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Catalogo Giornate del Cinema Muto 2012 - La Cineteca del Friuli

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iordina o aggiunge <strong>del</strong> suo al materiale originale. Molti personaggi<br />

dickensiani minori o di media importanza sono scomparsi, tra questi<br />

Miss Pross (e di conseguenza anche il suo assordante scontro finale<br />

con la Vendetta) e la famiglia Cruncher. Il Dr. Manette figura nel<br />

prologo come un giovane medico che cerca di salvare una ragazza<br />

rapita dai St. Evremonde, ma ha solo il piccolo ruolo di una stordita<br />

e amnesica vittima <strong>del</strong>l’ingiustizia reale. Del processo londinese a<br />

Charles Darnay si dà solo un resoconto, senza però metterlo in scena,<br />

favorendo strategicamente il Tribunale <strong>del</strong>la Conciergerie. Poi, dopo<br />

che ci vengono mostrato i vizi e la rapacità <strong>del</strong>la nobile famiglia dei St.<br />

Evremonde, l’attenzione si concentra su Sydney Carton: la sua vita e il<br />

suo talento sprecati, il suo amore senza speranza per Lucie e la tiepida<br />

rivalità con Darnay.<br />

Il film si prende un’ulteriore libertà rispetto al romanzo di Dickens. <strong>La</strong><br />

sartina senza nome che Carton incontra sulla carretta dei condannati<br />

e cui stringe la mano ai piedi <strong>del</strong>la ghigliottina acquista un ruolo di<br />

maggiore spessore e diventa “Mimi”. <strong>La</strong> parte fu creata per Miss De<br />

Silva: Mrs. Helena Martin-Harvey. Mimi, ancor più di Lucie Manette,<br />

diventa un’eroina praticamente onnipresente sia nel dramma teatrale<br />

sia nel film The Only Way. Ma, dopotutto, Lucie sembra ragionare con<br />

la propria testa e ha la temerarietà e il discutibile gusto di preferire<br />

un francese sobrio a un inglese ubriaco, mentre Mimi si accontenta di<br />

venerare Carton da lontano. Mimi fa da cameriera tuttofare per Lucie<br />

solo perché Carton ne è innamorato, e viene condotta a morte – sulla<br />

stessa carretta che porta alla ghigliottina Carton – per aver favorito la<br />

fuga da Parigi di Darnay e dei Manette. Indubbiamente, quello di Mimi<br />

era un ruolo coi fiocchi per la moglie di un attore-impresario.<br />

Come attore, John Martin-Harvey aveva un penchant per i personaggi<br />

manifestamente o nascostamente “nobili”. Come se fosse una risposta<br />

al luogo comune che ogni inglese è un cavaliere o un puritano, Harvey,<br />

sia per temperamento sia nella scelta dei ruoli, era un cavaliere, con<br />

un repertorio teatrale di realisti smargiassi o gentiluomini decaduti che<br />

lottano strenuamente per trovare e/o recuperare la loro innata bontà<br />

riscattandosi da una vita indegna.<br />

The Only Way acquista particolare vivacità nella sua descrizione<br />

<strong>del</strong>la Parigi <strong>del</strong> 1793, l’arena in cui Carton può affrontare impavido<br />

la marmaglia. In un tribunale francese, solo contro tutti, l’inglese<br />

sfida una folla di scalmanati e riesce quasi a vincere la sua causa. Il<br />

comportamento di Carton sul luogo <strong>del</strong> patibolo galvanizzava il<br />

pubblico di Harvey. L’episodio <strong>del</strong>l’inglese senza paura davanti alla<br />

plebaglia parigina che presto gli taglierà la testa era la scena madre<br />

<strong>del</strong> film, e la fama di Harvey era talmente persuasiva e così intenso<br />

il suo magnetismo personale che in alcune occasioni si interrompeva<br />

<strong>del</strong>iberatamente la proiezione nel momento in cui Carton scendeva<br />

dalla carretta per salire sulla ghigliottina. Lo schermo veniva sollevato<br />

all’istante, e Harvey, in abito da passeggio, si faceva incontro al<br />

pubblico plaudente declamando le battute finali <strong>del</strong> dramma nonché<br />

ultima didascalia <strong>del</strong> film: “Quel che faccio è il meglio, di gran lunga il<br />

meglio che io abbia mai fatto; e il riposo che m’attende il più dolce,<br />

di gran lunga il più dolce che io abbia mai conosciuto.” – DAVID MAYER<br />

56<br />

The Only Way is a double adaptation: a film adapted from a play<br />

adapted from a novel. We currently approach this film as the best<br />

silent version of Dickens’ 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, but at the<br />

film’s core is Freeman Wills and Frederick <strong>La</strong>ngbridge’s popular stage<br />

