At 14:41 11/08/2005, you wrote:
Dear Fran,
Thanks for this wonderfull news. I did watch this movie on BBC some
years back, but never recorded it. It was as usual from BBC very
elegantly costumes and i loved it.
This reminds me also of another play i once watched from BBC way
back. It was a play wich took place in 1680ies and the costumes were
gorgeous, dont remember the name of the author nor the name of the
play, but it really deserved to be on DVD two. Especially
interresting because there was a dressing scene, where the lady was
very tightly laced in her stays.
Also i think it is so unfair that you english speaking people cant
see the tv series they made of the marriage of Gustav III. It was so
wonderfull and well played. They had hired english costumes and
there were many many to die for costumes in it. About the story is
true i dont know, must admit that swedish history is worse than my
english history. Point of the story wich is a 3 hour play is that
the king dont know how to act when he is supposed to make the poor
danish princess pregnant. ( could be truth, i could imagine) He has
to force one of his closest servants into the bedchamber and help him!
Remember the king was only 18 and he was broaght up by politicians
and the princess was only 16 years old (horrors) Sometimes we cant
imagine how horrifying and terrible it must have ben to be a monarch.
There's a new DVD (though of a 1991 film) of a four-part BBC
production of "Clarissa," from the 18th-century novel by Samuel
Richardson. Lovelace, a nobleman and dedicated rake, obsessively
pursues Clarissa, a bourgeois paragon of moral virtue and therefore
the ultimate challenge. Her greedy, scheming, vindictive brother
and sister combine to urge their parents and wealthy uncle to force
Clarissa into marriage with a rich, ugly airhead. For the first
time in her life Clarissa rebels and eventually has to seek
Lovelace's protection. He tries one elaborate scheme after another
to actually get her into bed. And finally . . .
Well, watch it!
Taut, menacing, sensual (with even incestuous overtones in
Clarissa's siblings' relationship), this film is almost as good as
"Dangerous Liasions." And probably a lot better than the novel,
which is 1536 pages in the Penguin edition and reputed to be one of
the longest novels in the English language, perhaps _the_
longest. I haven't read it and I'm not going to, as I gather it
gets quite tiresome.
But the film, with the action left in and much of the moralizing
stripped out, is another story.
I saw this when first out and was disappointed in the costumes. No
chemises!!! Corsets on bare skin. Even Hogarth's prostitutes wore
chemises. No-one professing to be a lady, or even of the class of
Clarissa, would have gone without a corset. I don't remember Sean
Bean at all, and I am a huge fan. So you can tell what sort of an
impression it made on me.
Suzi
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