pekinman I spent the month of July reading Anthony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time'; books that are uneven in quality but afford a long, fascinating read resulting in a strange poignance akin to but also quite different from Evelyn Waugh's war trilogy 'Sword of Honor'. Powell also seemed determined to out-Proust Proust but fails in that regard as Proust was a much better writer. Some have thought this to be Powell's version of Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited'. I can see no correlation at all beyond, perhaps, the early scenes at Oxford and the drunken character of Charles Stringham who is vaguely reminiscent of Sebastian Flyte in Waugh's famous book.I have reached a point where I am no longer simply grateful for someone taking a stab at filming great or near-great literature. This adaptation of Powell's massive epic is so poorly done that I can find no mitigation for it having been attempted at all. I didn't expect much, even from a longish mini-series, but these books deserved detailed treatment, however many episodes it might have entailed. But the producer, Alvin Rakoff, either didn't have a clue as to the spirit of this story or was sorely curtailed in his budget. Given the often inept casting (something for which the producer is responsible) and the slipshod editing and hacking about of both the story line and the excision of many characters, I suspect the former case to be true. Mr Rakoff managed to miss the heart and soul of this tale and has merely created an interminable bore of a film.And the switch of actors in several roles was not only unnecessary but clumsily done. On the other hand, given the horrible make-up jobs on the characters of Mark Members and J.G. Quiggin who both look 100 years old when they are only in their 60s it is probably good that there weren't more characters to have to age in such a way.There are two performances that are absolutely true to the originals and they are Simon Russell Beale ('Persuasion') and Miranda Richardson who play Lord and Lady Widmerpool. There is no explanation for Pamela Flitton Widmerpool's behavior in the books and she is just as much an enigma in the film. It is terrible that Beale's amazing performance has been wasted on such a lousy screenplay.Most of the acting is very good, such as it is, but several performers are badly miscast. Paul Rhys is especially annoying as Charles Stringham, a man who is depressive but not a lobotomized, grinning buffoon. And poor Lord Erridge Warminster is turned into a goofy clown. Rakoff has added little political bits of his own for some reason; for instance, it was deemed necessary to include an attack on the Marxists in the demonstration by Oswald Mosley's Black Shirts. This is not in the book and adds nothing to the story. There are many other instances of wasted celluloid that would have been better utilized in telling the original story and creating rounded characters. Only Widmerpool and Pamela Flitton are rounded out, the rest are all cardboard cut-outs whose behavior makes little sense as a result.The producers also play fast and loose with time sequences. And characters run on for a scene or two and then vanish never to be seen again. This was even confusing to someone who knows the books!I doubt if I will live long enough to ever see this gargantuan tale presented as it should be so I'll have to stick to the books, which are fascinating. I have given this effort 3 stars, one for Beale, one for Richardson and one for production values which are high. No expense was spared on hiring out vintage automobiles and beautiful houses, not to mention a nice junket to Venice for the production team.Skip this piece of rubbish and try and find the books, if you can. Little Brown published them in a four book omnibus which can still be found from time to time on ABE.com. or if you are lucky and live in a large city, in a good used bookstore with a rare books section.This was a MAJOR disappointment even when I was prepared for a watered down version. I didn't think it could possibly be this bad. Reader's Digest would have been proud but the BBC should hang it's head in shame.

hjmsia49 I obtained this four DVD series from a local library. I saw it advertised in a catalog and recognized some of the performers so I thought it might be interesting. My impression was that the first three decades were almost totally divorced from the final decade. We liked the performance and narration by James Purefoy of the lead character Nick Jenkins but I felt the series would have ended satisfactorily when he returned from WWII to his wife and child. I stared in disbelief at the final episode when the main characters of Nick Jenkins, his wife Isobel and his former lover Jean were now all portrayed by different performers? I suspect the original actors might have read the script and wisely decided that sordid episode was not for them? Few of the characters in the final decade have any redeeming qualities whatsoever especially poor Pamela. You didn't care any longer about the fate of most of them. When you thought you have seen enough decadent characters, a new one shows up. Simon Russell Beale as Widmerpool managed to be be alternately amusing, pompous, entertaining, ambitious and comical during the first three episodes. In the final decade he became too pathetic to watch. I also felt there were far too many characters to try to keep track of with many popping in and out of the saga at different times with no apparent rhyme or reason.We really liked the first three decades, especially the music which represented accurately the mood of the times. When Jenkins entered the Ritz Hotal to meet with the ex-husband of his former mistress, the pianist was playing two Vera Lynn chestnuts- "Room 504" and "That Lovely Weekend" which I haven't heard since my WWII days. Perhaps, I enjoyed the music of the initial decades because so much of it was American and familiar. The final decade was totally devoid of any music which made it too ponderous and ugly to bear. My suggestion would be to enjoy the bravura performances and music of the first three episodes and terminate your viewing when Nick Jenkins returns home to his family to another Vera Lynn melody- "It's A Lovely Day Tomorrow." Spare yourself the discomfort of watching the tawdry final episode. Finally, much of the nudity was jarring and unnecessary and probably as embarrassing to the audience as it appeared to be to many of the characters.

