David Copperfield – The Movie

This David Copperfield film from BBC is easily one of my favorite made-for-tv movies. We just watched it last week and I was very pleased with the artistic ability of the director and the cast to portray the story so vividly and faultlessly. For such a long film, which took three nights to watch, they were able to keep my usually short attention span all the way through David’s life.

The best fun was spotting all these actors who are now quite famous. It is very curious to note that this was Daniel Radcliffe’s (of Harry Potter fame) first movie, and just so happened to also star Maggie Smith (later Minerva McGonagal) and Imelda Staunton (later Delores Umbridge), all of which ended up on the Potter films. The story goes that when Chris Columbus was casting the role for Harry, they kept bringing him all these boys that didn’t fit. Irritated, he took the casting director to this very David Copperfield movie, pointed to the boy on the screen, and said that’s the boy he wanted to play Harry. The rest is history.

They all do terrific and it got to be quite laughable in a dark way all the odd deaths everyone’s relatives had come down with. The best part is the first half with the young David, though it holds well all the way to the end as a masterpiece of storytelling on screen.