I finished watching The prisoner of the Chateau d'If, and did finally feel something (and there were a couple of songs that I actually liked, though I'm not sure why there were any songs in it at all, as this isn't a musical and there were only a handful of random songs at wide intervals throughout). The reason why there seemed to be "an awful lot of plot to be covered in the final episode" turns out to be that it is much longer than the other two, which are about 65 minutes each while this one runs about ninety minutes...

Even so it still seems quite rushed, and I don't see the point of including such characters as Valentine de Villefort and Maximilian Morrel when the subplot involving them has been entirely removed (also an issue, as I recall, with the Robert Donat version!) I was able to follow more of what was going on in this episode thanks mainly to my familiarity with the original plot, although where departures from this took place I was quickly confused. ( Read more... )

( Soviet Musketeers music )

I watched the first episode of the BBC's new drama "This City is Ours", mainly because it *was* the first episode and I often miss the beginnings of things and then have no interest in watching the remainder. But I shan't be bothering with any further episodes, I'm afraid. ( Read more... )


The second half/series of Sous le Signe des Mousquetaires was actually very intriguing as a set-up, because since they had (like the BBC "Musketeers") abandoned canon and were apparently writing their own material using the established characters and setting, pretty much anything was up for grabs and you couldn't tell which way the story was going to come out. ( Read more... )
At least d'Artagnan has finally confessed to lying to his friends about Milady's supposed death (although Athos nobly points out that, having, as I had suspected, guessed the truth some time previously, the fault was as much his in not speaking out earlier; even though he doesn't share the background of Dumas' character, this animated version of Athos is actually one of the few who looks and feels 'right' to me)

It has been warmer, and I sowed a batch of chilli, towel-tomato and Roma tomato seeds. (Although there was ice on the top of the water this morning, so night-time temperatures are still plummeting!)

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As a compromise to embarking upon Twenty Years After, I tried watching the Soviet "Count of Monte Cristo", The Prisoner of the Chateau d'If, which gets mentioned in a similar vein and apparently features Boyarsky as Fernand (I haven't seen any sign of him so far).
And... frankly, if I hadn't already been familiar with the plot I would not have had even the faintest idea what was going on -- the film opens with a scene at the opera which turns into what turned out to be a flashback sequence -- and even with my knowledge of the book and characters I was guessing wildly. I could barely pick out a single word of the unsubtitled dialogue, never mind one word in five :-(

I suspect that the vocabulary and construction of the text for this one was a lot more sophisticated than for something along the lines of "The Treasure of Cardinal Mazarin", while my 'listening age' is still stuck at somewhere around the level of "Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds" :-(

( Enter Boyarsky as Fernand )

The National Film Theatre has just started running a 'Robert Donat season'; the star exhibit is of course Hitchcock's "Thirty-Nine Steps", which I'm afraid I never much cared for (I'm going off Hitchcock in general, after a promising start), but there are other films I'm interested to see, quite apart from the question of Donat himself. On that matter, on current showing, I remain mildly well-disposed but still to be convinced — on the other hand, at this stage in the Buster Keaton season I didn't think much of Keaton either...

Exhibit Number One was "The Private Life of Henry VIII", which of course I remember like everyone else for the famous chicken-bones on the floor scene... and had no idea that Donat was even in it. It was Charles Laughton's film, of course, and remains rightfully so, even though it's a bit creaky. (He over-does the swaggering and laughing at the beginning of the film, and the structure remains inherently episodic, despite an attempt to use Donat's character as a linking device — unfortunately it's not really much of a role. John Loder, in another very minor part, made more of an impression on me...)

Today's exhibit was Donat's sole Hollywood movie, the 1934 "Count of Monte Cristo". I was eager to see this, as I like swashbucklers and it has a good reputation; I also had an ulterior motive! The good news is that this turns out to be, as I hoped it might, my "long-lost Monte Cristo" -- the film I once caught the end of, thanks to the BBC, on holiday twenty years ago, and have never been able to find again since. The bad news is that, alas, the part I missed isn't actually nearly so good as the remainder...

The Reliance Pictures production of "The Count of Monte Cristo" is a queer mixture of success and banality; of studio polish and poverty-row shortcuts; of genuine emotional power and thumping cliché; of briskly-moving adaptation and bizarre moments of staging (revolving witness-box, anyone?) A literal version of Dumas it is not — one would not expect it of any film spectacular made at this period — but many of the changes made are entertaining or effective, and the happy ending provided works at least as well as Dumas' rather unsatisfactory version. The meandering original is reduced to a bare two hours' running time by dint of concise scripting and cutting out most of the sub-plots involving the de Villefort and Morrel families, an attempt which is by and large successful. It works less well at the beginning, where there are simply too many unidentified characters popping up and scheming without any of them really being established properly, particularly as Morrel and de Villefort's father are then pruned from the plot, never to appear again. And de Villefort's downfall as presented here really doesn't work for me: lacking the damning evidence of infanticide, the script doesn't seem to come up with any terribly convincing alternative to turn the tables on the prosecutor. On the other hand, introduced material such as Mercedes' (completely uncanonical) aristocratic snob of a mother and the tableaux in praise of Fernand at which Haydee accuses him works very well.

Ironically — given the Hollywood studio's doubts as to their unknown English import's ability to pull off anything but a fresh-faced lead — Robert Donat shines mainly in the latter half of the picture as the older, embittered and sophisticated Monte Cristo. His guileless Dantes makes little impression, for it could be any generic juvenile lead role — the character as written is not so much naive as uninteresting. Donat fares better where he can give a sense of some hidden depths to the part, and his best features are his strong eyes and brows rather than his cheery grin. As Monte Cristo, however, he is both debonair and dangerous, an intelligent schemer with a dry wit at his enemies' unknowing expense, and he is supported ably by both Douglas Walton as the young Albert and Elissa Landi as Mercedes.

It was Miss Landi's performance with which I was truly impressed here; she ages with utter conviction from the wilful girl to the resolute mother, and lends her scenes opposite Donat the real impact that is lacking from so much of the film. In a plot that has been re-angled to concentrate far more closely on the Edmond/Mercedes relationship, her role is vital, and her character provides most of the emotional engagement of the story, from light-hearted charm to heartbreak (Valentine de Villefort, here paired off with Albert, is a mere cypher in comparison).

The film starts off in outright formulaic guise, from Napoleon's appearance (in full uniform and cocked hat, with his hand duly thrust in his breast like that) to the standard storm-at-sea sequence with water poured across the screen. It continues to suffer from crude musical underlining almost throughout, almost sabotaging for example Donat's scene with the dying Abbé Faria, which he otherwise pulls off with conviction, while certan characters, such as Morrel and the mute Nubian Ali, appear to have been retained despite the loss of the plot elements which actually involved them (possibly as a result of cuts to the script later in filming?) Overall, however, the adaptation does a pretty good job of conveying information quickly and concisely — Albert's entire Italian adventure is dealt with effectively in a matter of a few minutes with none of the essentials lost, and Haydee's brief role introduced without seeming contrivance. It borrows little in practice from Dumas' wordy original save the bare outlines of its plot, and sometimes not even those; but as an initially uninspired Hollywood adaptation it improves considerably as it goes on. Literary fidelity isn't everything, and if it were not let down by certain sections I would have rated it considerably higher; alas, this production remains an odd mixture of the powerful and the pedestrian.