It begins like another one of Lean’s expressionist Dickens adaptations, but is quickly exposed as a witty social comedy, one of Lean’s few forays into the genre. The legendary Charles Laughton’s performance as the boozing blowhard of the title is rightly famous, but the film’s real appeal is in the way it delivers comical twists on the expected: the marriage of convenience grows into real love, the tyrant gets one-upped but then reincorporated into a new family structure, and the powerful woman asserts her strength not by simply controlling those around her, but by invigorating them to self-improvement without ever losing her own identity. It makes everything old seem brilliantly and often hilariously new. (DVD)