The Old Curiosity Shop

Dickens at his most compelling is about plot and character, and few films can capture both with any complexity. What is most effective in this 90 minute adaptation is the essence of the three leading characters--too often Grandfather is played as a senile bumbler, lost in his surroundings, losing his mind, feeble and thus not compelling; That reliable stalwart Derek Jacobi makes of him a man gripped by a compulsion--certainly smart enough to function but unable to control a nefarious habit. At the other end of humanity is one of the author's nastiest and most vulgar money-grubber, Daniel Quilt, who threatens to bite his wife and who eats hard-boiled eggs shell and all--with icky relish. One often wonders, too, at the gullibility and illness of Little Nell, played here a bit older than usual, a clever young woman trapped by circumstance but with an inherited inner will to survive. Much that is in the novel is omitted, 90 minutes hardly allowing all the detail for which the Victorian novelist is famous, but there is ample breathing room given many of one's favorites--Mrs. Jarley of the Waxworks, for example, or the innocent family that practically adopts Nell. An hour and a half with these splendid sets immersed in this dense Victorian period is well spent!