Les Miserables on Screeen

The semi-operatic film and stage versions of Victor Hugo’s massive novel Les Misérables, music and libretto by Claude Michel Schonberg and Alan Boubil, have become a virtual institution. Popular as it is, the recent movie has not replaced the theatrical stagings. The London production is still running and a new version is promised for Broadway in 2014. Forgotten for the moment are the great screen adaptations of Victor Hugo’s novel.

The musical is indeed splendid. The original production by Trevor Nunn and John Caird included some extraordinary emblematic stagecraft that was probably influenced by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s attempts to interpret the themes of Shakespeare’s plays through stage design. Characters emerge from the shadows to deliver extended musical soliloquies, a gigantic cart seemingly hurtles towards the audience; a barricade appears for the insurrection only to disappear for the scene when Valjean carries Marius to safety through the Paris sewers. Many found this production profoundly moving, especially when Colm Wilkinson played Valjean. Unfortunately on the night I saw a supposedly improved staging of the original on Broadway in 1988 Wilkinson was ill and the understudy went on. Nunn and Caird’s production was as good as everyone said it was but the emotional impact was missing. I had to wait until the video of the Tenth Anniversary Concert appeared to see Wilkinson’s performance and to appreciate how effective Les Misérables must have been in its original performances.

The recent film version of the musical is very fine too, even though Russell Crowe as Javert can’t sing. (It is a good performance, but why producer Cameron Mackintosh and company didn’t cast Philip Quast—electrifying when he played the part here, and reportedly the best of the stage Javerts—is beyond me.) Hugh Jackman makes a splendid Valjean. He doesn’t quite have Wilkinson’s sensitivity, or his high tenor, but he is still a worthy successor—a point nicely made by having Wilkinson play the Bishop who gives Valjean the famous candlesticks. Ann Hathaway’s Fantine is indeed heart-rending as her hair is actually shorn on set as she sings “I Dreamed a Dream”. All of the songs were recorded live to a piano accompaniment, with the orchestra inserted later. The director, Tom Hooper, believed it gave the drama more immediacy. It was, however, not quite as original an innovation as was claimed. George Cukor did much the same for Rex Harrison’s Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady.

But what about the classic films? One of the greatest of the French film versions of Les Misérables has just been released on DVD, fully restored and with subtitles. Directed by Jean-Paul Le Chanois and starring the great Jean Gabin as Jean Valjean, it was released to great acclaim in France and Europe in 1958, but has only recently been exhibited in the USA. To the best of my knowledge it has never been screened theatrically in Australia. The only film versions we saw were the 1935 and 1952 adaptations made by Fox and 20th Century Fox. These included less of the original novel than does the musical. Le Chanois as co-screenwriter with René Barjavel and Michel Audiard includes both the famous pursuit of the ex-convict Jean Valjean by the obsessed Inspector Javert as well as most of the book’s sub-plots. Because of this the 1958 film is as good a starting point as any for a discussion of Les Misérables on screen.

Victor Hugo’s novel has as its centrepiece one of the great plots in European fiction. The story of Jean Valjean sent to prison for fifteen years for stealing a loaf of bread, redeemed by a gift of candlesticks and silver plate from a saintly bishop but still hunted over the years by the obsessed Javert, really has everything a reader could want—an exciting chase, the redemption of an admirable hero and, even better, a tragic villain. Javert begins as a monster. His face is described as wolfish and his servility to the established order is portrayed as repellent; but later in the narrative he comes to doubt the morality of the law to which he has dedicated his life and this doubt destroys him.

There is also the story of the betrayed Fantine and her illegitimate daughter Cosette. Then there are the arch-villains the Thenardiers and their more sympathetic children Eponine and Gavroche. The reader first encounters them as the abusive guardians of Cosette, then as leaders of a gang of housebreakers with a strange tie to Marius, the adult Cosette’s betrothed, that dates back to the Battle of Waterloo. If this were not enough, the book includes long chapters on the historical context with commentaries on the Restoration of the Bourbons, 1789 and even a flash forward to 1848. Above all it is the story of Valjean’s adventures that hold the novel together.

