Les Miserables (Twentieth Century). When he arrived in Manhattan to gloat over public response to his two latest works (see p. 53), Producer Darryl Zanuck last week told the Press: "The most notable trend in picture-making has been that resulting from the public's cry for cleaner pictures. Efforts of the producers to meet this demand have made possible . . . Copperfield, Miserables, Bengal Lancer, Richelieu. ..." Fortunately for himself and Les Miserables, Producer Zanuck was entirely wrong. Les Miserables starts in the slums, proceeds to a Toulon prison galley and reaches its climax in a Paris sewer. It is the result not of the Legion of Decency but of Victor Hugo's feelings about man's inhumanity to man and it is still, as it always has been, the grimiest great story ever told.
To cinemaddicts whose acquaintance with Les Miserables derives from the silent adaptations made in 1918 and 1927, it may come as a surprise to learn that it is not only a monstrous piece of detective fiction but also the tragedy of a man's struggle with his own fate. It starts when Jean Valjean (Fredric March), represented as a deserving member of the Paris unemployed, is sentenced to the galleys for ten years for stealing a loaf of bread. There he first encounters Javert (Charles Laughton), the police inspector whose morbid fixation on the letter of the law makes him, as long as he lives, Valjean's Nemesis. When they meet again years later, Valjean is the beneficent mayor of a prosperous provincial town. But that makes no difference to Javert who ferrets out the secret of the mayor's past and forces him to escape to Paris where their last encounter comes several years later. This time, Valjean, regenerated a second time, is setting out to rescue the sweetheart of his adopted daughter from a not. Javert, an old man now, recognizes him just in time. His face beams with monstrous exhilaration. He utters one delicious word: "Valjean!"
At this point in Les Miserables Victor Hugo wrote a five-chapter treatise on the horrors of his next background, the Paris sewers. In his presentation of Valjean's final flight, Director Richard Boleslawski contrives to convey a comparable sense of horror.
Producer Zanuck's mistake about his motive for producing Les Miserables can be excused since neither he nor his associates made any more. Richard Boleslawski, under no illusions as to the material with which he was working, surrounds the action of the picture with rich and sulphurous gloom. Fredric March, decorated with such elaborate rags and whiskers that he had to be followed about the lot by a portable dressing room, gives a splendid performance. The strange buttery face of Charles Laughton, a mask of comedy in Ruggles of Red Gap, hardens into unforgettable lines of fixed, neurotic malice in Les Miserables. More than any other single ingredient, it helps to make the picture, like David Copperfield, a superb example of what the current cinema can accomplish with a 19th Century classic.