Curiosity Slop

By Richard Shickel

MR. QUILP

Directed by MICHAEL TUCHNER

Screenplay by LOUIS and IRENE KAMP

In the demise of Little Nell, The Old Curiosity Shop contains perhaps the most famous deathbed scene in English literature. A sentimental extravaganza, it has aroused critical scorn and the common reader's lachrymose appreciation for well over a century. The dishonesty and ineptitude of this wretched musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel can be measured by the fact that most of the children at a recent screening did not realize Nell had died. So hastily did writer, director and actor rush past this inconvenience that the kids believed she was literally going away on a long journey.

Older family members had every reason to wish that they had taken themselves and their loved ones on a journey to anywhere other than a theater full of restless children. The novel's intricate plot is--paradoxically--simplified into near incomprehensibility. Its rich characterizations are reduced to banality. Anthony Newley, who also composed the film's stupefying score, plays Quilp, a scheming moneylender whose machinations reduce Nell (Sarah Jane Varley) and her grandfather to begging. Newley works himself into a great lather turning Quilp's villainy into a parody of evil so broad that the most innocent child could not possibly be scared by the funny man. Of course, once menace is removed, so is drama. The audience is left to find such solace as it can in studying a prettified representation of 19th century England.

As classics like David Copperfteld and Great Expectations show, Dickens may be the easiest of the great novelists to dramatize in the movies. But George Cukor, who directed Copperfield in 1935, was right when he pointed out that "the toughness, the edge that Dickens had, must be preserved." More recently we have come to think that children cannot stand, or understand, the writer's true craggy spirit. What an irony, considering the televised garbage they are constantly exposed to. And what a disservice to them as well as to Dickens.

Richard Schickel

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