Our Mutual Friend (Repackaged) [DVD] [1998]

It's a dark and curious Dickens, not of the Gothic splendour of Great Expectations, but pawky and grim, foggy, dusty... His penultimate novel, and all the stranger because, in this version at least, Peter Vaughn is playing the good guy - the lovely Golden Dustman, the delightful Mr Nicodemus Boffin.The story hangs around a legacy (like Bleak House and Oliver Twist!) but the villain of this piece is a throughly dislikeable schoolmaster named Bradley Headstone (David Morrisey) aided and abetted by the detestable Charley Hexham (Paul Bailey) and with a black dog on his back in the shape of David Bradley as Rogue Riderhood. It's rather closer to a Victorian mellodrama than some other Dickens stories - but it's also *so* dirty.It's hard to escape the fact that the source of Boffin's wealth is the mounds of dust, dirt and cinder accumulated and dumped by London's dustcarts, because it gets everywhere - even the polite society of Lady Tippins, the Veneerings and the Lamles - all plainly wishing that Boffin wasn't among them, but far too polite to say so - seems to occupy a bubble floating on the surface of the dirt, and in permanant danger of breaking. Meanwhile it is something of a contest between the two Lamles to decide which is the more unpleasant.Money, the things people do to get it, the misery caused by the lack of it, and the malice of those that have it, is the theme here, rather as if the pervasive dust and the contaminating smears of money are one and the same. The mounds are without a doubt, a horrible place to work, though the brickfields of Bleak House may run them a close second.And like the broken goods buried in the dust, this world is full of broken people; Silas Weg with his wooden leg, Sloppy with his aimiably dull wits, and Bella Wilfer with her broken nature that she might (just) summon up the effort to mend; poor, love-lorn Mr Venus, the articulator of bones, and even the friendship between John Harmon and Eugene Waryburn that looks like it may break over Lizzie Hexham.And wierd, damaged Jenny Wren making little dolls, and treating her father as a little boy; Pieter Breughel's World Turned Upside Down is only just around the corner. Bradley Headstone stalks the landscape of the tale like a gravedigger, while the lone wolf, Rogue Riderhood, stalks him - Mr Bradley in the role that probably got him cast as Filch - the bad guys and their bad world really do seem likely to win right up to the end, and it seems genuinely unlikely that there will be a happy ending.Steven Mackintosh is the eponymous Friend - John Harmon - though not a particularly warm nor appealing one.

Brilliant story. DVD in good condition and arrived on time. Thank you.

Brilliant film version of one of my favourite books.

Why was it edited? A whole line to the story was missing, which the BBC put in there. The rest of it was brilliant, but when I pay for a video, I expect to get it??

Lovely adaptation of a beautiful book, will watch again and again.

Too much darkness and the story was difficult to get from this film. As I have not read this novel, I am still mystified about the central message , apart from not stealing someone else’s inheritance. The central woman was very weak. Dickens is not good at depicting women characters anyway. Deserves a slow read first to get the point of this book. Dr. Oenone Wollaston

Well worth a watch

Beautifully acted and produced and enjoyable in it's own right.There is still much of the book which has had to be lost and that's always a shame, the best production of a Dickens for me still has to be Little Dorrit, it really sets the standard and I hope more will be produced to the same standard.However, given that small misgiving I thought the performance of Paul McGann as the dissatisfied and drifting Eugene Wrayburn was played to perfection. Perhaps the best of all was the strange repressed sexual obsession of Bradley Headstone (David Morrissey) - frighteningly good stuff.Get it by all means, the quality of the acting of the two above make it worthwhile alone, and there are many other merits just waiting in store for you.