Nicholas Nickleby

Following within a year of the release of David Lean's popular and highly regarded GREAT EXPECTATIONS, it was inevitable that this adaptation of a Dickens novel would be compared to the earlier effort. It was, and it came up lacking. Bond is the young man who toils in a boys' school in Yorkshire where he has been apprenticed by his thoroughly reprehensible uncle, played by Hardwicke. Conditions at the school are appalling, and Bond befriends one of the students, Aubrey Woods, who has been the victim of much of the brutality at the school. They escape, join a traveling theatrical troupe, and enjoy a series of adventures, with Bond meeting and falling in love with Ji...