Raymond Bernard - Les Misérables (1934) DVDRip

Jean Valjean leaves jail, having served a 19-year sentence for stealing a loaf of bread, a hard and bitter man. The kindness of a bishop sets him on a new course, however, and eight years later he has become Monsieur Madeleine, a respected mayor and industrialist. His past suddenly catches up with him when he is recognised as the former convict and is nearly arrested for breaking parole by Inspector Javert.




Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, regarded by many as the most important literary work from France, has provided the source for numerous film, television and theatrical adaptations. Arguably the greatest, most ambitious of these was Raymond Bernard 1934 film, a monumental work which conveys not just the scale of Hugo’s epic novel, but also its intimacy and unfaltering humanity.




That Bernard was influenced by German expressionism is evident not just in the stark, angular studio sets, but also in the widespread use of shadow and oblique camera angles to add a sense of disorientating, inhuman menace (techniques later adopted by film noir directors). In terms of technical sophistication and production values, this film was way ahead of its time and it still feels surprisingly modern, particularly the last third of the film, which used extensive location filming to great effect.




The original version of this film ran to just over five hours, although it was most widely distributed in various cut-down versions. Currently, the film is available in a near-complete form (running to around four and half hours) and a cruelly truncated, two and half hour version.



This film boasts probably the best cast list of any film adaptation of Hugo’s novel, with some of the biggest names in French cinema in the early 1930s. Harry Baur is the definitive Jean Valjean – not only does he have the physical presence, dominating any scene he appears in, but he conveys with extraordinary subtlety the inner turmoil of a man who has his faith in humanity tested time and again. There’s a touching vulnerability to this Valjean, which hits home in the film’s most poignant sequence at the very end of the film. It is not hard to see why some consider Harry Baur to be one of the greatest actors of all time.



It was Bernard who proposed adapting Hugo’s hefty book into three parts —“Une tempête sous le crane” (“Tempest in a Skull”), “Les Thénardier” (“The Thénardiers”), and “Liberté, liberté chérie” (“Liberty, Sweet Liberty”)— to be screened as separate feature-length films, thus allowing him to include as much of the original narrative, characters, and details as possible.

High quality rips with meGUI from the extraordinary Eclipse Collection 2-DVD9-set uploaded by CerealRipper here at Avax.

Individual rips -and downloads- for the three parts:
Part1 (Tempest in a Skull) 1.36 GB - Runtime: 110 min
Part2 (The Thénardiers) 0.99 GB - Runtime: 85 min
Part3 (Liberty, Sweet Liberty) 0.99 GB - Runtime: 86 min

Total Size 3.35 GB
Total Duration 281 min

Script: André Lang and Raymond Bernard
Music: Arthur Honegger
Cinematography: Jules Kruger and René Ribault
Cast: Harry Baur, Charles Vanel, Henry Krauss, Gaby Triquet, Josselyne Gaël, Jean Servais, Charles Dullin, Marguerite Moreno, Orane Demazis, Émile Genevois