Product Description

The trials & tribulations of a young woman born & raised in debtor's prison provides the basis for this two-part adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6942 in VHS
• Released on: 1994-12-03
• Rating: G (General Audience)
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 2

Customer Reviews

Unique Treatment of a Dickens Novel, One I'll Watch Again
In recent years there have been some excellent productions of Dicken's works, including the BBC's Martin Chuzzlewit and the lushly beautiful Our Mutual Friend, neither of these would I want to be without in my video library!

But this production of Little Dorrit is done with a totally different eye, a unique approach, that I thought takes you straight into the novel. The producers of this film built the most unique sets and you have the remarkable feeling of at first watching a play unfolding before you only to find as you watch and become familiar with the usual Dickens plethora of characters that you are actually on a street in London in front of the Marshallsea yourself. It must have been very like this once, with the noise and confusion of such a city pressing all about and out of it emerges first one story and then another.

I thought the technique of telling the same story twice through different eyes helped to explain many things that a straight once through telling would have missed.

Excellent acting, beautiful music, all from Verdi, and a screenplay that captures the spirit of a great novel, makes this one part of my library we've already watched several times!

The Rest of the Story & The Emotional Payoff
When I'd finished watching Part 1 of this film it was way past my bedtime on a work night, but I had to watch Part 2 anyway -- "just to see how it works out . . ." And I couldn't turn it off. Like Part 1, this is a beautiful, beautiful movie, full of richly realized characters with subtle and persuasive inter-relationships that are completely involving. For the duration of the movie these people will be the most important thing in the world to you, and the emotional payoff at the end is all the more effective -- restrained as it is -- for the careful development that has gone before.

Derek Jacobi has never been more appealing as the protagonist, but to call him out from all the wonderful presentations is to do a disservice to a roster that reads like a "best of British theater tradition."

Select this movie when you want to be transported to a different time, a different place, into the lives of people you will care about in a way that "escapist" entertainment simply cannot touch.

Part two - A satisfactory conclusion
Part two of this ambitious film is a definite improvement over part one. It develops themes and fills out the plot (as really any second half of a story should), though you could never watch part two without seeing part one. The most jarring thing about this part is the insistence of recreating most of part one scene for scene (only this time through the eyes of Little Dorrit). Perhaps the most notable thing about this film (for me anyway) is that it contains the last lead performance in a film from Alec Guinness (all his subsequent roles, up to his 1996 retirement, were cameos) and he is wonderful in his fourth screen interpretation of a Dickens character. The rest of the cast is also fabulous (including the last screen performance of Joan Greenwood as Mrs Clennam). It has been said before - you will either love this adaption, or hate it.