Little Dorrit

Little Dorrit (1987)

Amy Dorrit spends her days earning money for the family and looking after her proud father who is a long term inmate of Marshalsea debtors' prison in London. Amy and her family's world is transformed when her employer's son, Arthur Clennam, returns from overseas to solve his family's mysterious legacy and discovers that their lives are interlinked.

Date of release
1987-12-11
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (14)
Runtime
5h 57m
Genres
Drama
Director
Christine Edzard

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Little Dorrit
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 2

Little Dorrit is a 1987 film adaptation of the 1857 novel Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. It was written and directed by Christine Edzard, and produced by John Brabourne and Richard B. Goodwin. The music by Giuseppe Verdi was arranged by Michael Sanvoisin.

Production

This was the first screen adaptation of one of Dickens's longest and most complex books for over 50 years and featured three hundred of Britain's best character actors.

Director Christine Edzard is known for her meticulous filmmaking often based on Victorian English sources, and her version of Little Dorrit has been recognised for its faithfulness to the original text and for the innovativeness of its narrative.

The film has 242 speaking roles and was made almost by hand at Edzard's and her husband producer Richard Goodwin's studio, Sands Films in London's docklands, where they have also made Stories from a Flying Trunk (1979), The Nightingale (1981), Biddy (1983), The Fool (1990), As You Like It (1991), Amahl and the Night Visitors (1996), The IMAX Nutcracker (1997), The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream (2001) and The Good Soldier Schwejk (2018).

Besides making films, the couple manufactured dolls houses and the sets that were built on site, where the hundreds of costumes were also sewn, were made using miniature models of houses combined with special effects to create the Victorian London background. The elaborate sets constructed included Marshalsea Prison, interiors of well to-do or neglected houses and the busy streets and dock areas of London.

The budget was only $9 million and the pink Sèvres china seen on Merdle's dinner-table, which would have been too expensive to rent or to buy, was made in the small pottery at the studios.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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