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Ghost Canyon

'Hard Times'
(Patrick Allen, Rosalie Crutchley, et al / 2-Disc DVD / NR / (1977) 2007 / Acorn Media)

Overview: Above 19th-century Coketown, soot billows from the mills’ smokestacks like black flags. As the town’s leading citizen, Thomas Gradgrind values hard facts and unflinching reason above all else, and he teaches these values to his children, Louisa and Tom. Gradgrind’s friend, the self-made industrialist Josiah Bounderby, manages his mills with similar heartlessness—much to his profit. But a series of events shakes both men to their very core, causing profound pain to those around them and an eventual awakening.

DVD Verdict: Charles Dickens' 'Hard Times' is more than just an indictment of materialism and a triumph of the human spirit. Indeed, Granada Television's (UK) 1977 adaptation of Dickens' 1854 novel is an amazingly steady, focused work that achieves a welcome drumbeat of gravity befitting the original source material. From the company that brought 'Brideshead Revisited'and 'The Jewel in the Crown' to the screen — and from the writer and director of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,' Spy — this production features Dickens’ unforgettable characters struggling with remarkably contemporary conflicts: the demands of technology versus the needs of society, and the practical power of materialism versus the ineluctable pull of the human heart.

In the fictitious Victorian industrial city of Coketown, two of its leading citizens mercilessly stand on hard principles befitting the hard times that come with Britain's industrial revolution. Thomas Gradgrind (Patrick Allen), an Utilitarian school governor with political aspirations, believes his young charges should strive for unemotional perfection through rigid, crushing repetition of facts, and facts alone ("Facts alone are wanted in life."). His two prime pupils are his own children: Louisa (Jacqueline Tong), his beautiful, emotionally stagnated daughter, and his son Tom (Richard Wren), who is literally bored out of his mind with the horrendous, never-ending course of memorization of meaningless facts to which his father subjects him.

Gradgrind's friend, the rags-to-riches industrialist Josiah Bounderby (Timothy West), also believes in the total worthlessness of human beings except as vessels for human endurance in his mills. Obsessed with his social position, the loutish, unfeeling, uncouth Bounderby has acquired for his home the services of Mrs. Sparsit (Rosalie Crutchley), born of the gentry but now destitute. Bounderby delights in keeping her around, more as a springboard for his incessant reminders that he came from nothing, while she was given the world at her feet ("I never had turtle soup, venison, and a gold spoon in my mouth as a child."). Bounderby, finding cold comfort in the similarly hard-hearted theories of Gradgrind, knows that Gradgrind's students will make excellent automatons for his slave shops, while Gradgrind sees living proof of his theories in Bounderby's current success. Both men conclude that Louisa would make an excellent mate for the ape-like Bounderby – whether she likes it or not.

I've always watched director Irvin's career with interest; he has a certain elemental seriousness to his approach, an adherence to the essential reality of a given scene, that I find compelling. Therein, and once again, this critically acclaimed adaptation fully and faithfully realizes the Charles Dickens classic in all its emotional depth and timeless relevance. It also has to be one of the cleanest, most direct Dickens TV adaptations that I can remember seeing! This is a Full Screen Presentation (4:3) and comes with the Special Features of a Charles Dickens Bio and Cast Filmographies.

www.AcornMedia.com





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