Little Dorrit (1988)

Directed by

Christine Edzard

Genre

drama film

Country

United Kingdom

Runtime

5h 57m

Rating

6.4 of 10 from 14 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A man returns to London after years abroad and becomes entangled with a debtors' prison and the family of a young woman called Little Dorrit. Two parts show the same events from different characters' perspectives.

slow-burnmelancholicintimateepiccharacter-drivensomberreflective

What happens

Little Dorrit is a 1987 film adaptation of the 1857 novel Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. It was written and directed by Christine Edzard, and produced by John Brabourne and Richard B. Goodwin . The music by Giuseppe Verdi was arranged by Michael Sanvoisin. The film stars Derek Jacobi as Arthur Clennam, Alec Guinness as William Dorrit, and Sarah Pickering in the title role. A huge cast of seasoned British and Irish stage and film actors was assembled to play the dozens of roles, including Simon Dormandy, Joan Greenwood, Roshan Seth, Miriam Margolyes, Cyril Cusack and Max Wall. Pickering, in contrast, had never acted on screen; she was cast after writing to the production team claiming to 'be' Little Dorrit. It remains her only screen acting role. Little Dorrit lasts nearly six hours and was released in two parts, of approximately three hours each. The first part was subtitled Nobody's Fault, an allusion to one of Dickens' proposed titles for the original novel, and the story developed from the perspective and experiences of the Arthur Clennam character. The second film, titled Little Dorrit's Story, took many of the same events and presented them through the eyes of the heroine. Together they represented overlapping chronicles. Sands Films, the production company that made the film, is run by Christine Edzard, the screenwriter and director, and her husband Richard B. Goodwin. Little Dorrit was listed in the BFI's "ten great British films directed by women" in 2014. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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