Making this work in a film that is only about four hours long is a considerable achievement. Le Chanois doesn’t include the French history but by simplifying the sub-plots he manages to create a narrative very much in the spirit of the novel. A brief flashback is used to tell some of Fantine’s story when she first encounters Valjean when he has become Monsieur Madeleine, the Mayor of Montruel. He even manages to get in some of the Battle of Waterloo by showing the action again as a flashback through Thenardier’s eyes as he plunders the dead.

The film is shot very simply in the style of the early cinemascope features with the action framed mainly in mid-shot. It all works superbly. A beautifully spoken narrative delivered by Jean Topart based on passages from the novel links some of the episodes and describes the characters’ inner turmoil. Mercifully it is briefer than Hugo’s expositions but gives the author his voice in the best way possible.

Much of the film is carried on the shoulders of Jean Gabin’s powerful Valjean. At first he is a brute, not yet a murderer but capable of killing. The next time we see him the brutishness has become transformed into a kind of effortless authority; he is a respected local mayor and there is a new compassion. Valjean, in Gabin’s interpretation, has made his moral decisions and isn’t about to change them. Emotions are embodied, not acted. Physically Gabin conforms exactly to Hugo’s description—greying hair, middle-aged, the calm assurance. The only real doubt comes when Valjean considers leaving the wrongly identified ex-convict to be tried and convicted in his place so that as mayor he can continue with his good works. A glance at the bishop’s candlesticks is enough to make his decision. None of the film or stage versions include Hugo’s grim observation that all “M. Madeleine’s” achievements in the town as a factory owner and mayor are destroyed by Valjean’s refusal to let another be wrongly condemned.

Other performances in the film are exemplary. Bernard Blier makes a grey civil servant of Javert and is all the more chilling and plausible. The real villain in this version is Bourvil’s magnificently slimy Thenardier. The script incorporates all the servile hypocrisy and cruelty of the original characterisation and it is very satisfying when, in the scene when the gang kidnaps Valjean, Thenardier becomes the object of one of the legendary Gabin rages. Supposedly Gabin had written into his contracts that there should be one scene when he gets angry. It is probably not true—Gabin was too great an artist to indulge in that sort of nonsense—but it does make a good story, and Gabin’s explosions, when they did come, were truly formidable. Nevertheless, for all the intensity of this outburst he skilfully plays against the sentimentality of the material, even though he is given a full-blown nineteenth-century death scene, which he plays with a moving stoicism.

This relatively full version was preceded in France by an even more extraordinary work, Raymond Bernard’s three-part Les Misérables, released in 1934. This was epic film-making on the grand scale. Bernard succeeded in persuading the Pathe-Nathan studio to give him the nearly five hours of screen time he needed to get as much of the novel on screen as he could. Bernard proposed creating three parts—“Tempest in a Skull”, “The Thenardiers” and “Liberty Sweet Liberty”—each to be screened as separate feature-length films. His co-writer was the critic and playwright Andre Lang and the cinematographer was Jules Kruger, who had shot Abel Gance’s silent epic Napoleon. The art director, Jean Perrier, faithfully recreated sections of nineteenth-century Paris on outdoor locations near Antibes. The buildings were designed to be slightly askew in the style of German expressionism, thereby heightening the impact of the sequences showing the student rising. As he did for Abel Gance, Kruger incorporates some fluid but far less obtrusive hand-held shots, particularly in the action scenes. But the major influence on the visual style is the Emile Bayard illustrations for the first edition of the novel, even though the film is far richer pictorially.

Dominating Bernard’s Les Misérables is Harry Baur’s Valjean. A big overweight man with a boxer’s face, Baur easily portrays the ex-convict’s bitterness and anger and faithfully recreates the emotional outbursts described in the novel and more or less omitted by Gabin. As well there is a wonderful gentleness in Baur’s scenes with Cosette. Charles Vanel as Javert in the heavy black coat and top hat of the Bayard illustration is less the obsessed hunter than a cold-eyed defender of the established order.

