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Reviews
Martin Chuzzlewit (1994)
A disappointment.
Dickens' book contains two juicy plums: The moral education of a selfish person, and a satirical put-down of the United States.
A competent adaptation would have made the most of these themes; this one manages to ignore them both.
Am I the only one who thinks BBC adaptations were better in the 70's and 80's? Yes, they were very stagy and the production value was zilch - but the scripts and acting were second to none. It seems that after Lord Grade's departure there was a conscious decision to dumb things down. The new adaptations are very cinematic and gorgeous to look at, but that's about it. (See for example the old and new versions of "Great Expectations").
Suspicion: The Way Up to Heaven (1958)
The man who cried wolf
Small correction to the previous review: Mrs. Foster is not leaving on a cruise, but flying from Adelaide (Kennedy) airport to Paris, to see her newborn grandson.
I caught this show on Jordanian TV in the seventies & loved every minute. It's an astonishingly good teleplay - better than the British remake ("Tales of the unexpected"), better even than the original short story by Roald Dahl.
In the original, Mrs. Foster knows exactly what she is doing, but in this adaptation she's an innocent. Some would dismiss this change as typical American sugarcoating, but IMHO it works very well.
To the viewers' growing horror, they're shown in great detail the psychological torture her husband puts her through. When he says "Oh, now the elevator's stuck!" she snaps - she's sure it's yet another delaying tactic. For her it's the final straw and she leaves for the airport without him.
Her return home is a moment of discovery for both her and the audience.
It would be great if some enterprising reader with access to this episode puts it on YouTube.