Roxie Theater: Les Misérables

PRESENTED IN THREE PARTS: A Storm in a Skull • The Thénardiers • Liberty, Sweet Liberty
Les Misérables (1934)

5:30 PM The novel, the film, the musical, the video game, the cookware set: everyone knows at a little something about LES MISÉRABLES, even if no one has seen every adaptation of Victor Hugo’s sprawling tale of the labors of Jean Valjean in nineteenth-century France. Director Raymond Bernard mixes the expressionism of silent film with the tilted angles of film noir, making his 1934 version of the “ur-noir novel” into a triumphant distillation of the new form of dark cinema that emerged in France in that decade.

The great homely “actors’ actor” Harry Baur is Valjean, carrying the three-part, four-hour epic on his shoulders, pursued by the unshakable Javert (Charles Vanel), and raising his stepdaughter even as he is continually forced to remain on the run.

The superb photography is by Jules Kruger, one of the key collaborators with Abel Gance on his 1927 silent masterpieces NAPOLEON. You will see the connective tissue between the two works when you surrender yourself to the rarest of all screenings in the FRENCH series—a once-in-a-lifetime experience! (1934, dir. Raymond Bernard, 287m). *There will be two intermissions.