Little Dorrit is a 1987 film adaptation of the 1857 novel Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. The music by Giuseppe Verdi was arranged by Michael Sanvoisin.
The film stars Derek Jacobi as Arthur Clennam, Alec Guinness as William Dorrit, and Sarah Pickering in the title role. A huge cast of seasoned British and Irish stage and film actors was assembled to play the dozens of roles, including Simon Dormandy, Joan Greenwood, Roshan Seth, Miriam Margolyes, Cyril Cusack and Max Wall. Pickering, in contrast, had never acted on screen; she was cast after writing to the production team claiming to 'be' Little Dorrit. It remains her only screen acting role.
Little Dorrit lasts nearly six hours and was released in two parts, of approximately three hours each. The second film, titled Little Dorrit's Story, took many of the same events and presented them through the eyes of the heroine. Together they represented overlapping chronicles.
Sands Films, the production company that made the film, is run by Christine Edzard, the screenwriter and director, and her husband Richard B. Goodwin.
Little Dorrit was listed in the BFI's "ten great British films directed by women" in 2014.
Plot
After returning to London after several years abroad, Arthur Clennam becomes involved in the problems of his mother's seamstress and those of her father in the Marshalsea debtors' prison.
Production
This was the first screen adaptation of one of Dickens's longest and most complex books for over 50 years and featured three hundred of Britain's best character actors.
The film has 242 speaking roles and was made almost by hand at Edzard's and her husband producer Richard Goodwin's studio, Sands Films in London's docklands, where they have also made Stories from a Flying Trunk (1979), The Nightingale (1981), Biddy (1983), The Fool (1990), As You Like It (1991), Amahl and the Night Visitors (1996), The IMAX Nutcracker (1997), The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream (2001) and The Good Soldier Schwejk (2018).
Besides making films, the couple manufactured dolls houses and the sets that were built on site, where the hundreds of costumes were also sewn, were made using miniature models of houses combined with special effects to create the Victorian London background.
BFI's Screenonline described the filmmaking in detail: