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David Copperfield

Director: George Cukor
Year: 1935
Run-time: 2 hr 9 min

- David Copperfield is not a Dickens novel I'm especially familiar with, but this film does an excellent job giving me the full scope of the book in a breezy two hours.  The snappy pace at which it covers a long period of a man's life is pretty enviable, and though some emotional story beats feel cheapened because of it (especially the death of Copperfield's first wife), it still succeeds as a movie by keeping a high melodramatic pitch throughout.  This is a story that's largely about empathy, and this film has no trouble helping us feel for its characters, even though the situations are not as dire as some of Dickens' other novels, such as Oliver Twist.
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