Barnaby Rudge (1960) User Reviews

Will do for now

[keith-moyes-656-481491 · 7/10 · 8 May 2012]

Barnaby Rudge is the forgotten Dickens novel.

I forgot to read it 30 years ago, when I read all the others. The movie and TV industry forgot to dramatise it. As a collector of Dickens on screen, I am spoilt for choice when it comes to Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield and there are at least two versions of all the other novels, but this 1960 BBC serial is the only Barnaby Rudge to have appeared since the early silent era.

Because it was originally a series of live broadcasts I assumed that it had immediately disappeared into the ether and Barnaby Rudge would continue to be hole in my collection. I was wrong.

The broadcasts were filmed off monitors and so escaped the mass wiping of the BBC's videotape archive. These recordings survived and have surfaced on DVD, so I finally have a complete set of Dickens dramas.

The recordings are in good shape and the picture quality is much better than I expected. Of course, the 405 line image is quite low definition, but the scan lines don't really show until the final episode when, for some reason, they suddenly become highly visible.

This 13 part serial was an ambitious project and is a more lavish production than I was expecting. It is a very faithful and very comprehensive adaptation of the book, with a large cast, scores of extras (although not enough) and dozens of sets.

Being live, it is inevitable that there are a few fluffed lines but the cast seem well rehearsed and handle the elaborate Dickensian dialogue with remarkable assurance. It is actually a very slick production but it does pose a problem for a modern audience.

In 1960, the BBC still saw television drama in terms of Theatre, not cinema. Despite the best efforts of the director and some of the cast, Barnaby Rudge is best viewed as a play rather than a TV movie.

Many of the performances come straight off the stage: Joan Hickson, Barbara Hicks and Timothy Bateson are all acting for people sitting fifty feet away in the stalls, not ten feet away from their TV screens. However, other actors (e.g. Raymond Huntley and Peter Williams) do scale their performances down for the small screen.

Irrespective of style, the acting is variable and it is unfortunate that some of the worst performances are of key characters.

Barbara Hicks's Miggs shrieks relentlessly throughout and soon tried my patience, while Timothy Bateson's Simon Tappertit is a primping, mugging, deluded buffoon, who never convinces as a leader or as a key figure in the riots.

Even more unfortunate is John Wood's Barnaby. He is a good-hearted simpleton: strong and brave, but gullible and easily led. I think it is probably a difficult part to get right and I don't pretend to know how it should be played, but this is not it. Wood looks bemused rather than simple-minded and there is a hint of Kenneth Williams his line reading, so his Barnaby sounds more gay than fey.

However, the major problem is the book itself. It has been ignored by television for a reason.

The story is too big for the tight budgets of most BBC dramas. Its centrepiece is a meticulously-researched, hour-by-hour, recreation of the Gordon Riots of 1780, when for a few days London was in the control of a mob. Understandably, the scenes of the storming of Parliament and the burning of Newgate prison, shot live in a studio, are under-populated and unconvincing. They really needed to be pre-filmed but, in the days before co-production, filming on this scale would have been too expensive for the BBC.

More importantly, the book is poorly structured. The first 300 pages introduce a wide range of characters and set up a number of intertwining sub-plots: a murder mystery; a threatening stranger; two bitter enemies; two troubled love affairs; a clash between father and son; a rebellious apprentice; a treacherous gypsy and so on. It is noticeable that Barnaby is only a very minor figure in all this. Nonetheless, the pot is simmering nicely when Dickens suddenly announces: "and so five years passed, about which this narrative is silent."

This is a real slap in the face for the reader, because the story then resumes with a new set of characters and veers off in a completely different direction. All those intriguing plot lines are put on hold for hundreds of pages. Many of the original characters do pop up from time to time, and Barnaby becomes a much more important figure, but some disappear entirely and only re-emerge near the end of the book. It is as if Dickens suddenly remembers that there are mysteries still to be uncovered and love affairs still to be resolved and he only has a hundred pages in which to do it. He does manage to tie up all the loose ends but only in a slightly hurried and perfunctory way.

This production minimises the impact of that gaping hole in the story by burying it in the middle of an episode and only making minimal reference to the five years that have passed. Even so, there is no way to disguise the fact that the second six or seven episodes have very little to do with the first six.

I would still love to see Barnaby Rudge shot on a budget and a scale appropriate to its subject matter, but because of this weakness in the book I think this is unlikely to happen. It looks as if I will have to settle for this version.

However, I can live with that. This Barnaby Rudge may be somewhat archaic and is clearly under-funded, but it is quite accomplished in its own way and is certainly good enough to keep me satisfied until something better comes along.