tonstant viewer No, I haven't read the books, but I have read Proust, and you can bet Mr. Powell read him too. Powell's first volume appeared thirty years after Proust's death, and a greater valentine can't be imagined.Both "Dance" and "In Search of Lost Time" are panoramic multi-generational quasi-autobiographical narratives of the gentry they knew. Lower class types pop in from time to time, but they never take center stage for long. Both genteel epics run more than 3000 pages. Major characters are rarely single portraits, but are usually drawn from composites of two or three prototypes. Both works chronicle the human cycles of birth, education, coupling, re-coupling, decay and death.In addition to writing earlier, Proust had the structural advantage of writing the beginning and end of his novel first, spending the rest of his life filling in the middle. It was a meditation on the nature of memory, and underlying all the gossip and melodrama is an awareness that there is a coherent thesis and philosophy tying the whole journey together.At least as presented here, no such unifying ideas are discernible in Powell. We meet characters of greater or lesser interest, they do the things that people do (and sometimes don't do, and occasionally never have done in the history of the world). They learn, age, crack-up and die, but the whole thing just kind of trails off and rumbles to a stop rather than ends. We may have a good time getting there, but I wind up wondering why we made the trip.In response to criticisms of the abridgment, we should note that Powell, as a former screenwriter, was not upset at the reshaping of his work for TV. Nicholas Coleridge reports: "Powell, himself, says that 'Somewhat to my surprise' he is happy with the adaptation. 'It seems quite alright to me,' he told me with faltering voice, on the telephone. 'I think they've done it as well as this medium possibly can.'"Across the board, the actors are almost uniformly pleasing. Simon Russell Beale has been rightly cheered for his remarkable and daring Widmerpool, but Michael Williams (Judi Dench's late husband) is outstanding as Ted Jeavons, and Edward Fox steals every scene he's in, no surprise there. James Purefoy as Nick has to do a lot of listening, and occasionally he does it wonderfully well.I was not upset at the recasting of half a dozen characters in the fourth film. Some of the young actors looked quite silly in extreme age makeup as practiced 10 years ago. I'd have been happier if it had been more widespread. It took me about 8 seconds to register that Nick and Isabel and Jean were played by different actors, and then I plunged right back into the story. I'm sorry for the viewers that were derailed by the substitutions, but I wasn't.I am perplexed by the character of Pamela Flitton as played here in her unique patented performance by Miranda Richardson. She is a vicious, irritable, impatient, destructive, sexually voracious, uncontrolled and uncontrollable woman, everything that panics an English writer from Charles Dickens to Bram Stoker and onward.Pamela is a crimson-lipped vampire straight out of Hammer Horror, and not one thing she does or says has a motivation. I hope the books are more coherent in explaining why, why anything.BTW, the film "A Business Affair," from novels by Barbara Skelton, gives Pamela's prototype's side of the story, and I look forward to seeing it by way of further illumination. There's precious little to comprehend on view here. She just is.Anyway, this is all professionally done and makes for entertaining viewing. It may not be the absolute best of its genre, but it's a long way from the worst. It is highly recommended to people who like British miniseries based on long novels.OTOH, no one has ever made a good movie out of Proust, they're all terrible. There's a wonderful published screenplay Harold Pinter wrote for Joseph Losey, but it was never produced. If you want to spend a year reading 3000 pages, please start first with Proust, then take on Powell for dessert.

kcm76 At long last, Anthony Powell's 12 volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time has been dramatised for television. If Powell's "Journals" are to be believed, this is after any number of false starts spanning the best part of 20 years. The dramatisation was in four two-hour episodes, each covering approximately 3 books. They were shown on UK's Channel 4 TV in October 1997. The format of four 2-hour films was, in many ways, unfortunate as it severely constrained the amount of the action which could be shown, however given the exigencies of modern TV scheduling it was probably the only way in which "Dance" was ever going to get televised. As a devotee of the books, I was apprehensive about how they would translate into film. Just how do you condense 12 novels into 8 hours of television? However in my view the dramatisation worked extremely well, notwithstanding the necessary omissions. What helped the whole production was some interesting, and at times inspired and doubtless extravagant, casting which included: Edward Fox (as Uncle Giles), Zoë Wanamaker (as Audrey Maclintick), John Gielgud (as St John Clarke), Alan Bennett (as Sillery), Miranda Richardson (as Pamela Flitton)... some interesting choices!! Overall an interesting and enjoyable series. I just fear that having been done once that we'll never see "Dance" recreated in a different (better?) format and that Powell will remain relatively unknown in comparison with contemporaries like Evelyn Waugh ... which is in my view quite unjustifiable as Powell is a much better writer. Fortunately Channel 4 released these 4 films on video - which is excellent as they're well worth watching again.