Les Misérables - Deuxième Film: Les Thénardier (1934)

Zusatzinfos

von PierrotLeFou

Hintergrundinformationen zum Film

Raymond Bertrand brachte seine Hugo-Verfilmung 1934 in drei Teilen in die Kinos. Michael Koresky schreibt im Booklet der Criterion-DVD hierzu:

"It was Bernard who proposed adapting Hugo’s hefty book into three parts—'Une tempête sous le crane' ('Tempest in a Skull'), 'Les Thénardier' ('The Thénardiers'), and 'Liberté, liberté chérie' ('Liberty, Sweet Liberty')—to be screened as separate feature-length films, thus allowing him to include as much of the original narrative, characters, and details as possible. And because of the great success of his previous film, the forty-two-year-old director got the screen time (nearly five hours) and resources he needed to realize his vision."

In den folgenden Jahren kam es zu diversen Zusammenschnitten und Rekonstruktionsversuchen, ehe Bertrand in den 1970er Jahren eine möglichst vollständige Rekonstruktion der Urfassung erstellen konnte. Koresky:

"[I]n 1944, a longer, two-part version was shown in France, although this time, due to obvious wartime influences, all references to revolution and political uprising were excised. When Bernard and Lang, who, both Jewish, had been lying low during the war, discovered this version, they began legal proceedings to get it restored to the proper length. They ultimately managed to get it to 204 minutes, and this shorter version was the only one available for decades. [...] It wasn’t until the 1970s, when the French Broadcasting Company (ORTF) commissioned a restored version of Les misérables, that Bernard, then in his eighties and nearly blind, was given the opportunity to reconstruct the film into something close to its original, expansive length. After months of reassembling it from memory, he and his editor, Charlotte Guilbert, arrived at a version that was almost complete, save for some scenes that were unrecoverable. This version, which is now the most commonly available, premiered on French television in the summer of 1977, mere months before Bernard died, at age eighty-six."

Bei Criterion liegt der Film als dreiteilige Version auf 2 DVDs vor, wobei die Gesamtlaufzeit ungefähr 280 Minuten beträgt.