Les Misérables

Notes

In the opening credits, this film is introduced as "Victor Hugo's Les Misérables." After the opening credits, the film includes the following quote from Victor Hugo: "So long as there exists in this world that we call civilized, a system whereby men and women, even after they have paid the penalty of the law and expiated their offenses in full, are hounded and persecuted wherever they go-this story will not have been told in vain." In detailed conference notes regarding the screenplay, in the Twentieth Century-Fox Produced Scripts Collection at the UCLA Theater Arts Library, studio head Darryl Zanuck is quoted concerning his views of the story: "The romance between Jean Valjean and Cosette is the most important element of the story and should be developed. His feeling for her when he first takes her is one of attachment. This later develops into devotion and culminates in her being his life blood. By treating it this way, the scene where he finally gives her up will absolutely slaughter audiences. This treatment will strike a human note in the picture and make it something much more important than just a finely conceived melodrama."
       Director Richard Boleslawski and screenwriter W. P. Lipscomb also wrote and directed an earlier 20th Century Pictures historical epic, Clive of India. Sir Cedric Hardwicke was knighted the previous year by King George V for his work on the English stage. According to a review, 200 inmates of the Midnight Mission in Los Angeles were given roles as prisoners in the film for ten dollars a day for a week; Fredric March used nine different makeups; the film cost almost $1,000,000 to make; March and Charles Laughton were each paid $100,000, and Rochelle Hudson was borrowed from Fox. According to news items, the film was shot in thirty-four days, and Zanuck attended the New York premiere. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Cinematography (Gregg Toland), Film Editing (Barbara McLean) and Assistant Director (Eric Stacey). It was fifth on the list of 10 Best Pictures of 1935 in the Film Daily Nation Wide Poll of Critics of America, rated an "Honorable Mention" by the National Board of Review and was fifth on the list of New York Times reviewer Andre Sennwald's ten best films of the first six months of 1935. Other film versions of the novel include a four-part series produced by Vitagraph in 1909; a 1917 Fox Film Corp. production directed by Frank Lloyd and starring William Farnum (see AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1911-20; F1.2961); a 1934 French production starring Harry Baur and Charles Vanel and directed by Raymond Bernard; a 1947 Italian film entitled I Miserablili, starring Gino Cervi and Valentina Cortese and directed by Riccardo Freda; a 1950 Japanese production starring Sessue Hayakawa and directed by Daisuke Ito and Masahiro Makino; a 1952 Twentieth Century-Fox production starring Michael Rennie and Robert Newton and directed by Lewis Milestone; a 1958 French/Italian co-production starring Jean Gabin and Bernard Blier and directed by Jean Paul Le Chanois; a 1978 Norman Rosemont Production made for television starring Richard Jordan and Anthony Perkins and directed by Glenn Jordan; and a 1982 French production starring Lino Ventura and directed by Robert Hossein. A musical based on the novel, with French text by Alain Boubil and Jean-Marc Natel, additional material by James Fenton, and music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, opened in Paris in 1980. The American version of the musical, with lyrics by Boubil, Herbert Kretzmer, Jean-Marc Natel, Trevor Nunn and John Caird, had its premiere in Washington, D.C. on December 20, 1986.

Miscellaneous Notes