Northanger Abbey dvd movie.|
Northanger Abbey buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $19.98 Features • Color • NTSC In Theaters : 1987 DVD Release : 27 June, 2000 |
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Northanger Abbey description Jane Austen goes Gothic in this darkly dramatic rendering of her Northanger Abbey, a novel that wasn't published until after her early and sudden death. Austen pokes fun at her peers in this story, in which her heroine, Catherine Morland (Katharine Schlesinger), is hopelessly addicted to macabre romance novels that wreak havoc on her imagination. She comes from a large, but loving family, and she's taken, as a companion, to the decadent society of Bath. There, she meets the duplicitous Thorpe siblings, Isabella (Cassie Stuart) and John (Jonathan Coy), and the kindly Tilney sister and brother, Eleanor (Ingrid Lacey) and Henry (Peter Firth). The Tilneys also have an elder brother, the snobbish soldier Frederick (Greg Hicks), and an oddly eerie father, General Tilney (Robert Hardy). Needless to say, all this provides plenty of fodder for fantasies and Catherine comes up with many, even imagining all sorts of evils on a visit to the Tilney family home, Northanger Abbey. The soundtrack is more than a little melodramatic, but it's best to think of it as a humorous touch rather than a serious, punctuating one. --N.F. Mendoza |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | NOT Jane Austen |
| This production was very disappointing. I can never figure out why directors & screenwriters think they can improve on the work of literary masters--they almost always come up with something more or less like this.
Anyone who has read Jane Austen knows the delight of her dialogue. This version pretty much just throws it out altogether. It's more a trashing of "Northanger Abbey" than a dramatization. Here are some of the ways in which it fails: - It concentrates on the gothic horror aspect of the novel, which was really a secondary plot. - The REAL theme of NA is about how Catherine, naive & genuine, gains maturity by learning from her social blunders. This was essentially lost in this production. - Catherine's cute and funny personality, so strong in the book, doesn't appear here. - Henry's humor is also lost. - In fact, most of the humor is lost. (It IS a very funny book--really.) - Isabella and John Thorpe are depicted as cunning, calculating plotters. In the novel, they are opportunists, but just aren't that smart. They only succeed because the Morlands are so naive.) - Robert Hardy is made to play a ridiculous General Tilney. I resent the indignity to Robert Hardy. WHY, WHY, WHY can't the producers, directors, etc. just follow the novel and use what Jane Austen wrote? If I could understand it at age 13, don't you think most adults could? A true dramatization of the novel would be a delight. NA has the same light, bright, sparkling quality of Pride & Prejudice, and a loveable heroine both comic and nervy, for her time. It's a shame that there is nothing out there to represent NA but this disrespectful, unenjoyable production. The only thing I can praise about it is the fact that the story and costumes are set in the 1790s, when Jane Austen originally wrote its ur version, "Susan". There are several subtle points in the novel that make more sense in the context of 1790s Bath. (Please, BBC, do another version of this great novel, and do it more like the 1985 "Mansfield Park", where most of the language was Miss Austen's own.) |
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