A Film Canon

Given the sheer breadth of Hugo's classic novel, it's impossible that a single cinematic adaptation could be anything other than appropriation. In this case, the rearrangement of source material speaks to such contemporary preoccupations as the Great Depression, acknowledged in Jean Valjean's (Fredric March) opening monologue about the endless search for work and bread, which doesn't occur in the novel, as well as the inadequacies of the penal system, as if to offer an historicised confirmation of I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. At the same time, Boleslawski translates Hugo's Romantic melodrama into contemporary terms - and, more specifically, conflates its ethical and generational imperatives, completely identifying the students' uprising with Valjean's own resistance to Javert (Charles Laughton), such that the film's ultimate appeal is for a New Testament of sympathetic masculinity, to be ushered in by those post-war generations disillusioned with the 'blind', sadistic and, ultimately, self-destructive law for whose gatekeepers Laughton has such an extraordinary proclivity. It makes sense, then, that Valjean's application of Myriel's recommendation to "give, rather than take" culminates with his decision to give up adopted daughter Cosette to her lover Marius; a scenario that also concludes tbe disproportionate attention paid to this quintessentially melodramatic relationship, part of a radical narrative simplification that may be associated with Boleslawki's proclivities for method acting, which tends to work best in dramas predicated on small numbers of larger-than-life characters, rather than the ensemble cast that Hugo would seem to require.