Brideshead Revisited (25th Anniversary Collector's Edition)
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Actor: Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Jane Asher, Jeremy Irons, Simon JonesBrand: ACORN MEDIA
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Box set, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 659 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-10-10
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Acorn Media
DVD Reviews of Brideshead Revisited (25th Anniversary Collector's Edition)
DVD Review: ecstasy of the most ennobling kind
Summary: 5 Stars
My d-d-dears: To avoid m-murky obscurity, let me make it c-clear at the outset that I am reviewing the Acorn Media version of _Brideshead Revisited_ (hereafter "BR"), released Oct 2006, the 25th anniversary edition.
That the medium of television could produce ANYTHING so superlative at all is, at first glance, quite odd. _Pace_ to other Amazon reviewers, but BR is not just televisions Finest Hour (or to be precise: 659 minutes, plus addenda); it is not just television's supreme achievement; it is television's ONLY achievement. Like the Roman Colosseum, the Tube is an engineering marvel; look what it's used for. Anyone with even a grain of sensibility long ago took a hold of his telly, hauled it to the dump, and then gave it the old HEAVE-HO! Only a monitor and a DVD player are needed to savor BR's quality. This DVD is worth buying - aside from better reasons - just to have a document of TV's ONLY day in the sun.
For television is the g-g-g-great Western blight. It spots and kills everything it touches: It kills family life, it kills art, it kills the brain, and I do believe that it has killed the secular humanist c-c-clodhoppers critics in the "Revisiting Brideshead" addendum. If they knew ANYTHING about C-C-Catholic piety, they would NOT have said such t-t-terrible t-tripe. But then when Flannery O'Connor (SUCH a g-g-gorgon, my dears; just TOO TOO macabre) defended her use of the g-grotesque, she argued that when people are spiritually deaf, one has to shout. BR, both the two versions of the book and this quite d-d-delicious DVD version of the t-telly show, abjures the grotesque for beauty, the stentorian for soft whispers. So I mustn't b-blame critics if their remarks are little insipid. So l-let me EXPLAIN it to you good plain people.
BR's popularity, given its Catholic theme presented to an un-Catholic and anti-Catholic world, is odd as well. Sebastian remarks that everything Catholics think important is different from other people. And indeed it is, given the current poisoned Cultural Marxist atmosphere, in this Brave New World of dysfunctional families and omnipresent license, where divorce is judged dandy, piety pejorative, sodomy adorable, and children worthy of butchery in the tens of millions using an Orwellian label for the crime. In such a climate, two errors of commission are inevitable. First, critics, those mass men in the Age of Hooper, have made too much of Waugh's supposed upper class snobbery. Waugh did not hate the middle and lower classes; Waugh hated the modern world. His life and his art were a studied attempt to scorn, mock, and defy it, and all its works, and all its vain pomps. With BR he changed his usual strategy and contrasted baleful modernity to Castle Brideshead, with its "lowly kinship" to the Beatific Vision.
Second, too much also has been made of Sebastian's and Charles' supposed homosexuality. But then, can The Last Man in his Brave New World, soaked in soma, hardly appreciate friendship as a form of love at all, judging it instead to be only homoerotic? Doubtless next in line for utter incomprehension by Jasper, Samgrass, Motram, Mrs Arnold Frickheimer, Lady Celia _et al._ will be romance, marriage, parenthood, childhood, innocence, family. Point of fact: The real homosexual in the work is the Satan- making clear enough Waugh's view on the matter.
Errors also of omission the commentators commit by their almost Invincible Ignorance of Catholic myth - and my "myth" I don't mean _lies_, but "a system of symbols that hang together". Lady Marchmain is piety without charity, Bridy faith without charity, Julia romance without charity, Charles friendship without charity. As for Sebastian's flaw and fall, most folk nowadays would follow Julia's first judgement: It must something chemical in him. But Cara, the foil of Lady Wisdom to Samgrass' pedantic Sir Folly, got it right without using the term: It's something spiritual in Sebastian, or better said, the lack thereof. At the Ritz, God tells Charles the real problem with Sebastian: lack of fidelity to a Religious Vocation ("I don't know what that means" says Charles, nor does the "modern" world), a Vocation to an Order that performs corporal works of charity, a Vocation Sebastian partly hears in rescuing Charles from his father and Kurt from his illness, Sebastian ending his days at least half way into the place where he belonged all alone. And the Satan figure shows that evil is ultimately ridiculous.
Not to know the legend of St. Sebastian is to miss the purport of the Satan's quip "I should like to stick you full of bared arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion". Not to know the story of Eden is to miss (1) the Satan's very calling card: his stutter The Snake's tongue; and (2) when God catches Charles and Sebastian sunbathing naked on the roof, and when Sebastian says "Go away [...]; We're not decent", she (She!) replies "Yes you are!" Once these Catholic allusions are grasped, Waugh's comic tendency is more marked: going with the Satan to a homosexual bar, and taking a God out to dine at the Ritz. And secular sacraments: a Eucharist up in a pagan temple with claret precedes a baptism, by total immersion, in the fountain. The Jesuits aren't spared Waugh's wit, with the pig named Francis Xavier and a bear named Aloysius. Yet I suspect that Waugh is quite serious with the "six black Cordelia's", mocking not Cordelia's piety but our incredulity.
