Richard Attenborough

Cyril Cusack

Edith Evans

Pamela Franklin

Susan Hampshire

Wendy Hiller

Ron Moody

Laurence Olivier

Robin Phillips

Michael Redgrave

Ralph Richardson

Emlyn Williams

Sinéad Cusack

James Donald

James Hayter

Megs Jenkins

Anna Massey

Andrew McCulloch

Nicholas Pennell

Corin Redgrave

Isobel Black

Liam Redmond

Donald Layne-Smith

Christopher Moran

Jeffrey Chandler

Kim Craik

Helen Cotterill

Alastair Mackenzie

William Lyon Brown

Frederick Brogger

Jack Pulman

Charles Dickens

Delbert Mann

Malcolm Arnold

Peter Boita

Alex Vetchinsky

Anthony Mendleson

Ken Hodges

George Minassian

Drama

TV Movie

David Copperfield

20th Century Fox Television

United Kingdom

CinemaSerf

This was never one of my favourite Dickens stories - I always found the title character just a bit , well, wet! Anyway, the really quite mediocre Robin Phillips take the role for this adaptation, and we follow his rather brutal adventures of childhood and early adulthood that see him deal with bullying, beating, extortion and tragedy. As with the book, to which this is fairly faithful, there are quite literally heaps of curious and engaging characters he encounters along the way, most notably Sir Ralph Richardson's wonderfully over the top "Micawber", Sir Michael Redgrave's "Peggotty" desperately seeking his errant daughter "Emily" (Sinéad Cusack) and from Ron Roody as the duplicitous, downright nasty piece of work that is "Uriah Heap"! The production is pretty lacklustre. The photography offers us lots of long, moody shots of the contemplative hero on the beach - and the cameraman seems content to try out his new zoom lens just once (or thrice) too often. Malcolm Arnold provides us with an unremarkable score and the whole story irather plods along without much potency. As an introduction to the work of Dickens, it might have a purpose in diverting the viewer to the author's (and his other, better) novels, but a piece of cinema it's little better than a very well cast television movie.

English