The Mallens

Rating:
Summary: look elsewhere
Review: Bought this DVD box set after watching the Forsyte Saga. I have always been a fan of Cookson's books and the adaptation of this one was done very well. It is set in nineteenth-century England and has all the things you need in a movie, scandals, love and violence. The Mallens are a cursed family and from one generation to the next they can't escape.

Rating:
Summary: The Mallens saga
Review: Bought this DVD box set after watching the Forsyte Saga. I have always been a fan of Cookson's books and the adaptation of this one was done very well. It is set in nineteenth-century England and has all the things you need in a movie, scandals, love and violence. The Mallens are a cursed family and from one generation to the next they can't escape.

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly good, but dark
Review: I tracked down this mini-series solely because I wanted to see other work by John Duttine, who was so outstanding in "To Serve Them All My Days." Based on the little I knew about "The Mallens," I wasn't expecting much, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it held the melodrama in check and featured very fine acting. It has that "Masterpiece Theater" tempo of being slow enough to give you a sense of what life in rural 1860s North England probably was like, without being so slow that it bores. The characters, while very different in their assumptions and motivations than we expect in contemporary fiction, struck me as believable and understandable. One warning though: the material is very dark.

** SPOILER **

People die in ways or under circumstances that are very foreign to 21st century life, i.e., consumption, accidents. But that's part of what I found rather fascinating about it -- the sense of fatalism is palpable. Worth a look if you appreciate well-made period melodrama.


Rating:
Summary: look elsewhere
Review: There are wonderful miniseries out there. Either of the Forsyth Sagas, Wives and Daughters, Berkley Square and all of the Upstairs Downstairs series. Even Catherine Cookson's The Girl or Glass Virgin is better. This is not one of those. This is heavy going with unlikeable people and often absurd situations. Call me a fool but someone, somewhere should end up happy in these stories.