drama, commissioned in 1898 as a piece to commemorate France’s<br />

revolution, and the performance of actor-manager Sir John Martin-<br />

Harvey (1863-1944). The charismatic Harvey became identified with<br />

the role of Sydney Carton, which he purportedly performed over<br />

7,000 times between 1899 and 1939 in Britain and throughout North<br />

America. In the hands of film director Herbert Wilcox, who fretted<br />

that Harvey’s stage version lacked sufficient literary respectability,<br />

the theatrical narrative has undergone a partial reversal, restoring<br />

some excised characters but also slowing Harvey’s swift plotting and<br />

rapid sequence of dramatic scenes. Fortunately, it is Harvey’s stage<br />

version which mostly survives, and which has sufficient momentum to<br />

override Wilcox’s pedantic attempts at restoration.<br />

The Revolution and the subsequent “Terror” of 1794 have long<br />

provided fertile environments for British and French novelists and<br />

dramatists to explore the paroxysms of this popular uprising and for<br />

these same authors to develop what might be called the substitutionand-noble-self-sacrifice<br />

school of melodrama. Such melodramas<br />

feature a protagonist who successfully substitutes himself for a rival/<br />

near-rival/son imprisoned and awaiting execution in the Conciergerie<br />

and who then sacrifices his own less-worthy life to liberate the<br />

Revolution’s victim. Baroness Orczy and Montague Barstow’s The<br />

Scarlet Pimpernel, Watts Phillips’ The Dead Heart, and Victorien<br />

Sardou’s Robespierre are three such dramas. Our familiarity with A<br />

Tale of Two Cities might lead us to suppose that Dickens is being<br />

directly plagiarized, but the facts are otherwise.<br />

Dickens himself is the borrower from a theatrical cliché which is at<br />

least a decade older than his novel. Perhaps because the guillotine is<br />

the first attempt to industrialize death and to make the operation of<br />

the process more interesting than the individuals consumed in the<br />

process, dramatists have sensed that one frightened victim looks much<br />

like all the others and that errors might occur. Alexandre Dumas père<br />

was the first in a considerable lineage of dramatists to work the prisonsubstitution<br />

trick in his Le Chevalier de la Maison Rouge in 1847. Dion<br />

Boucicault adapted this play in his 1853 melodrama Genevieve; or,<br />

The Reign of Terror, and, in turn, Boucicault’s play became the source<br />

for the same ruse in Wilkie Collins’ 1857 melodrama The Frozen<br />

Deep. Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities followed in 1859, and the<br />

first stage version of the novel appeared in 1860.<br />

The Only Way draws heavily on Dickens’ novel, and, like the novel, it<br />

pursues a similar strategy of first establishing, then reversing polarities<br />

