The best Les Miserables ever?
The reviewer quoted above is right. This is a magisterial film. BBC showed the films over three days one Christmas about 8 or 9 years ago (?) so I was able to tape them and I guard those videos as rare treaures. It is bizarre that the film is not better known - though the fact that it is really a trilogy must have something to do with it.
Harry Baur is an awesome presence - a huge hulking man. Honneger's music is quirky and evocative. The scenes of Paris often look like genuine 19th Century photgraphs magically brought to life. The barricade scenes get the sense of history and immediacy (hand held camera) in perfect balance. Brilliant.
As an aside, it's interesting how all the American films radically filleted the book, highlighting the enmity of Valjean and Javert. They cast a youngish more romantic lead as Valjean (Fredric March, Michael Rennie, Richard Jordan, Liam Neeson - well, he's on the cusp) and a character actor in the Javert Role (Charles Laughton, Robert Newton, Anthony Perkins, Geoffrey Rush). The French, however, took a quite differnt approach. Perhaps from reverence, they embraced the epic nature of the novel, and they also made Valjean himself an essentially big "character" part (Harry Baur, Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura) with a somewhat less prominent Javert (Charles Vanel, Bernard Blier, Michel Bouquet). The international 2000 TV mini-series (I've not seen it) looks like a bit of a cross-breed, with Gerard Depardieu (the Jean Gabin de nos jours), against John Malkovich (a strong character actor).