Hard Times

In 1939, Lillian Hellman tried to persuade Sam Goldwyn to buy John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The producer demurred, saying he was put off by "the gloom and the sordidness of the background and the people." Twentieth Century Fox's Darryl Zanuck felt differently. Zanuck paid Steinbeck $100,000 for the rights to his novel, and hired Nunnally Johnson to write the script and John Ford to direct. The Grapes of Wrath wasn't the first time Zanuck took a novel about the disenfranchised and turned it into studio gold. Five years earlier, he shot a version of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, which the producer saw as "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang in costume," noting that its story of a man forced to steal bread was "the theme of today." The film, released in 1935, was directed by the Polish/Russian, Stanislavsky-trained Richard Boleslawski, and featured two brilliant actors in the lead roles: Fredric March as the reformed thief Valjean and Charles Laughton as his long-term tormentor Javert.

Zanuck's Les Miserables wasn't Hugo's Les Miserables, which was no doubt to the good of the film. As with The Grapes of Wrath, what lingers in the mind about the 1935 Les Miserables is the rich, atmospheric detail of the photography and set design, as well as the leads, whose ferocity makes the script's betrayal of the novel irrelevant. What lingers just as strongly is the realization that once upon a time Hollywood thought poor people were not just interesting subjects, but necessary as well. Zanuck's Les Miserables was the first of at least seven screen versions of the Hugo novel, three of which have been made by Hollywood. The newest version has been directed by Bille August, the Danish director who started out with small films like Twist and Shout before transforming The House of the Spirits into a house of wax and Smilla's Sense of Snow into slush.

August's Les Miserables stars Liam Neeson as Valjean and Geoffrey Rush as Javert. Rush is quite good in the role, and in his final scene, the most alive and forceful in the film, begins to approach Laughton's wild-eyed zealot, whose obsession with Valjean carried a tinge of sexual menace. That menace is absent from August's film, as too are Valjean's erotic feelings for Cosette, which, ironically, were more acceptable for post-Code Hollywood than the Hollywood of the late 20th century. Neeson, who tends to emote through his looming physicality - he's pantherlike in Schindler's List, an ox to slaughter in Ethan Frome - is directed to either charge through a scene like a bull or hesitate meaningfully midframe, as if signaling a shift in his emotional register. His Valjean seems less haunted - and hunted - than slow on the uptake. Claire Danes, as Cosette, the orphan Valjean adopts from Uma Thurman's terminally stricken whore, snivels through her role well enough and, like everyone in the cast, speaks her lines with an English accent. Perhaps that explains why the Parisian mob looks so polite when her love interest, Hans Matheson as Marius, squeaks, "To the barricades!"