"Les Mis"--le Movie

I thought I would watch some of David O. Selznick's cinematic literary adaptations for MGM in the 1930s, but a new set of both of 20th-Century Fox's verions of Les Miserables intruded. It's just as well, for the producer of the first, 1935 version was Daryl F. Zanuck, who was almost as assiduous as Selznick in adapting famous novels, and even more daring--he supported John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, getting most of the novel's anger on the screen. Zanuck was just as supportive of films that confronted social problems. The Day the Earth Stood Still was based on a 1930s short story ("Farewell to the Master") that had little to do with atomic warfare, for instance, but Zanuck supported Edmund North's added slant in his screenplay.

The 1935 Les Miserables stars Frederic March as Jean Valjean, whose search for justice as opposed to the law's precepts is the social fuel for the theme. March is an actor who seemed to be pretty much a journeyman when I was younger, but his subtleties I now appreciate. Near the end of his career he was able to display his range as the president of the US in Seven Days in May and as the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind. Since Valjean requires him to be mostly stoic and suffering, he is only able to use his gifts when he portrays the addlepated double for Valjean who is being threatened with the galleys, and whom the real Valjean must save. March could have gone over the top, but his subtlety in showing the double's mental weakness makes him more sympathetic and Valjean's decision more believable.

Javert, on the other hand, is portrayed by Charles Laughton, who was making a career in the 1930s out of portraying all sorts of outlandish characters: Nero, Doctor Moreau, Henry VIII, Rembrandt, and, most famously, Captain William Bligh. His Javert is constructed by Laughton, as he did with so many of his roles, out of exterior make-up and interior tics. His face is baby-smooth, and he pouts like a malevolent Humpty-Dumpty. His internal weakness is revealed by a ghastly tremor of those fleshy lips, and he shows Javert's social origins by letting his voice betray him with a hint of a Yorkshire accent when Javert becomes ("becooms") angry.

It's a hammy performance, but it fits in with the expressionist touches that director Richard Boleslawski employs, in uneasy combination with some overt Cross symbolism and Alfred Newman's score (which comes close to plagiarizing Schubert's "Ave Maria" at particularly "spiritual" moments). The expressionism is evident in the sets, the Dutch angles employed during chases, and the lighting and cinematography. I remembered halfway through the movie that the DP was the great Gregg Toland, who collaborated with Welles on Citizen Kane and with Ford on The Grapes of Wrath. His close-ups are particularly luminous and effective, and his later daring use of shadows in films such as Ford's The Long Voyage Home can be seen in his lighting of Valjean's via dolorosa through the Paris sewers. The movie could stand to be fifteen minutes shorter, and the Cossette is fairly drab, but this adaptation shows how the studio system usually could produce something of lasting worth, even when it was not trying particularly hard.

The other side has the 1952 Fox adaptation, but that will have to wait until I finish watching History Boys.