DARK PASSAGE (Delmer Daves, 1947)

The 1940s was Hollywood’s principal decade of noirs. One of the finest examples is Dark Passage, a dark descent into questions of identity and of innocence or guilt.

The story here, from a David Goodis novel, fascinates. Wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder, a San Quentin escapee, Vincent Parry, in the dead of night undergoes plastic surgery; the new identity this provides allows him to sleuth about in an effort to restore to his former identity a good name. (Tacitly motivating many fictional detectives is the need to determine the identity of the perpetrator of a specific crime in order to absolve themselves, temporarily, of a general feeling of guilt owing to their sense of complicity in humanity’s “dark side”—Original Sin, as it were.) In his on-the-lam adventure, Parry is offered many a “helping hand”—for instance, by the cab driver who, recognizing him and gleaning his innocence, arranges for the operation, the plastic surgery, free of charge; but a mocking hand of fate at every turn obstructs Parry’s quest for exoneration by striking down one soul after another who might help reveal the actual killer’s identity. Parry—“Alan” now—ends up, as a result, hunted by the police for a second murder that he didn’t commit—the accidental death, in fact, of the last person who might have proven him innocent of the first murder. Indeed, the very process of Parry’s attempt to prove this innocence has led to a number of other deaths, including (self-defensively) one by his own hand. In Alan, then, the idea of Vincent’s innocence has been muddied; far from San Francisco, in Peru, awaiting his girlfriend’s arrival, Vincent/Alan must therefore remain flypapered by guilt regardless of his claims of innocence.

Doubtless the film’s main reference point is the Second World War only recently ended. Like Parry “innocent,” the United States, along with the other Allies, had been attempting to “prove” Axis guilt by defeating Germany and Japan. However, the experience of war leaves no participant unmarked. War, however righteously entered into and waged, corrupts; it’s the reflection of a fallen world. With a “cold war” refreshing the point, America thus had to deal with one of its signature periodic “losses of innocence.”

Delmer Daves wrote and directed Dark Passage, and he did both splendidly. The film’s first part employs a subjective camera perspective; we see everything through Parry’s eyes. The year before, Robert Montgomery used the exact same technique in another work of crime detection, Lady in the Lake; but there it’s all show, an empty if dazzling style inviting conversation. Daves, on the other hand, uses the device expressively, creating a brooding, powerful sense of the hunted man’s vulnerability, his constant exposure to potential discovery and to physical danger. Also, Daves draws on the devices—deep shadows, phantasmagoric distortions, multiple images—from such silent German films as Karl Grune’s brilliant The Street (1921) and Ernö Metzner’s Uberfall (1929) to evoke a fractured, ambiguous and tormented world; unmistakably, a sunlit streetcar ride recalls the transplanted German expressionism of Friedrich W. Murnau’s American Sunrise (1927). Overall, though, the film that Dark Passage most resembles is Viennese-born Edgar G. Ulmer’s American Detour (1945), a noir whose riveting sense of fatalism discloses the imprint on Ulmer of the historical lot of the Jewish people, including its most recent chapter of woe, the Holocaust. (Ulmer made films in Yiddish in the late 1930s, including the haunting The Light Ahead, 1939.) Daves’s film bears the same preoccupation with chance and fortune, and a similar sense of a dogging shadow. For all its borrowings, though, Dark Passage holds together as something distinct, alert—and it in turn helped define another film; for the same repressed tenor, the same engrossing fateful monotony would reappear in France twelve years hence, in a masked assault on reactionaryism, Georges Franju’s remarkable Eyes Without a Face (1959)—a title that Daves might have used for his film.