– making the audience sympathetic to the Revolution, then appalled<br />

and antagonistic to the corruption and violence of the Terror. But it<br />

also suppresses and elides and rearranges and adds to the novel. Gone<br />

are many of Dickens’ lesser and mid-range characters: no Miss Pross<br />

and thus no terminally deafening encounter with “The Vengeance”,<br />

no Cruncher family. Dr. Manette appears in the prologue as a young<br />

physician attempting to save a girl abducted by the St. Evremondes but<br />

has only a small role as the dazed amnesiac victim of Royalist injustice.<br />

The trial of Charles Darnay in London is reported, not dramatized, but<br />

that is a strategy to make more of the Tribunal in the Conciergerie.<br />

Rather, once we have seen the vice and rapacity of the noble family of<br />

St. Evremonde, the emphasis is on Sydney Carton, his wasted life and<br />

talent, his hopeless love for Lucie, his half-hearted rivalry with Darnay.<br />

There is a further liberty taken with Dickens’ novel. The little<br />

nameless seamstress whom Carton meets in the tumbril and whose<br />

hand he holds at the foot of the guillotine has been enlarged into the<br />

role of “Mimi”. It was a part created for Miss De Silva: Mrs. Helena<br />

Martin-Harvey. Mimi appears throughout the stage play and film The<br />

Only Way as a heroine more ubiquitous than Lucie Manette. After<br />

all, Lucie has something of a mind of her own and has the temerity<br />

and questionable taste to prefer a sober Frenchman to a drunken<br />

Englishman, but Mimi worships Carton from afar. She cleans and acts<br />

as maid to Lucie because Carton loves her, and Mimi is taken to her<br />

death – to ride to the guillotine in the tumbril with Carton – because<br />

she abets Darnay’s and the Manettes’ escape from Paris. Undeniably,<br />

Mimi is a plum role for an actor-manager’s wife.<br />

As an actor, John Martin-Harvey’s choice was for roles which<br />

displayed actual or inner nobility. As if in response to the cliché that<br />

every Englishman is either a Cavalier or a Roundhead, Harvey was by<br />

temper and self-casting a Cavalier, his stage roles featuring swaggering<br />

royalists and decayed gentlemen struggling to find or recover inner<br />

goodness and to redeem worthless lives.<br />

Where The Only Way comes to life is in its depiction of the Paris of<br />

1793, the arena where Carton can stand up to the rabble. It’s where,<br />

in a French tribunal, the lone Englishman takes on a mob of Frenchmen<br />

and nearly wins his case. The Tribunal episode lasts for a full 17<br />

minutes, and it is from this point that the film gathers momentum.<br />

This sequence shows Harvey at his best: intelligent, thinking quickly,<br />

sardonic, melancholic humour willingly turned against himself, all in<br />

an easy quiet inner style which can enlarge to full stage tirades. Note<br />

how, frequently changing hands, he uses his hat both to disguise and<br />

emphasize large gestures. That blunt, battered, shabby hat, introduced<br />

to gull the court into thinking him a harmless English eccentric, leads<br />

his sweeping arms and assists the force of his rhetoric, but nevertheless<br />

is so commonplace and unobtrusive as to hide Carton’s guile and<br />

court-craft. Carton’s behaviour on the scaffold endeared Harvey to<br />

his audiences. So appealing was this moment of an Englishman fearless<br />

before the Paris mob who will soon take his head, and so persuasive<br />

was Harvey’s reputation and so intense his personal magnetism that<br />

at some screenings the film was <strong>del</strong>iberately stopped at the moment<br />

Carton stepped from the tumbril and ascended the steps to the<br />

guillotine. Immediately the motion picture screen was raised, and<br />

Harvey, in street clothes, stepped forward to the applauding audience<br />

declaiming the play’s – and the intertitles’ – closing lines: “It is a far, far<br />

better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far better rest that<br />

I go to than I have ever known.” – DAVID MAYER<br />

57<br />

Prog. 10: Great Expectations<br />

THE BOY AND THE CONVICT (Williamson Kinematograph<br />

Company, GB 1909)<br />

Regia/dir: David Aylott; prod: James Williamson; f./ph: Henry Sanders;<br />

orig. l: 750 ft.; 35mm, 719 ft., 12' (16 fps); fonte copia/print source: BFI<br />

National Archive, London.<br />

Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.<br />

Senza riconoscere il proprio debito verso Great Expectations di<br />

Dickens e non nominando mai direttamente i personaggi, The Boy and<br />

the Convict (Il ragazzo eil galeotto) estrapola uno dei temi <strong>del</strong> romanzo<br />

– il rapporto d’amicizia tra il giovane Pip e il forzato Magwitch – che<br />

divide in 13 scene, ognuna <strong>del</strong>le quali girata in un’unica riresa da una<br />

cinepresa in posizione statica. Le prime 6 scene mostrano l’incontro<br />

tra il bambino e il forzato evaso, in cui il ragazzino spaventato gli<br />

procura <strong>del</strong> cibo, prima che l’altro tenti di sottrarsi con la fuga a un<br />

nuovo arresto. “Sette anni dopo” il forzato, diventato ricco, deposita<br />

anonimamente presso una banca un’ingente somma di danaro per<br />

il ragazzo e in seguito lo incontra rivelandogli la propria identità.<br />

Sulle prime il giovane lo respinge con sdegno ma, al sopraggiungere<br />

<strong>del</strong>la polizia, lo aiuta a fuggire. In seguito, il ragazzo (Pip) avvicina la<br />

moglie <strong>del</strong> forzato giusto in tempo per un “happy ending”, peraltro<br />

abbastanza diverso da entrambi i finali alternativi di Dickens, in cui il<br />

forzato, ormai scagionato dalla confessione <strong>del</strong> vero colpevole, gli dà<br />

in moglie la propria figlia. – GRAHAM PETRIE<br />

Making no reference to its debt to Dickens’s Great Expectations and<br />

never naming the characters, The Boy and the Convict extracts one<br />

thread from the novel’s plot – the relationship between the young<br />

Pip and the escaped convict Magwitch – and divides it into 13 scenes,<br />

each filmed in a single shot by a static camera. The first 6 scenes show<br />

the meeting between the boy and the convict, in which the child is<br />

frightened into providing him with food, before the latter attempts<br />

to escape re-arrest. “Seven Years <strong>La</strong>ter” the now-wealthy convict<br />

deposits money anonymously in a bank for the young man and then<br />

later meets him and identifies himself. After initial rejection, the Pip<br />

character encourages him to escape as the police arrive, and then<br />

contacts the convict’s wife and daughter in time for “A Happy Ending”<br />

rather unlike either of Dickens’s alternative endings, in which the<br />

convict, now absolved of guilt through a confession by the real culprit,<br />

is able to give his daughter in marriage to the young man.<br />

GRAHAM PETRIE<br />

STORE FORVENTNINGER (Grandi speranze / Great Expectations)<br />

(Nordisk Films, DK 1922)<br />

Regia/dir: A.W. Sandberg; scen: <strong>La</strong>urids Skands; f./ph: Louis <strong>La</strong>rsen,<br />

Einar Olsen; scg./des: Carlo Jacobsen; cast: Martin Herzberg (giovane/<br />

young Pip [U.S. prints: “Buddy”]), Harry Komdrup (Pip), Esther Kjær<br />

Hansen (giovane/young Estella), Olga d’Org [Olga Belajeff] (Estella),<br />

Marie Dinesen (Miss Havisham), Gerhard Jessen (Joe Gargery), Ellen<br />

Rovsing (Mrs. Gargery), Emil Helsengreen (Abel Magwitch), Peter<br />

CHARLES DICKENS

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