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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: BBC Warner
Salesrank: 9429
Released: May 17, 2005 |
| Our Price: $8.77 |
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
The Baltics, 1939. British professor Guy Pringle (Kenneth Branagh) arrives in Romania with his new bride, Harriet (Emma Thompson) and becomes enmeshed in the politics of anti-fascism. Despite Harriet's serious misgivings, Guy's social circle soon includes members of the British Secret Service who want to involve him in dangerous missions, and a downtrodden prince who zeroes in on Guy's generous nature and winds up living with the Pringles. Thus the stage is set for this mesmerizing story of marriage tested by accidental betrayal, callous insensitivity, and a world in upheaval. Based upon the autobiographical novels of best-selling author Olivia Manning, and set in places as far-flung as Bucharest, Athens and Cairo, Fortunes of War is majestic in both its scope and its vision.
Description of Fortunes of War:
"Wherever we are, that will always be the center of things." So professor Guy Pringle reassures his new wife, Harriet. Unfortunately, where they are is Bucharest in 1939, with the Nazis gathering on the border, and fascism casting longer, darker shadows. Thus begins this epic 1987 miniseries based on Olivia Manning's Balkan and Levant trilogies that was originally broadcast in the United States on Masterpiece Theatre. For most Americans, it was an auspicious first look at England's glamorous former First Thespian couple, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, who, as one character notes of Harriet, "lightens the darkness." Fortunes of War suggests what Casablanca might have been like had it followed Victor and Ilsa instead of Rick, who famously didn't want to stick his neck out for anybody. Not Guy. "I want to do something more dramatic than lecturing," he proclaims. "It is our duty to shine a little light to hope someone notices." His activities are enough to put him on a Nazi death list, forcing Guy and Harriet to Greece and Egypt. "It isn't a lark," Guy tells Harriet early on, "but it is an adventure." Fortunes of War is populated by colorful characters, most notably the pitiable and decidedly untrustworthy Prince Yakimov (Ronald Pickup), and the dashing young soldier Simon Boulderstone (Rupert Graves of The Forsythe Saga and A Room with a View). There is plenty of intrigue, betrayals, domestic melodrama, and emotional separations and reunions to propel this nearly seven-hour production to its powerful conclusion. Readers of Manning's books and Branagh and Thompson fans will find the release of War good fortune indeed. --Donald Liebenson
Fortunes of War Reviews:
Fortunes of War 
2009-11-30 - The cast is great, the acting superb. there is humor, drama, history, pathos. Emma Thompson and Kenneth Brannaugh are powerful together. The other characters are well developed and very memorable also.
Somewhat long and strange 
2009-11-08 - World War II in Egypt and the middle east traps a couple in strange circumstances.
The English professor appears after several episodes to be a Marxist,
and his wife, the author, seems to be wanting more of his attentions.
Her husband's actor friend kills himself ( said to be in love with
the husband), but we know that his Atlantic open boat experience
with a boat load of children haunts him.
There is a big deal about Pyramid climbing.
The acting is very good, but I never felt that the narration
of the story got me involved in the characters as real 3d people.
They all seem more or less 2d characterizations with hidden motivations.
A lot of people die in this and not always in the war.
Since I'm a big fan of both Emma Thompson and, Kenneth Branagh,
this min-series is a disappointment no matter how well
filmed.
"The fortunes of war flow this way and that" 
2009-10-27 - The BBC's 1987 seven-part miniseries based on Olivia Manning's BALKAN TRILOGY and LEVANT TRILOGY were the first pairing of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson (who would soon wed and become each very famous internationally in his and her own right), and they've never been better as Guy and Harriet Pringle, an academic couple trapped "on the wrong side of Europe" during the early years of World War II. In Bucharest, for Guy's first job teaching English as a married man, the Pringles find themselves increasingly isolated, first by the movements of the Rumanian fascists in league with Hitler (the Iron Guard), and then by the invading German army; they become transplanted first to Athens and then to Cairo as the war continues, along with a changing group of other involuntary English exiles. The miniseries, like the books it is base on, is tremendously episodic, and sometimes you lose track of who's who in Guy's and Harriet's circle given the enormous cast of characters. Whereas the Manning novels (like that other great extensive roman a clef that covers the same period, Anthony Powell's DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME) allow the characters to be joined by the sense of the ebb and flow of the author's strong prose style, here many of the episodes seem highly disjointed. Yet many of the moments within have been unforgettable to me for more than twenty years: the Pringles finding to their horror at a performance at the Bucharest Opera that the German influence has replaced "Rigoletto" with "Tannhauser"; the final result in Cairo of Professor Lord Pinkrose's long-deferred lecture on Byron; the consequences when the likable but impossible sponger Prince Yakimov (Ronald Pickup, in a classic performance) indulges in a cigarette during an Athens air-raid; the strained humiliated goodbye of a Syrian who has shown Harriet the sights in Damascus when she leaves him to run off with her countrymen.
The effect of the production is helped tremendously not only by the expensive sets and costumes (the BCC wanted to compete with the success of Granada Television's recent expensive miniseries adaptations of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED and THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, and spared little) and by the terrific acting. Branagh has never been more charming as the irrepressible and platonically promiscuous Guy, a Marxist English teacher who makes everyone feel as if he's the most important person in the room, and Thompson has one of her signature roles as the lonely, long-suffering Harriet. One can genuinely fault the series for presenting World War II mostly as a bothersome nuisance to bourgeois, well-educated Englishmen; yet as so many novelists and filmmakers of the twentieth century were aware, few things have more appeal to audiences than young people in love separated and displaced by war.
How do you turn on the Subtitles?
2009-05-10 - This DVD was hard to work with on my (new) DVD player. Please, someone, how do you turn on the subtitles? I've tried everything I know several times. The box says "closed captioned" and I really need that feature to hear properly.
As good as it gets
2009-03-25 - If this type of entertainment is your thing, this is an incredibly good value. Nine bucks for six something hours - seven episodes - of great entertainment. There are plenty of reviews here about the program if you need that kind of info - I say buy it, pop some corn and stay home from the crap movies - I guess that would be almost all of them - and save yourself at least a hundred bucks and be well entertained. There's some laughs, some cries and a great story of people looking everywhere for what's right under their noses.