The acting is first-rate. Giving his tricky lead role an absorbing grandeur (as Pierre Brasseur would his, in the Franju film), Humphrey Bogart is excellent. (Here is a key to understanding the role: Vincent never did love his wife; therefore, his guilt over her death helps determine his inability to prove his innocence.) In Bogart’s hands, the convicted wife-killer on the run who is desperate to prove himself innocent emerges as a full and driven character. (This is something that Harrison Ford was unable to achieve in Andrew Davis’s worthless The Fugitive, 1993, as much a descendent of Dark Passage as of the TV series based on the Sam Shepherd case.) Moreover, warmer and more alluring than anywhere else, Bogart’s young, beautiful spouse, Lauren Bacall, is Irene Jansen, the girl who so believes in Parry’s innocence that she hides him from the police. (Irene’s father, who died in prison, also had been convicted of wife-murder—wrongly, his daughter believes; but, slyly, Daves doesn’t let the matter rest.) And best of all—brilliant, in fact—is Agnes Moorehead as Madge, Irene’s friend and, at one time, perhaps Parry’s mistress. Moorehead’s portrait of jealousy accumulates into one of ferocious sexual greed. Madge is a nasty person; that much is certain. But Moorehead’s delicately nuanced acting, supported by the ambiguous context that the film provides, leaves one wondering whether Madge is really guilty of all that in her final moment she confesses to or is simply saying what she thinks might save her life.

Even more than Bogart’s, Moorehead’s is the character one keeps coming back to.

I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE (Howard Hawks, 1949)

Among the loveliest and most oddly moving American film comedies, I Was a Male War Bride blends genres seamlessly. This generic crossbreeding wasn’t unusual in the late forties and early fifties: Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) crossbred the “woman’s picture” with film noir; It Happens Every Spring (Lloyd Bacon, 1949), the sports film with fantasy; High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), the western with the social “message movie.” I Was a Male War Bride’s two genres were screwball comedy, in which sexual antagonism is traditionally rife, and the postwar semi-documentary, which often (though not here) involved some sort of criminal investigation. The latter genre, inspired by wartime newsreels and, perhaps, Italian neorealism, was in particular identified with the studio 20th Century-Fox, and with either producer Louis De Rochement (Boomerang!, Elia Kazan, 1947), director Henry Hathaway (Kiss of Death, 1947; Call Northside 777, 1948), or both (The House on 92nd Street, 1945, which launched the genre). (De Rochemont had produced and directed March of Time newsreel features during the war.) These films were generally based on actual people and actual events. In 1948 William A. Wellman made a related film, The Iron Curtain, which Sol C. Siegel produced. That same year, documentary on-location shots of a bombed-out Berlin were woven into Billy Wilder’s satirical A Foreign Affair—perhaps Wilder’s most brilliant comedy, this from Paramount. The following year Siegel produced I Was a Male War Bride, which was even more extensively shot in postwar Germany. It was based on a story by Henri Rochard, who is the main character, depicting a part of his own life story, much as The Iron Curtain had come from spy Igor Gouzenko’s actual experiences, which he sold to the movies as an original story. I Was a Male War Bride (unlike The Iron Curtain) was a hit with the public and a favorite of its executive producer, and the head of 20th Century-Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck.

The director is Howard Hawks, whose reputation is primarily as a genre director. Hawks made war and combat films (The Dawn Patrol, 1930; The Road to Glory, 1936; Air Force, 1943) and westerns (Red River, 1948; Rio Bravo, 1959; El Dorado, 1967); he made the best U.S. gangster film of the sound era (Scarface, 1932) and, although uncredited except as its producer, perhaps the best U.S. science-fiction film (The Thing from Another World, 1951). Another rich bounty of Hawks’s legacy is his screwball comedies: Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), Monkey Business (1952). Hawks was nominated for a competitive Oscar only for his direction of Sergeant York (1941),* but the American motion-picture academy voted him a career Oscar in 1975.

Captain Rochard, of the French Army, and Lieutenant Catherine Gates, of the American, have teamed up for successful missions; one of these retrieved French art treasures that the Nazis had confiscated. Now they embark on Rochard’s final mission, the unclear nature of which is correlative to their own dizzyingly unclear personal relationship. Each apparently delights in making the other miserable, but only Gates, romantically swifter, is conscious of the delight; beneath a surface of bickering, the two are in love with each other. During this last mission of theirs, both discover this and wade through a dispiriting maze of bureaucratic U.S. Army red tape in order to marry and set off for America, their wedding night, at the mercy of rules and regulations pertaining to lodging, in a constant state of postponement. In order to set sail for the United States, Rochard must be categorized as Gates’s “alien bride,” for which role, to be allowed onboard the ship, Rochard must feign being a woman. They lock themselves into a cabin; the Statue of Liberty—France’s gift to America—eventually appears through the port-hole: visual proof, after a series of humiliations, that Rochard’s sense of manhood has been restored and that the Rochards’ marriage has been consummated.

