Unrivaled among silent-film adaptations of Charles Dickens novels are the four epic Danish features for Nordisk Films by its leading director, A.W. Sandberg: Our Mutual Friend (1921), Great Expectations (1922), David Copperfield (1922), and Little Dorrit (1923). The most visually spectacular is Our Mutual Friend, from Dickens’s last completed novel (1864-65), combining a comic satire about greed with a dark mystery that opens as a corpse floats in the Thames. Shot in 1918—the delayed release apparently due to disputes between Sandberg and Nordisk over the film’s ambition and length—its two parts survive only with significant missing footage in the second half, but it still runs almost two-and-a-half hours. Available for the first time with English subtitles that draw on Dickens’s phrasing and with new text screens to fill in missing story information, the forgotten film proves to be one of the great silent literary adaptations.
