Search - Sense and Sensibility (BBC, 1981) on DVD

Praise the BBC. If it 's worth doing, it's worth doing right

Charles Bowman | Elmer, LA. United States | 05/13/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This SENSE AND SENSIBILITY is certainly superior to the earlier version is almost every way. That is not to say that the earlier film did not accomplish what it was attempting. And, if
they were attempting to tell the film world that this literary
classic demanded film, and challenging the BBC to do their very best, then the precursor was brilliantly successful!
This version is wonderful because the great writers knew that character and character almost by itself makes literature and film, for that matter. It takes time to reveal character and
Jane Austen's characters are worth the effort. I remarked to my spouse that the BBC version had time to reveal less important characters like Mrs. Dashwood and the dastardly Dashwoods as well. There was time to reveal Willoughby and those wonderful dialogues between he and Marianne. There was time to feature the heated conversations between the sisters Dashwood. The casting for this movie was wonderful, and I anxiously await other productions with this excellent cast! There was time, too, for the camera to grasp the landscape and the environs for the viewer and they did it lovingly. Nowhere in this film was the action of the literary work abbreviated. The movie moved in its own time, but it faithfully moved in Jane Austen time as well, and it was she after all, who loved that time well enough to capture it for us. Thanks."

"Undervalued, in Some Respects"

Stanley H. Nemeth | Garden Grove, CA United States | 04/14/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Many commentators have duly chastised this 1981 BBC production for being less a film than merely a filmed book, and consequently clumsy in chosen images, while also dull in pacing and rhythm. What works on the written page clearly does not always transfer successfully unless suitable adjustments have been made to the requirements of a different medium. I'd agree that this version of Austen's novel is ultimately one better listened to than watched. At the same time, it has merits lacking in both the Emma Thompson and more recent Andrew Davies versions. Both of these last, for my money, were far too amiable in their vision, so that Jane Austen tends to emerge in them as a gentle-hearted chronicler of Regency order rather than a shrewd, even lethal social satirist.

No less a worthy than E.M.Forster is on record as saying Austen showed him the possibilities of deadly domestic humor. And indeed in "Sense and Sensibility" the bores and mean-spirited types among the country gentry are captured for all time, like insects in amber. This adaptation of the novel is truer than others to Austen's insights here. Dinner parties and card-playing scenes are punctuated by superlatively stupid or just plain snobbish comments from the due recipients of Austen's irony. And Lucy Steele, for instance, emerges not as a potentially sympathetic fiancee of Edward's, but as in the novel a pretty mean inquisitor who adds to Elinor's private sufferings.

The final encounter of Willoughby and Elinor is included here, as in the
Davies version, but the dialogue in this version is truer to the complex moral response of the novel. In Davies, Willoughby remains pretty much just a nasty fellow to a suddenly one-dimensional, priggish Elinor and an unnecessarily appearing Marianne. The Thompson and Davies versions, of course, have their merits, and as films clearly surpass this production in technical aspects. Still, short of rereading the novel, Austen's readers can gain much from this version."