I am obviously on a von Arnim roll at the moment as just before my wonderful purchase over the weekend, I spotted that at long last this simply gorgeous film is out on DVD. What took so long? I originally saw this some ten years or more ago and adored it so much I bought the video. This has been watched so often the tape resembles a lace doily and the tracking is appalling and sound dreadful, but I was reluctant to part with it until I could get hold of another copy.
It arrived this morning and I am just delighted with it. This was the first Elizabeth von Arnim I read. I had been browsing in Waterstones and spotted the Virago edition, yes the green one, and pulled it down, took it home read it in two hours and was back in the shop later on that day to purchase the others that were in stock (if I remember rightly Mr Skeffington and Love and a couple of others) and here is a link to my original post. The story of four dissatisfied women who rent a castle for a month never fails to uplift and the first morning when Mrs Wilkins opens her eyes, sees the sun streaming across her bed and pulls the shutters wide and looks out, oh my goodness what a magical moment.
"She jumped up, pulled on her slippers, for there was nothing on the stone floor but one small rug, ran to the window and threw open the shutters. "Oh!" cried Mrs Wilkins.
All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in colour, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower starred grass slope from which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.
She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light. Lovely scents came up to the window and caressed her. A tiny breeze gently lifted her hair"
See what I mean?
The cast is wonderful: Joan Plowright, Miranda Richardson, Josie Lawrence, Polly Walker and the male roles are taken well by Alfred Molina, Jim Broadbent and the simply unbeatable Michael Kitchen. The story line has been altered, but very slightly only and does no harm, merely pairing off a female character with a male protagonist and it works. My Virago edition has Josie Lawrence on the cover and delightful thought she is, I really dislike film tie in editions and kept an eye out for the original Virago edition of 1986 and eventually after a few years of keeping aforementioned eye out managed to get hold of one and here it is. This cover is 'Promenade on the Banks of the Amsted' so not exactly Italianate but I just love it, so elegant, so typical of these wonderful Green covers.
"Colour, fragrance, light, sea; instead of Shaftesbury Avenue, and the wet omnibuses, and the fish department at Shoolbread's and the Tube to Hampstead, and dinner, and tomorrow the same and the day after the same and always the same..........."
If ever you feel this way, and let's face it, who hasn't, then this book and DVD is for you.
