There have been so many movies, television productions and Miniseries retelling Les Misérables, that I have lost count. They include myriad versions in from Japan, as well as Turkey, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Spain, not to mention the numerous French and English ones, going all the way back to the Lumière Brothers in 1897, just twelve years after Victor Hugo's death.
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| A poster for a 1912 film version of Les Misérablesdirected by Alfred Capellani |
I will give some internet resources for analyses of these various versions at the end of this post. For myself, I just wanted to discuss two: the very latest television production from the BBC of 2018, now being streamed on PBS in America, and the French film directed by Raymond Bertrand of 1934. Both are exemplary for me in the retelling of Hugo's massive novel with limited, but expanded time frames (6 hours for the miniseries, nearly 5 hours for the movie). It's a pity that the 1925 French silent version isn't readily available--it ran about 7 hours and used to be shown over two days.
Though there have been numerous films made of the novel since Bertrand's black and white classic, I don't think that any of them measure up. Lack of color (still in its infancy) is no problem. The superb cinematography (including hand-held cameras for the barricade sequences), expressionistic lighting and a moody score by Arthur Honegger all syncronize beautifully with Bertrand's direction. The casting too is perfect. Harry Baur, I think, comes closest to my own literary impression of Jean Valjean. He is not young, even at the beginning, heavyset, definitely a peasant tree-trimmer, not at all attractive, with hair that whitens during the film as per Hugo's description, but so expressive and eventually so likeable in his plainness! I find the process of his redemption, not by overacting, but by restraint, not only believable but increasingly sympathetic as the film progresses.
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| Harry Bauer and Charles Vanel: Les Misérables, 1934 |
The same can be said of Charles Vanel who plays Javert--he too is massive, often monolithic, and his looming inflexibility makes his presence a heavy adversary in each scene he is in. This film introduces him in a low-key first scene in which he appears as one more figure in the Prison system, where he simply reminds Valjean as he leaves prison of the consequences of recidivism. Only later, in the role of the police chief at Monfermeil, does he take up his adversarial relationship with Valjean aka Mayor Madeleine. When he appears at the dying Fantine's bedside, he seems to fill up all available space in monolithic menace. While not quite Hugo's gorilla-man, he comes very close. Homely, like Baur, the two men really portray two men of humble beginnings, and their conflicting growth as poles of inflexibility on the one hand and the possibility of redemption on the other.
The rest of the cast is wonderful too. I wish I had space to discuss them all, but you can check them out on IMDB. The film does a splendid job of both complex character portrayal and staying close to many incidents in Hugo's novel. A few of the book's key narratives are cut: there is no second imprisonment of Valjean, and once he rescues Cosette from the Thenardiers' clutches, the tale fast-forwards to Cosette's 16th birthday--no time at the Gorbeau house, no pursuit then by Javert and escape and time at the convent. Likewise, the Thenardier parents disappear after they get arrested in their extortion manouvers--there is never an encounter with him by Valjean and Marius in the sewers, and no subsequent blackmail attempt.
The ending is simplified too: the day after Valjean frees Javert at the barricades, the policeman arrests him as he emerges with Marius from the sewer, allows Valjean to take Marius to his grandfather's house--where Valjean identifies himself as the young man's rescuer, and all is quickly resolved, including Javert's suicide.
The episodes that are included, though, are rendered in meticulous detail. Fantine's brief romance and tragic decline and fall are rendered beautifully. The actress Forelle portrays Fantine in a way that recalls Hugo's character: blonde, fragile, and a little feckless. The scriptwriters choose to show the beginning of her seduction, then fast-forwards to her working at M. Madeleine's bead factory. Her descent from poor-but-fastidious mother to toothless prostitute is carefully but quickly shown. It's really M. Madeleine's remorseful care that restores her spiritual respectability. When he goes to liberate Cosette, we not only feel the child's gratitude, but the emotion of human tenderness that begins to grow within her rescuer.
Likewise, the entire sequence of Thenardier and his cronies' attempted robbery of Valjean, Marius's dilemma as a witness, Javert's raid on the robbery and Valjean's escape is tightly edited and very exciting. And Orane Demazis's Éponine is so different from the sexpot waif of the musical! She's a little chunky, a little cheeky, and very much a street girl, as is Émile Genevois, who plays her brother Gavroche, the supreme urchin (he, ironically, later had a bit part as an omnibus driver in the 1958 French remake of Les Misérables).
Most splendid of all is the barricade sequence, from its initiation during Lamarq's funeral procession to the total defeat and slaughter of the student rebels, including the execution of Enjolras and Grantaire. The drama escalates in tension and violence, some of it filmed by hand-held camera as if it was actually happening, to the heroic, futile last stand of the remaining protestors, with time to narrate Éponine's and Gavroche's deaths, and Valjean's liberation of Javert.
It's this examination of Jean Valjean's transformation, and Javert's corresponding inability to live beyond his own rigidly set parameters that makes this film so effective, and it's done without any histrionics, over-acting or excessively corny emotionalism. This film is hard to find, and doesn't stream anywhere--you have to by the remastered DVD. It's worth seeking it out.
The 2018 miniseries has even longer to tell the story, and, as directed by Tom Shankland and written by Andrew Davies, earnestly attempts to cram as much of Hugo's novel as can be done in its six hours. Hugo is not strictly chronological: the Battle of Waterloo occurs midway through the novel. In the BBC series it is, of course vastly compressed, but it does set the stage for both the stories of Thenardier and Marius Pontmercy and the political problems of his family. In this way, it pays tribute to Hugo's historical digression, but sums it up by visual spectacle and that all-important last paragraph.
