious clerk forging documents for his own gain and a love triangle that resolves itself in an unexpected and abrupt way.
This story reminded me at times of another Charles Dickens story: Great Expectations. Both novels followed a young boy into adulthood and included a romance that has its roots in their childhood. Looking at the film adaptations of these two great novels, especially the 1946 version of Great Expectations I reviewed earlier in this blog, the biggest differences come in the form of tone. There is a joviality to David Copperfield that is mostly absent in Great Expectations. It’s not just W.C. Fields, either. David’s first love, Dora, is played broadly and primarily for humor. She is a childish woman who seemed ill-prepared for adulthood.
When we are first introduced to her, she is watching a ballet and reacting to the imagery as if it were real events and not a performance. Her childlike fears and wonder are seen as cute and playful at the time. It is not until she and David are married that we see that that is all she really is. Her childishness permeates everything. She is far too immature to be a wife and is incompetent at even the most basic of housekeeping skills, something of far more importance in those days. We get the sense that David’s life would have been utterly destroyed had she not gotten sick and died so soon after their marriage.
This film has a slapped-together feel to it that occasionally made it hard to stay in the story. The acting was inconsistent throughout, with some performers treating this like they were on the stage and others appropriately acting for the silver screen. This mixture of styles doesn’t gel well and gives the whole affair a hodgepodge feel to it that isn’t helped by the obvious backlot and stage shots. This really needed a grander scale to it, but limitations from the time hinder this film from reaching the heights this story deserved. When it gets it right, though, it really gets it right.
Freddie Bartholomew is not as commanding on screen as he would be in later films. Watching this and comparing it to Captains Courageous, it is obvious that he received better coaching in the latter production. He is good but a little too obvious that he is acting. Even so, it is a delight to watch him, and you can see that he has something that, with a little more practice and experience, could turn out to be great. It’s telling that the film loses some steam in the second half when Frank Lawton takes over as the older David.
As a production of Charles Dickens, there are far worse out there. This is hardly a bad film. But it needed to be fleshed out more so that there was not so much of a reliance on brief bits of dialogue to fill in all the missing story. That kind of writing only calls attention to all that has been left out. Screenwriter Howard Estabrook (with uncredited assistance from Lenore J. Coffee) needed to find a way to incorporate the necessary plot points in a more organic way. Since they didn’t, what we have is a decent film that feels incomplete. That is really too bad because David Copperfield is one of Charles Dickens’ all-time greatest novels, and it ended up being just an okay film. I expect more from an adaptation of this kind, and when I don’t get it, I come away from the whole thing simply disappointed.
Academy Award Nominations:
Outstanding Production: David O. Selznick
Best Film Editing: Robert J. Kern
Best Assistant Director: Joseph M. Newman
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Release Date: January 18, 1935
Running Time: 129-133 minutes
Not Rated
Starring: W.C. Fields, Freddie Bartholomew, Lionel Barrymore, Madge Evans, Maureen O’Sullivan, Edna May Oliver, Lewis Stone, Frank Lawton, Elizabeth Allan, and Roland Young
Directed By: George Cukor
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