A very respectable adaptation of one of Dickens' weakest books

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 5 September 2013]

Barnaby Rudge is not Charles Dickens at his best, for this viewer it is one of his weakest books(perhaps even his weakest), I do agree that it is not very well structured, bogged down by too many incidents and relationships, and the characterisations of the characters are on the syrupy side with rather unconvincing villains as well. For Dickens fans though it is still worth a read, because as ever with Dickens it is evocative of the time and there is a social purpose behind it. This 1960 series is most respectable and more than makes do for the only adaptation(to knowledge) of the book available. Not perfect by all means. Some of the camera work is static(mostly in the more wordy scenes), some big scenes are under-populated and show some under-funding and not all the casting works. Barbara Hicks is agreed too shrill, Timothy Bateson relies far too much on mugging and a lot of it is irritating and John Wood while mostly good natured like his character can seem a little too bewildered. The production values are relatively lavish even within the budget and is of reasonable quality. There is a lot of talk in the dialogue, but it is faithfully adapted and is very intelligently written. The storytelling is also faithful, sustains itself well over a long but never stodgy-feeling length, and does a good job at being coherent, not easy for adapting a book that isn't very well-structured. The acting mostly is fine even with some staginess(not entirely inappropriate though actually), Raymond Huntley, Peter Williams and Arthur Borough are very good and feel very natural within the surroundings. Joan Hickson is also her old reliable self. So all in all, not mind-blowing and not one of the all-time great Dickens adaptations, but respectable and interesting. If you can find it, it is definitely worth watching. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Respectable version of Dickens but looks its age

[aramis-112-804880 · 6/10 · 3 May 2022]

BARNABY RUDGE is the story of ordinary people whose lives are changed by the almost-forgotten eighteenth century Gordon Riots and how two sets if young lovers were affected. Actual historical persons are few, but Dickens was never short of characters.

BARNABY RUDGE is one of my favorite Dickens novels (along with THE PICKWICK PAPERS and OUR MUTUAL FRIEND). I read it first in college and 4 times in the intervening 40 years. I love Dickens but once every ten years is enough for any of his novels.

This live television version has all the usual problems inherent in the form. Each episode has to fit inside its parameters and no matter how it's rehearsed, once in live performance speeds vary. So occasionally the actors are talking unnaturally fast, as with bad Shakespeare. And since it's live there can be only one take. Fortunately this show had no major disasters; but if all the backdrop had collapsed the actors would have to keep going.

An excellent cast includes now-famous faces: Arthur Brough, Raymond Huntley, Joan Hickson ("Miss Marple"), Barbara Hicks as a rather too-nice Miggs and others. But John Wood's Barnaby is more pixillated than mad, which is probably Dickens' fault; and a young Timothy Bateson, who would over later decades be a veritable warhorse on TV, radio and in the movies, misses something in his Sim Tappertit. One of my favorite Dickens characters, along with FRIEND's Silas Wegg and DAVID COPPERFIEND's Uriah Heep, Sim is a firebrand revolutionary, but too short, ridiculous and full of himself to be of much genuine use. Bateson, probably at the behest of the others, plays Sim all for laughs, missing the character's dangerous edge.

Lots of the faults of the script are from Dickens. Not, as some reviewers have said before me, that his book was poorly structured. Dickens wrote for serial and each of his novels is a separate world of colorful characters vomited out on readers. At that time in the history of the novel and due to the manner of his writing, it's absurd to talk about "structure" in the way we use the term in modern novels. Alistair Cooke once famously wrote that anyone who loves GREAT EXPECTATIONS and A TALE OF TWO CITIES (his two tightest novels as we think of the form today) probably won't like Dickens. That's doubtlessly the problem with other reviewers who prefer novels as they are today rather than accepting Dickens as he was. Those two novels, like FRIEND, came late in his career when novels were changing and Dickens was struggling to change with them.

But the bulk, and I think best, of Dickens' works are, from the way he wrote for serial, huge, sprawling masses of distinctive characters and coincidences. An added problem was, like CITIES, RUDGE is an historical novel; but from our perspective, it's like seeing two mountains that might be miles apart but look the same height to us, since from a twenty-first century perspective all Dickens' novels appear distantly historical. We miss the notion that this story takes place before Dickens was born. Our loss.

But the great thing about Dickens is, he always, even from the start, knew his story-lines and stuck to them like clothes lines on which he pinned tons of colorful and perhaps extraneous material. Since his storylines are clear in retrospect and his characters so vibrant and detailed it's no wonder his novels were adaptable in the silent-film days and still are turned out nearly every year. The difficulty with Dickens adaptation is what to leave out, especially as the various branches of his wider stories twine round each other. Watch the RSC's 9-hour "Nicholas Nickelby" to guess where you'd use the pruning shears.

That a live-tv version of RUDGE was written at all is a marvel. I'd like to see the same script used for a newer version, but even the BBC doesn't do such long versions of the great books in the post-MTV days when attention-spans are short (MTV started in Aug. 1981 and I graduated college in June 1983 so I was already predisposed to long attention spans and had read RUDGE the first time when the plaintive "I want my MTV" was initially heard).

Actually, I find the Dickens books I prefer were those whose stories I didn't know before diving in and so carried with me no preconceptions. That was the way of Dickens' original audience. Perhaps, then, RUDGE would benefit by a new adaptation, since even people claiming to love Dickens are ignorant of it.

This BARNABY RUDGE has a nicely-weeded teleplay straight from Dickens and an illustrious cast; but with overblown live-tv performances and a constant hiss, as with old records, it's awfully annoying. It's too bad, since RUDGE is the Rodney Dangerfield of Dickens' novels, not getting any respect. It should. It's a great story with vibrant characters. This version is full of fine actors, some (like Neil McCarthy) who seem born to play their roles. It's a respectable adaptation but it plays too fast and, like me, looks its age. But to date it's the best we have. In light of the violent an arson-filled riots in America in the months leading up to the 2020 election, and the seizure of cities by rioters, it might be a good time to blow the dust off RUDGE and film it afresh while it's timely.