The outstanding script is by Charles Lederer, Leonard Spigelgass and Hagar Wilde; the gray cinematography that so beautifully adds to the film’s immense realism is by Norbert Brodine and Osmond Borradaile. Everything about the film is steeped in the experience of postwar Europe, in which context the Rochard-Gates union deeply affects us as a blossom growing from the rubble of war. I Was a Male War Bride’s comedy of coitus interruptus would remain cinema’s funniest until Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1971), and the conclusive image remains the only instance in cinema when the appearance of Lady Liberty reliably reduces me to tears. All that this couple has been put through in order to be together and have a life together coalesces into one of the most forceful wallops to the heart that any light film has ever delivered, and it predicts the difficulties ahead for their marriage, given especially Rochard’s cultural dislocation. The Rochards’ ordeal also reflects on the high degree of order that may be needed to reclaim Europe from the chaos that fascism and the war had embroiled it in.

For all its realism, this is a terrifically funny film, loaded with visual gags and even slapstick, as when, mounted on a railroad-crossing gate en route to retrieving Gates’s dropped lipstick, Rochard suddenly rises with the raising of the gate as a train rushes through, making every male viewer wince at the pain that Rochard is sustaining to his crotch. The skyward moment takes up a long shot, with the train in between the viewer and Rochard so that the event appears in flickering patches of space. Throughout, Hawks draws on various techniques such as this choice of camera placement to subordinate a personal or subjective occurrence to the realism of the social or unfolding historical environment. Hawks knows his business—and his Jacques Tati, to whose Jour de fête (1947) he pays homage in this instance and at least one other.

Cary Grant is wonderful as Rochard, the absence of a French accent a poignant reminder throughout of the vantage of Rochard’s reminiscence and of his Americanization. Grant makes Rochard’s frustrations and humiliations, all rendered low-keyed (he doesn’t emit his famous whinny here), exactingly realistic. Ann Sheridan is perhaps even better as Gates. The great dramatic actress of Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942) and Come Next Spring (R.G. Springsteen, 1955) proves herself here one of cinema’s great comediennes.** For one thing, she helps us believe that the couple are really in love. One of the several flaws of Bringing Up Baby is that Katharine Hepburn’s character seems to exhaust Grant’s character, their final clinch more a product of this hounding of hers and his exhaustion than of any real feeling between them. Moreover, Sheridan is as vibrantly warm as Hepburn is archly cold; Gates doesn’t strike us as a comedy contrivance but as a complex, down-to-earth woman with a great sense of humor, all of which befits the fact that she is based on an actual person. Hepburn, of course, is funnier in Bringing Up Baby; as Gates, though, Sheridan is more human and humane. In her mid-thirties, she is also, still, a sexual knockout—a help since, however handsome he may be, Grant is by contrast fastidious and sexually reticent. Grant needs Sheridan, much as Henri needs Catherine, for his completion. She’s still got that oomph.

And we have our memories of (in 1939’s Dodge City) the single most beautiful American woman ever to appear in films, who left our earth too soon, at age 52.

* The winner, John Ford for one of his weakest films, How Green Was My Valley, which also won as best picture, personally apologized to Hawks. For us, now, the triumphs of 1941 aren’t either the Hawks or the Ford film but Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, both nominated as best picture but winning only a single Oscar between them.

** Two other grand Sheridan performances are in Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938) and Take Me to Town (Douglas Sirk, 1953). Although she is out-acted by Jimmy Durante, Bette Davis and Monty Woolley, Sheridan’s dead-on parody of Joan Crawford in The Man Who Came to Dinner (William Keighley, 1941) is screamingly funny. Poor Joan!

MEMENTO (Christopher Nolan, 2000)

Like his later, demented Insomnia (2002), Christopher Nolan’s Memento is so odious and dreadful that one must wonder what spiritual or intellectual deficiencies would account for someone’s finding the film the least bit attractive. How often can one say this about a film?: There isn’t a single interesting shot in Memento. Something else: it’s silly.

