ABSTRACT
There were numerous stage productions of the novel in the 19th cen tury as well as a dozen film versions of the novel from the two minute and a half adaptation of the Dotheboys Hall episode in 1903 to Jim Goddard's shooting of David Edgar’s nine-hour long stage production in 1980. The four films I will address span fifty-five years. The first is the 1947 Ealing Studios production directed by Alberto Cavalcanti which was released during the British film revival of the post World War 2 period, together with the David Lean film adaptations of Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The second one is the longest adaptation ever of a Dickens novel, i. e. David Edgar, Trevor Nunn and John Caird's stage production with the Royal Shakespeare Company (1980-1, screened by Channel 4 in 1982).1 Such a long adap tation might seem to be the definitive one. However, the experience was repeated again in two recent versions: Stephen Whittaker's for the BBC in 2000, which seems to follow the new trend for film adaptations to be shorter than those of the 1950s, '60s and ’70s, in the sense that it is three hours long only, and finally Douglas McGrath's 2002 film for M.G.M. Even though the Crummies sequence is not a cardinal function in Barthes's terminology,2 it has never been suppressed in film adapta tions which intended to tell the main plot outline. Structurally speak ing it comes as comic relief after one dark melodramatic moment at Dotheboys Hall, describing a Yorkshire boarding school for orphans or rejected children which Dickens intended to denounce. Considering the four adaptations under study, the films are quite comparable in the sense that they all dedicate 10% of screen time to the Crummies section. Besides, they all make use of a contrasting editing procedure: Nicholas and Smike with the Crummies in parallel with (or rather in opposition to) Nicholas's sister Kate's plight (and Madeline's plight for Cavalcanti): one has clearly picaresque overtones, the other clearly melodramatic ones.
