This is a drama about a small selection of diverse people all living in a small town in mid-thirties Yorkshire. Dramas and indeed novels like this can really grip you, they can become addictive when you can engage with the characters and want to know more about them. With a 400 page novel or a ten hour tv show you can get to know them but when, like with this picture, you've only got an hour and half, it simply doesn't work.
Philistine that I am, I've never read this book - it's not really my thing but believing it to be semi-iconic I thought I out to dip my toe into its water. I can vaguely remember as a young boy being forced to watch the ITV series back in the seventies so I subsequently avoided the BBC series about ten years ago. I thought that if it could be condensed down to an hour and a half it might be more palatable. Oh dear no!
I did find it reasonably enjoyable but hardly something I'd watch again. It's competently enough made and does look quite good - it is after all produced by Korda and directed by Victor Saville, but with a character driven drama like this where very little actual action happens, to try and squeeze a long nuanced story into a short feature film format results in it being little more than a glorified trailer.
Screenwriter Ian Dalrymple clearly loved the novel too much to sacrifice any of it which was what was needed to create a manageable movie. In his adaptation, all the themes of the novel have to be explored and all the characters have to be there. Instead of focussing on any one particular theme or person, what we end up with is therefore 4 minutes on snobbery, 3 minutes on poverty and the class divide, a couple of minutes on male chauvinism, 3 minutes about the value of girls' education (which could certainly be a film in itself), a minute on traditionalism vs. Progress, 2 minutes on hypocrisy and 6 minutes about corruption. And all that has to be done whilst developing the characters including a couple of romances. One has to give Victor Saville some credit, he takes an impossible task and whist he doesn't quite succeed, he does a reasonable job of it.
I said earlier, over condensed like this is it's like a glorified trailer - well one thing this film has done is inspired me to watch the ITV or BBC adaptation.