It’s a trick-film, following, one year later, in the thudding footsteps of the single silliest, most vilely manipulative film I have seen, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999). Like that inadvertent farce, which might be subtitled Dead Man Talking, Memento conjures grim atmospherics, abetted by the lead character’s somnabulistic voiceover, much of it (though not the dialogue itself) reminiscent of Edgar G. Ulmer’s marvelously closed-circular and fatalistic Detour (1945). Pity Nolan doesn’t have an ounce of originality or creativity—or heart. Memento draws upon nothing real. It’s simply a clever stylistic exercise. Like other trick-films (round up The Usual Suspects), it’s a film without a soul.

One night, someone breaks into a man’s residence and rapes and kills his wife on the bathroom floor while he is asleep. As with Ulmer, Fritz Lang must be hovering, because the man, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce, whose smirking performance warrants a few hours in a public stockade), is hell-bent on revenge. This will be hard to come by, though, for, once roused from bed by noise that fateful night, Lenny is left a little brain-damaged from the ensuing scuffle with his wife’s killer. In particular, he has lost his short-term memory, hence his capacity to make new memories. Thus he memorializes his mission before the fact, and its progress as it unfolds, through a series of captioned photographs and self-messages, many of the latter in the form of tattoos covering his arms and chest. (Warning: Between this and the fact that one of the film’s other characters, a diabetic, is constantly being given insulin injections, Memento holds the all-time record for needles in a film.) Unfortunately, a sufficient number of his notes and reminders are ambiguous, and some even reflect Lenny’s tendency to lie to himself; and on top of all that, given his memory problem, one person after another manipulates poor Lenny, leading him astray. The upshot is that Lenny ends up killing persons other than his wife’s killer. Indeed, the possibility is eventually revealed that Lenny himself accidentally killed his own wife after she in fact survived the rapist’s assault. The fuel of Lenny’s mission, then, may have been guilt all along—but guilt he doesn’t recall because he doesn’t recall what he himself may have done. Lenny, who has papered over his past with a script to his liking that he has memorized by rote, at the last muses: “Don’t we all need mirrors to remember who we are?”

This isn’t a plot; it’s a crackp[l]ot, and it accounts for only a portion of the film’s exasperating cleverness. For, to induce in the viewer something akin to Lenny’s memory deficiency, the film unfolds backwards, beginning with Lenny’s shooting to death someone at point-blank range. (The film is endlessly violent.) Let me be more precise. The narrative doesn’t unfold perfectly backwards; rather, it proceeds by cranked back intervals of time—a method calculated to deliver a new surprise at every crank. Oh, the one woman who seems to be nice and seems to be helping you, Lenny, who touched your heart after her boyfriend beat her up? It turns out that you are the one who split her lip, and now she is only pretending to help you because you smacked her and dispatched her boyfriend. There’s no end to the cynicism and meanness Nolan can whip up on a dime through his backward narrative.

To clarify or complicate matters (take your pick), the film alternates between restrained color and black and white. The passages in color are the ones moving backwards in time, and they are subjective, from Lenny’s point-of-view. The black-and-white passages, on the other hand, are flashbacks that move forward in time. These are objective. At the end, the two modes converge.

It’s a puzzle that we are given here then. As such, apparently the film is a great conversation-piece for its pretentious adherents.

Carrie-Anne Moss plays Natalie, the (un)helpful bartender who is really a drug dealer’s moll (I think; my short-term memory is fading). She is awful.

Many have marveled at the cleverness of Nolan’s script, which is derived from a story by his brother, Jonathan. It won the best screenplay prize from critics’ groups in London, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. Memento also garnered Independent Spirit Awards as best film and for Nolan’s screenwriting and direction.