As the anonymous writer of the notes for the special edition DVD observes, “Bernard juggles Hugo’s multitude of characters with dazzling dexterity … so that Cosette (Gaby Triquet and later Josseline Gaël), Marius (Jean Servais), Eponine (Orane Demazis) and of course Valjean never seem shuffled around … a rich approximation to the unfolding pleasures of the novel”. The director also has a lot of fun with Marius’s impossibly right-wing grandfather, Gillenormand, played by Max Dearly in a delightfully over-the-top performance that provides some much-needed comic relief. The fuller treatment of the character enables Bernard to sketch at least some of the history that meant so much to Hugo.

Given the story of film preservation in the twentieth century it should come as no surprise that the full version of this masterpiece was nearly lost. It was cut down without the director’s consent and the footage mislaid. Fortunately the lost material was located in the 1970s and re-edited from memory by Bernard himself, by then well into his eighties and half-blind. It is this “director’s cut” that is now available on DVD in the Eclipse Series.

The first American Les Misérables (1935) was very different from its illustrious predecessor. The screenwriter, W.P. Lipscomb, described the process as extracting the script from Hugo’s novel, and indeed that is what he did. The Thenardiers are gone, and so is Gillenormand. The brutality in the Fantine plot is sanitised. In Bernard’s version we can see that she has sold two of her teeth and it is quite clear that she has been forced into prostitution. Lipscomb’s script only hints at this, and Florence Eldridge as Fantine looks suitably frail but retains a wan ungapped smile. Lipscomb and the director, Richard Boleslawski, concentrate on Valjean and Javert. In some ways Fredric March plays Valjean as a Hamlet figure who goes much further in seriously contemplating the alternatives with which he is confronted—such as leaving the wrongly accused ex-convict to be convicted in his place or killing Javert—than the character does in the novel. It is effective dramatically and avoids the trap of making Valjean too saintly while still being true to the novel.

The confrontations between Valjean and Charles Laughton’s Javert have an intensity that I have not seen in any of the other interpretations. In a multi-layered performance Laughton suggests that in the character’s obsession with the letter of the law and servility to authority there is more than a hint of sado-masochism. He is helped by the tightly framed close-ups given to him at key moments by Boleslawski and the cinematographer, Gregg Toland. (Lipscomb’s writing here is very fine but much of the action is wordless.) One can’t help wondering about the on-set relationship between the director and Laughton. Boleslawski was an acting teacher who had helped bring the Stanislavski system to America. Laughton was noted for totally immersing himself in his parts. Director and actor probably had much in common. Anyway the interaction between the film’s Valjean and Javert is among the finest acting achievements in early American sound film and was almost certainly enhanced by sensitive direction.

The 1935 Les Misérables is noted for breaking new ground with its visual style. Gregg Toland, who was to shoot Citizen Kane four years later, was experimenting with the faster film stocks that were being developed to get greater depth of field and to work with lower light levels. Similar effects can be found in German cinema of the 1920s but Toland was going further and it seems Boleslawski was prepared to give him a free hand. The new digital restoration on DVD does overdue justice to Toland’s deep focus shots in the galley scenes and the tight framing of the close-ups and two-shots. The chase through the sewers is a triumph. Toland seems to have used only a few spots—one can be seen moving—and was not afraid to have the actors move in and out of the shadows. All in all it more than equals the great chase through the sewers in Carol Reed’s The Third Man.

All three of these “unmusical” versions of Victor Hugo’s great novel are extraordinary achievements. They are true to the spirit, and sometimes the letter, of the original. There is also reason to believe they may have influenced some of the productions of the musical. Discovering these classics anew can only enrich our appreciation of the new film and the forthcoming stage versions of Les Misérables the musical.