Nicholas Nickleby

Newsprint was still rationed in 1947. when Ealing Studios premiered Nicholas Nickleby. But even today, critics would be hard pressed to make room for the overflowing incidents and plethora of characters in one of the best Dickens adaptations to reach the screen. It has not got the reputation of David Lean's Great Expectations, which came out the year before: but then it is not such a finely-wrought book. What it lacks in universal truths, it makes up for in a superabundance of grotesque characters: and although the English stage today has plenty of comedians, and television even more, one simply cannot imagine this richness being matched in any contemporary remake of Nicholas Nickleby. Here is Alfred Drayton as the sadistic Squeers; Bernard Miles, as Ralph Nickleby's subservient clerk Newman Noggs, bursting his fetters when his master's ruin has arrived and giving vent to a gale-force exultation of diabolical glee; Cyril Fletcher as mincing Mantalini (even odder than Fletcher's own odes); Fay Compton as his spouse, his famous 'heart's joy'; Sybil Thorndike as Mrs Squeers; Cathleen Nesbitt as Miss Knag; Athene Seyler as Miss La Creevy; Sally Ann Howes and Jill Balcon as two of the book's young ladies; Derek Bond as a handsome, virile Nicholas Nickleby; Cedric Hardwicke as the steely-hearted uncle with a cutting edge to him that is sharper than the book's; and, not even last and certainly not least, Stanley Holloway as the earthy thespian Vincent Crummies. Compression was the main fault detected by critics in the 1940's, which is another way of saying that, like Oliver Twist, they wished for more. But director Alberto Cavalcanti handles what is there with pace and robustness - no one has attempted, as they might have done today, to 'psychologise' the characters and replace the bits that Dickens left out. One is envious of the confidence the film radiates: it showed that Ealing Studios, like Dickens before it knew its audience and what they wanted.