CITIZEN KANE (Orson Welles, 1941)

The lives of famous persons are each a kind of living document, but one seen through a glass darkly—in part, the smokescreen of fictions that they themselves have invented and promulgated. They are, if you will, the authors of their own documentaries. With their passing, another document encapsulating their lives comes into play: the newspaper obituary—a document limited to the major known (or accepted) facts about individuals. This skeletal biography was written by others in advance of their death; it was filed in anticipation of their death. There you have it: say, the life of a famous former newspaper magnate fittingly poised to be included in the very newspaper he once owned. Its accuracy or certainty is not entirely unimpeachable. Questions might remain: Did he really do that? Why, if he did, did he do that? Nevertheless, this document, a reduction of the “document” of the man’s life as he lived and half-created it, is poised to translate into yet another document, for this printed “life story” is apt to become, or contribute to, the man’s extended epitaph. Now consider this: the man himself inadvertently throws a monkey wrench into all this planning by others by uttering something on his deathbed that casts doubt on the adequacy of his planned obituary. Say it is a single word: “Rosebud.” He says this and expires. Nothing in what has already been written can account for what Rosebud is or was to this man, or what it represented to him. Yet whatever it is was obviously important to him; it expressed his dying, possibly summary, thought. The word then becomes a kind of challenge to newspaper detectives—reporters eager to investigate in order to unlock the secrets of the man’s life.

This is the premise of Citizen Kane, which the greatest American filmmaker of all time, Orson Welles, directed from a script by himself and Herman J. Mankiewicz, Joseph L.’s alcoholic older brother. It is a film that begins with a man’s death and proceeds, through investigative interviews by a dedicated reporter, to deconstruct the man’s life. At least the reporter tries to do this; at least the film goes through the motions of attempting to do this. If you (I believe, incorrectly) believe that the dying man held in his heart and mind a childhood sled at the point of his ultimate departure, you also (I believe, foolishly) believe that you, the viewer, succeed where the reporter himself fails. You may have then watched Citizen Kane without grasping it.

Welles starred in and directed his first film, “Hearts of Age,” in 1934, when he was 19. This film is included in at least two VHS anthologies of shorts; I know because I own copies of both. (I haven’t seen another short film, “Too Much Johnson,” which Welles co-directed.) Welles’s third film, Citizen Kane, was his first feature and his first studio film. For some reason, there exists the error in some minds that Citizen Kane was Welles’s first film—a misstatement of fact most often used to exalt Kane to a superhuman level along the lines of this rhetorical question: How could anyone’s first attempt at filmmaking be this amazingly brilliant? At least one reviewer, Pauline Kael, however, used the faulty premise, and more, in her self-serving attempt to besmirch Welles’s reputation by discounting the idea that the film was even primarily his. The film was Welles’s all right, but it didn’t come out of the maidenly blue. Welles’s experience as filmmaker preceded his experience as stage and radio director.

Of course, it’s pretty amazing that Citizen Kane was anybody’s third film, or twentieth, or fiftieth film.

Citizen Kane is a nearly intolerably moving piece of work. It’s a titanic, dark, dense canvas of American sociology, history and politics that sums up as waste the crammed life of a newspaper magnate (suggestive of William Randolph Hearst) who, disconnected from family and past, “buys things.” Lots of things: sculptures, paintings, animals, bric-a-brac. With its infinite reflexivity, the hall of mirrors in the elderly Kane’s vast and mostly empty mansion suggests his attempt to “extend” time and space, to defy mortality. This defiance, and the anxiety it implies, reveal the immense solitude that, since youth, following the withdrawal of familial care and love, Kane has been driven to fill with material things—“junk”—and with people whom he has also treated as though they were his possessions.

But life exhausts even these illusionary “extensions” of time and space; like the rest of us, Kane reaches a last deadline. It is here—at Kane’s end—that the film begins, piecing together Kane’s history as if it were a puzzle. Except for us, no one is present to hear “Rosebud,” Kane’s dying utterance, which becomes the springboard for enquiry. Those who cite this as a mistake, an oversight, miss the point, for this “inconsistency” signals the absurdity of any attempt to “solve” the mystery of a human life. What is “Rosebud”? At the last, one of the countless possessions of Kane’s that is routinely shoved into an insatiable furnace is the childhood sled bearing that name and image. Rather than the sled, though, “Rosebud” probably suggests the accumulation of thought, feeling and memory that Kane attached to this discarded object. Ultimately, perhaps, “Rosebud” signifies loss, the motive (Welles may believe) of all human life, which Kane’s egotism has monstrously enlarged into his own peculiar province, his Xanadu. Kane’s losses—count them: in boyhood, a mother’s care; all hope of political office; a business empire; two wives, and a son, his only child; life itself. Someone whom the reporter interviews notes that Kane was a man who lost almost everything.