Not only is a good deal of the novel's content in the series, but some embellishments are added: Fantine's fall is very much expanded and drawn out, with an emphasis on an almost operatic-like pathos, including her consignment of Cosette to the Thenardiers, and focusses on her sacrifice of her teeth and hair in agonizing detail. Lily Collins, who portrays Fantine has dark hair and is model-slender, quite different from the blond, vulnerable innocence conveyed by Forelle. There is also an added incident depicting the Thenadier's eviction from their inn by Javert's men to transition them from lower middle-class to Parisian petty extortionist criminals.
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| Dominic West, Lily Collins, Mailow Defoy and David Oyelowo: Les Misérables 2018 |
The two opposing characters are played by very handsome and charismatic actors. Oyelowo's Javert is portrayed as acknowledging Valjean's challenge to his narrow definition of good and evil and its non-changeability from the very beginning. It begins while Valjean is serving his 19 years, first when Javert witnesses Valjean's loosening of stone and then saving a chain-gang guard's life at the stone quarry (this episode is not in Hugo's work, instead Valjean is shown supporting a falling caryatid on a building so it can be repaired--and this figures in the 1934 film), and a subsequent altercation in which both Valjean and Javert establish their respective points of view. The latter is more or less in the musical, but not in the novel.
What overwhelmingly dominates the 2018 production is this epic opposition the two main protagonists The executive producer of the miniseries is David Oyelowo, who plays Javert to Dominic West's Jean Valjean, and I wonder if this is why he is a more dominant and forceful presence here. In Hugo's novel Javert is indeed Valjean's bloodhound-like pursuer, but so much of this pursuit has to do with the coincidences of where fate places the two protagonists. Indeed, in Hugo's novel, when he finally corners Valjean and Marius at the sewer exit he's actually there in pursuit of Thernadier as a corpse robber of the sewers.
In the BBC production, Javert becomes so obsessed with capturing Valjean that he prioritizes above helping to quell the 1832 uprising, his primary duty as a police chief. He goes to the barricade in disguise because he believes that Valjean will show up there, not really to spy on the student rebels. Another problem is that these two characters never age over the period from 1815 to 1832. Hugo has Valjean's hair turn white after his rescue of Cosette. Dominic West is slender and fit right up to the end; he's well into his 60's according to Hugo at his time of death, and here his hair finally, in the last scene, is gently frosted gray. Javert, no spring chicken either, is unchanging not only in his philosophy but in appearance. He looks exactly the same right up to his suicide.
When these two characters are on the screen, they dominate it, and the others seem paler in comparison, though many of them are impressive on their own when they have the chance. Marius and his contentious relationship with his grandfather is examined in detail--indeed more even than in the book, for the miniseries has Marius' visit to his dying father much earlier in his life, and is able to talk to him, while in the novel he never does meet him when he's alive, and Marius only discovers the truth about his heroism when he's grown up. But the aristocratic Guillernormand's character, similar in a way to Valjean, begins to see things in a very different way by the time he consents to Marius's and Cosette's marriage.
One of the more appealing qualities in the miniseries is the examination of the extended Thenardier family and their changing dynamics. We are shown the love for Mme. Thenardier for her two daughters, even as everyone disintegrates as their circumstances fall, and her confession that she loves her daughters, but not her son. Both Éponine and Gavroche are portrayed as intelligent and resourceful; Éponine is not a sex-kitten any more than her 1934 counterpart, she's somewhat more blatant in her sexuality, even turning up as a whore in a brothel scene, but unlike Fantine she dabbles in this as just another source of income. Much like the 1934 film, the deaths of both at the barricades comes off as tragic and touching: they are heroic in their deeds, but will disappear without a trace or a memory when everything settles down again. I wish the scriptwriters had made the relationship of the two youngest Thenardier boys with the rest of the family clearer. In the novel they are literally rented out so early that Gavroche, when he adopts them and trains them in the arts of urchinship, doesn't even know that they are his brothers. The very last scene in episode 6, when the other Thenardiers are dead or scattered, shows the two boys begging in the street, an eloquent reminder of the miseries of the underclass after the uprising. The screenwriters used them as symbols of the futility, but, in their own words, didn't associate them with the Thenardiers.
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| The Original cover for the Classics Illustrated Comic: 1943 |
In the conscientious way that the series unfolds--in a literal sequence of storytelling with various episodes unfolding by intercutting them, in the gorgeous costumes and strong acting, and with so many of the novel's details put in, including Valjean's second imprisonment (though not his manner of escape), and the harrowing pursuit of Valjean and Cosette by Javert's men averted by that tense climb over the convent wall, I commend this production. But for evoking the spirit of Hugo's novel in a human way--even with abridgements--I find that Raymond Bertrand's 1934 film, with its homely Valjean and Javert does it better and touches my heart more deeply.
P.S.: Les Misérables just keeps going in many media. If you have little time to read thenovel or slog through five or six hours of film or Television, you can read the Classic Comics version. It came out originally in 1943, but has been republished with a new cover in 2015. It costs $9.95 on Amazon, but you can download Hugo's massive novel for free.
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You can download Hugo's complete novel in Isabel Hapgood's 1887 translation (with illustrations) athttps://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm:
Two short retrospective reviews of the 1934 production can be found at:
A recent review of the 2018 series: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/arts/television/les-miserables-collins-oyelowo.html times review of BBC show
A nice visual analysis of several of the other films is from a new blog "Infrequentmusings":https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtGJX0JCqFk film comparisons