Cinema - even the small screen -- talks with pictures: The winding staircase, a penitential Sebastian breaking down on the marble stairs leading up, or Charles going down twisting iron stairs with the Satan into an Infernal realm; the leitmotif of the door throughout the work: the garden door at the Botanical Gardens at Oxford, the door Charles can't close in Venice, the door not answered to Sebastian's rooms at Christchurch and Brideshead; or candles: In Part I, when the Tempter and Father of Lies blows one out, revealing him to be The Dark One; the quenched Lamp of the Presence in the chapel, later to be re-lit; and in Part II, at the dinner scene with Cordelia and Charles alone, the mirrored candelabra surrounding Cordelia, just as they do at the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.
This Acorn Production DVD offers glorious sight in splendid sound - the former having obliged a cleaning up of the film's surface, the latter a re-mastering of the original sound recording. The addenda includes, along with the risible "Revisiting Brideshead", two voice-overs, one of Part I, the other of Part IV. The first, with Irons, Quick, and Grace, is, save for some insights by Grace, quite fatuous. The other, by the producer and Andrews, is quite well done, leaving the impression that Andrews is indeed "very well endowed in the Top Story". Yet particularly contemptible are the out-takes, which give The Last Man, who mocks post-modernly all that is great, the chance to smugly enjoy actors missing a line and uttering an obscenity, and thus to mar all that is laudable. When discussing the various actors though, I didn't mind the spoofing survey of Aloysius' dramatic career.
Yet these few blemishes do not detract from the drama's sterling achievement. So, my d-d-dears, buy this DVD, and dash impetuously to your player to pay homage at the shrine: ecstasy of the most ENNOBLING kind. And N-n-no, I will n-n-NOT buy you a drink!
Description of Brideshead Revisited (25th Anniversary Collector's Edition)
25th Anniversary Collector?s Edition"Extraordinary" ?The New York Times
"Visually ravishing" ?Time
A special silver anniversary edition of the British classic called one of the best series in TV history. Based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh, two years in the making, and the equivalent of seven feature films back-to-back, this epic drama tells a story of romantic yearning and loss in the glittering but fading world of the British aristocracy between the wars. Winner of 17 international awards and starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Sir John Gielgud, Claire Bloom, and Sir Laurence Olivier in an Emmy®-winning role. Bonus features on this edition include the 50-min. featurette Revisiting Brideshead, produced by British television to celebrate the anniversary and featuring retrospective interviews with Irons, Andrews, Quick, director Charles Sturridge, and many more. Also includes a 20-page program guide, production notes, and photo gallery.
Fill a bowl with alpine strawberries, break out the Château Lafite (1899, of course), and bask in this benchmark 1981 British miniseries based on Evelyn Waugh's classic novel. Adapted for the screen by John Mortimer (Rumpole of the Bailey), this impeccable, nearly 11-hour production mesmerized American viewers during the course of its PBS run in 1982. In his breakthrough role, Jeremy Irons stars as Charles Ryder, a disillusioned Army captain who is moved to reflect on his "languid days" in the "enchanted castle" that was Brideshead, home of the aristocratic Marchmain family, whose acquaintance Charles made in the company of an Oxford classmate, the charming wild child Sebastian. Anthony Andrews costars as the doomed Sebastian, whose beauty is "arresting" and "whose eccentricities and behavior seemed to know no bounds." The "entitled and enchanted" Sebastian takes Charles under his wing ("Charles, what a lot you have to learn"), but vows early on that he is "not going to let [Charles] get mixed up with [his] family." But mixed up Charles gets. He becomes a friend and confidante, not to mention a lover, to Sebastian's sister Julia (Diana Quick). Meanwhile, the self-destructive Sebastian's life spirals out of control. Brideshead Revisited boasts a distinguished ensemble, including Laurence Olivier in his Emmy Award-winning role as the exiled Lord Marchmain, Claire Bloom as Lady Marchmain, and the magnificent John Gielgud as Charles's estranged father. Grand locations and a haunting musical score make this a memorable revisit of an irretrievable bygone era. For those who scheduled their weeks around the original Monday-night broadcasts or those visiting Brideshead for the first time, this boxed set release will be, as Charles rhapsodizes at one point while strolling the castle grounds, "very near to heaven." --Donald Liebenson
Stills from Brideshead Revisited (click for larger image)
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Beyond Brideshead Revisited
 The Novel |  The Original Score (Soundtrack to the Movie) |  The Movie in Theaters Now |
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