Les Miserables

This is the sixth French version of Victor Hugo's classic novel and the weakest. The two best French versions are director Henri Fescourt's 1927 silent version (which runs more than seven hours) and Raymond Bernard's 1936 version (six hours and fifteen minutes). This was a French film and TV coproduction (six 52-minute episodes for television) at a cost of $10,000,000. The film is heavy-handed, and because so much of the book has been squeezed in, many scenes aren't given enough time to develop. This makes the film seem forced and many sequences melodramatic.