Still, the word “Rosebud” explains nothing. At the end of the film “Rosebud” still is what it has always been—not the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, but an elusive clue in a mystery too vast to admit solution. Thus the film is self-critical, its zigzagging time structure at every point undercutting the straight line of inquiry that the reporter’s investigation tries to impose. Welles’s film isn’t a search for the meaning of “Rosebud”; it’s about the search for the meaning of “Rosebud.”

Throughout, Welles’s filmmaking is marvelous. With its see-through eye cavity, Kane’s pet cockatoo—disingenuously, Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that this was a lab error—embodies the formal resourcefulness that is the film’s hallmark while also encapsulating a major theme: the confusion with illusion that defines (and undefines) reality. No other American film so dazzles as Citizen Kane does, as in the vast visual pun, at the close, of a man’s whole life going up in smoke, preceded by a sweeping crane shot surveying Kane’s accumulated stuff—an apotheosis of American culture’s material obsessiveness. Wedded to specifics of modern America, Citizen Kane nevertheless is like an ancient echo. Towering, it haunts and astounds.

Black-and-white cinematographer Gregg Toland is Welles’s chief collaborator here, Bernard Herrmann’s music is essential, and the acting by Welles as Kane and George Coulouris as his nemesis, Thatcher, the banker whose ward Kane the boy becomes, is superb. Alas, although adequate at earlier stages as Kane’s friend and Jiminy Cricket, Joseph Cotten fails to convince in old-man makeup. However, all three of the film’s actresses are wonderful: Ruth Warrick as his high-positioned wife, Dorothy Comingore as the mistress who becomes his second wife, and Agnes Moorehead as his determined, self-sacrificing mother.

Routinely, Citizen Kane tops polls of cinéastes listing the greatest films of all time. Is it, then, the best film ever made? In fact, it may not even be Welles’s best film. Welles himself thought that his 1962 French-Italian-West German film of Franz Kafka’s The Trial was his greatest work, and I agree. But one does change one’s mind as to these rankings. (At least I do. Currently my choice of the greatest film I have seen is Yasujiro Ozu’s 1951 Early Summer.) Regardless, Citizen Kane may be the most fascinating film ever made about the interplay between fiction and documentary, between “reality” and a more accurate reality, and the film’s numerous inserts of newspaper front pages, and its nearly opening film-within-the-film, a documentary about the fictitious Kane that resembles a March of Time piece, deliciously rips, and riffs, across a keyboard encompassing “fictional” and “documentary” notes of expression. The tones combine to sound discordantly and be complex—a kind of Rite of Winter rather than of Spring, as correlative to the windy, winding echo that haunts Charles Foster Kane’s empty yet suffocating domain. Citizen Kane is the King Lear of films—ancient; Renaissance; modern; postmodern.

Presciently, the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review both named it the best film of 1941, and Mankiewicz and Welles won Oscars for the script.

NAYAGAN (Mani Ratnam, 1987)

“Are you a good man or a bad man?” the little boy asks his imprisoned grandfather, an underworld Indian don. The old man, who has spent a lifetime helping others and righting social wrongs, and also killing, answers, “I don’t know.”
     Nor do I, in a film that has given me a wrenching moral workout, and one of the most brilliant gangster films I have seen, Mani Ratnam’s 1987 Nayagan, which recently made Time’s list of the 100 greatest films of all time.
     It is often compared to The Godfather, I suppose because it’s a gangster chronicle covering many years and because its leading figure, based on an actual person, dearly loves his family—his wife, his son, his daughter, his closest associates. But Nayagan is a good film. Its frames aren’t studied, like those of Coppola’s film; violence in Ratnam’s film is horrific, not titillating, coldly manipulative of our enjoyment of mayhem, as is the case with Coppola’s. Whereas The Godfather is a commercial advertisement for the Mob, Nayagan is a humane piece of work.
     It is also lushly gorgeous, lyrically lovely in many passages, and spiritedly punctuated by songs and street dances. It’s a people’s film, at times an outright musical, that writer-director Ratnam brings in inexorably to a solemn finish.
     It is absorbing for all of its 2½ hours and sometimes riveting, but be forewarned: there is a Dickensian contrivance/surprise revelation that will please some and mess with others.