What The Dickens!

By RICHARD CORLISS

Fagin, Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Jellaby -- so many of Charles Dickens' great grotesques lurk in memory with the clarity of caricatures. They seem made not just for the page but for the stage and screen. As the great popular novelist of his or any age, Dickens has always been filched by other media. And as a social reformer who, as George Orwell wrote, "succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody," Dickens ^ invented outsize villains and situations applicable to almost any taste or decade. The endless Broadway and movie adaptations of Dickens stories testify to the vitality of the world he observed and created. That three new films based on his novels are on view this pre-Christmas season would surprise no one but Scrooge.

It would surely not surprise Frank Cross, the sleaze-hearted TV executive played with conniving brio by Bill Murray in Scrooged. Frank has even planned a Christmas Eve broadcast of A Christmas Carol, with an all-star cast (Buddy Hackett as Ebenezer, Mary Lou Retton as Tiny Tim). He is bursting with creative ingenuity: he wants tiny reindeer antlers stapled on the forehead of a Christmas mouse. But Frank is about to get scrooged by the ghost of his old boss (John Forsythe), and three Christmas spirits want to teach him a lesson in generosity. He will hallucinate an eyeball in his highball and be told that "garden slugs get more out of life than you do." Retorts Frank: "Name one!"

The film's writers, Saturday Night Live veterans Mitch Glazer and Michael O'Donoghue, know that all a TV skit needs is a likable star and some lunatic vamping. Because of the Dickens frame, this formula works at feature length, even if Richard Donner's close-up and impersonal direction clangs like the chains on Marley's ghost. And because, 4 1/2 years after his last star turn in a movie comedy (Ghostbusters), Murray remains a roguish delight to watch. As sham friendly as the guy who cheated off you in high school, as ersatz hip as a Vegas lounge singer, Murray lets the movie hang agreeably loose. Nobody tried for a masterpiece here; most people should have a good time.

The Walt Disney Co. would seem a natural to do Dickens. Walt was, after all, the Dickens of his day, deviser of a comprehensive world in which humor taught homilies and fantasy purred up against sentimentality. But not until now has the studio based a cartoon musical feature on a Dickens tale. It was worth the wait. Oliver & Company is Dickens with a twist, and Disney with a treat. Turning Fagin's gang into canines, transporting them to modern Manhattan and embroidering the scene with street vendors and Tiffany dog tags, the picture makes for a luscious comic valentine to New York City.

The animation (under George Scribner's direction) forfeits the usual Disney gloss in favor of a flatter, grittier palette in the Ralph Bakshi style, as befits the characters. Oliver the orphan kitten is your basic adorable pussycat, but the dogs in the gang that adopts him all have raffish personalities that speak as distinctively in song as in dialogue. Dodger is a city-wise mutt who, in Billy Joel's voice, sings an anthem to urban resilience: "I may not have a dime,/ But I got street savoir faire!" And in the Fifth Avenue home of the little girl who adopts Oliver dwells a French poodle named Georgette (voiced by Bette Midler). This pooch is one pampered prima donna. "Don't ask a mutt to strut like a show girl," she warbles in a chanteuse whisper that bursts into Ethel Merman brass. "No, girl, you need a pro." And from the pros who made Oliver comes the snazziest Disney cartoon since Walt died in 1966.

Dickens might have been Disney, or even one of the Saturday Night crew, but could he ever be Chekhov? Christine Edzard, who adapted and directed Little Dorrit, must think so. The novel is stuffed with incident -- with the histories of five families linked by love, greed and injustice -- but in this two-part, six-hour film, so little happens that most of the plot in Part 1 can later be reprised from another point of view. These Dickens people live in the spaces between heartbeats; grandfather clocks tick the measure of their bleak lives. Minor characters sit in corners, their postures and spirits broken; to everyone else they are just furniture without a function. The film looks tattered as well, like a Vermeer hung too long on a gentleman's drawing-room wall. It is as if the book's pages had been photographed, lovingly but out of focus.

"Throw a little polish into your demeanor," says old William Dorrit (Alec Guinness), and Edzard could take that advice to heart. Her film rarely has even the septuagenarian skip that Guinness puts into his step as he walks through Marshalsea debtors' prison with a sad child's hand in his. The child is William's daughter Amy (Sarah Pickering) -- Little Dorrit -- who lives with him in Marshalsea and carries herself with the fated passivity of a heroine from a Robert Bresson film. She does her domestic duty; she waits for death's embrace. First she cares for the aged William, then for sad, dear Arthur Clennam (Derek Jacobi), another child-father in need of redemptive nursing. All three are nature's noble cripples, made for each other. And around them swirl -- or, here, meander -- a gallery of Dickens eccentrics, cogs in the relentless machinery of the industrial age.

As soon as the moviegoer realizes that this Dorrit is to be no sumptuous, briskly rendered Masterpiece Theater, he can pick through it for some great performances. Roshan Seth is splendid as Mr. Pancks, a rent collector with an appetite for humiliation and revenge. Amelda Brown is an acute Fanny Dorrit, the elder sister desperate to crash a society that does not deserve her. Eleanor Bron hardly need arch a plucked eyebrow to suggest Mrs. Merdle's steely hauteur; Joan Greenwood hardly need move to inhabit the cold carcass of Mrs. Clennam. Jacobi locates eloquence in every sigh, and Pickering finally reveals a gosling beauty, even as Dorrit, through sheer persistence of style, finally locks the viewer into its stern rhythm.

But the film belongs to Guinness. His boldness, precision and feline slyness make him an ideal Dickens interpreter (as he proved four decades ago in David Lean's versions of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist). No screen actor can so impose while doing almost nothing. But here he is one of the few characters allowed any expanse of personality: the man with a squire's manners in a debtors' prison, always "very much obleeged" by the commonest courtesy, then crushed by the confines of haut-monde hypocrisy. Guinness's William Dorrit matches his George Smiley as twin capstones of a grand career. He gets an old actor's most precious present -- to have a death scene on-camera -- and he almost takes Little Dorrit to heaven with him.