Parades End 1964 DVD

Product Description

Parade's End (1964) (DVD)

BBC Home Entertainment presents the original 1964 mini-series starring Judi Dench, newly restored from the original film masters! This 1964 film adaptation of the classic novel by Ford Madox Ford shows a young Judi Dench (Skyfall, J. Edgar) in one of her earliest screen roles. Considered by many as one of the pre-eminent literary works of the 20th-century, Parade's End follows Christopher Tietjens (Ronald Hines, Elizabeth R), a wealthy member of Edwardian England's upper class, as the country is drawn into World War One. Tietjens is at the center of a love triangle between his wife Sylvia (Jeanne Moody), a treacherous socialite who is trying to destroy him, and his suffragette mistress, Valentine (Dench). The warfare Tietjens encounters as an officer in Europe is but a backdrop to a personal battle of conflicting loyalties, hidden passions and the rigid social expectations of his day.

Amazon.com This introspective adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's four-book series revolves around Yorkshire statistician Christopher Tietjens (Ronald Hines, pale and prickly), a nonconformist living in stiff-upper-lip Edwardian England (screenwriter John Hopkins concentrates on the first three novels in the tetralogy). When war breaks out, Christopher does his patriotic duty, while dreaming of the day "there will be no more parades." In the first part, his spiteful and snobbish wife, Sylvia (Jeanne Moody, overacting in an entertaining manner), leaves him for another man, but Christopher forgoes divorce to avoid a scandal and moves in with his Rossetti-obsessed associate, MacMaster (Fulton Mackay), the kind of arty gentleman who rolls his r's. To her mother, Sylvia explains her actions succinctly: "I hate my husband and I hate my child." While she's away, he meets Valentine (Judi Dench, the essence of compassion), a suffragette and pacifist. If Christopher represents the past, Valentine represents the future. Sylvia eventually returns, but Christopher continues to associate with Valentine, to the consternation of his father, who believes the rumors that have been swirling around his son (most of them untrue). As Christopher's brother, Mark (Ronald Leigh-Hunt), tells Valentine, he's "a fellow who never told a lie or did a dishonorable thing." In the next two chapters, Christopher serves as an officer in France and Belgium, loses several of his men, and suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder, which complicates his long-simmering, but unconsummated romance with Valentine. This 1964 version of Parade's End, which aired under the aegis of the BBC's Theatre 625, combines the stagy (abrupt transitions, minimalist sets) with the cinematic (disorienting close-ups, blurred backgrounds), but it increases in interest as the central duo grows closer and builds to a moving finish. In 2012, Sherlock's Benedict Cumberbatch took on the Tietjens role for a BBC-HBO coproduction. --Kathleen C. Fennessy