 | |
List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Bfs Entertainment
Salesrank: 73266
Released: April 12, 2005 |
| Our Price: $129.00 |
| Used Price: $30.97 |
|
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
|
Editorial Review:
Deep in her sleep behind closed doors of the Audley estate, Lady Audley’s scandalous past haunts her dreams. Revelling in the luxury attained by marriage to Sir Michael Audley (Kenneth Cranham – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) an aristocrat thirty years her senior, the beautiful and cunning Lucy Graham (Neve McIntosh – Gormenghast) is also greatly admired by Sir Audley’s dashing nephew, Robert (Steven Mackintosh – Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), who begins to nurse suspicions that Lucy is implicated in the bizarre disappearance of his good friend, George Talboys (Jamie Bamber – Horatio Hornblower). Powerfully tempted by Lucy’s allures, Robert struggles to solve the mysterious puzzle of Lady Audley’s involvement, exposing dark secrets, deception and murder along the way.
Lady Audley's Secret Reviews:
A Machiavellian anti-heroine in a compelling mystery 
2008-11-30 - "Lady Audley's Secret" the movie production is a compelling mystery with a credible cast. However, it is not really a faithful adaptation of the book and so purists may not appreciate it. I for one, loved both the book and the movie. In the movie adaptation, Neve McIntosh plays Lucy, an impoverished governess to a young woman, Alicia Audley [Juliette Caton] who catches the eye of her much older employer, Sir Michael Audley [Kenneth Cranham] and marries him. Life seems to proceed smoothly at first though the new Lady Audley seems to harbor a few secrets.
Things start to go drastically wrong for Lady Audley when her husband's nephew, Robert [Steven Mackintosh] shows up for a visit and seems antagonistic towards Lucy aka Lady Audley. The arrival of Robert's old friend, George Talboys [Jamie Bamber] creates more problems as Lucy has a dark secret that she fears George will reveal and takes desperate measures to conceal them.
When George goes missing, Robert is bent on unravelling the mystery, and is suspicious of Lucy - setting him off on an investigation that not only brings him closer to solving the mystery, but uncovers some of Lucy's secrets, putting his own life in danger.
Though part of the mystery is known to viewers as the movie proceeds, there is a dark secret that is only revealed to viewers towards the end, which makes the story all the more compelling and the mystery riveting. The acting is credible all-around, especially of the two leads, the anti-heroine Lady Audley as played by neve McIntosh and also Robert [Steven McKintosh]. They not only portray their characters with compelling intensity but share strong on-screen chemistry.
The sets are lush as are the costumes and the cinematography of the English countryside is simply breathtaking. Fans of period dramas and Victorian mysteries will love this offering. Highly recommended!
Dark secrets
2008-11-22 - This was a superb production!!!!- I have never read the book but this was a great melodrama. You find yourself at times feeling sympathy for each character in spite of their flaws. They are not one-sided. The plot shows how Lady Audley's secret destroys the whole family, not just her.
Neve Macintosh portrays her part well, as a rather ruthless woman who wants a secure life. Yet she is still capable of love.
A great movie!
Excellent
2007-09-06 - BEAUTIFUL SCENERY, BEAUTIFUL VICTORIAN FASHION. WONDERFUL PLOT, CARRIED OUT TASTEFULLY BY ALL ACTORS. VERY ENJOYABLE. A REALLY EXCELLENT DVD TO ADD TO YOUR PERIOD DRAMA COLLECTION.
Exploring the Dark Side of Victorian "Respectability" 
2006-10-06 - Though this has been called a mystery (and it is, in part, that) its really much more than that. Through its many twists and turns this labyrinthine novel is really an expose of the countless hypocrisies and double-standards concealed beneath the polite veneer of Victorian society. Whats most exciting is that this novel is proof that not all of those alive during the time subscribed to the notion that Victorian England actually was the shining isle of virtue and respectability that many claimed it to be. "Morality" and "respectablity" were mandatory in the England of the 1860's and though very few people could actually live up to these high standards the rich could at least afford the semblance of respectability. Those with money could conveniently hide their own imperfections and sins behind thick castle doors or send proof of their sins off to the colonies in order to keep them out of sight and out of mind. The poor were not so lucky, for them the slightest mistake or even the slightest hint of scandal was instantly made public and scandal spelled instant ruin. Tucked comfortably away behind ivy covered walls the rich lived however they wanted to. But the poor lived under the watchful eye of the public and the wealthy landowners that were exploiting them and ready to discipline them if they stepped out of line; thus the poor lived in fear of both material blight and in fear of censor from their supposed "betters".
Braddon focuses her keen attentions on a young and beautiful 22 year old who was born in a mining town. Realizing that the only way that she can escape living in the same squalid conditions as her parents "Helen" decides to improve her prospects in the only way that is available to a woman in the 1860's: she marries for money. But her first marriage to George Talsby doesn't turn out as planned (because of the marriage George is cut off from his families wealth) and though the union produces a child she knows she cannot love a man who cannot "make her comfortable" and so she abandons him and then tries the only other way she can think of to escape from poverty: she changes her name and gets a job working on a wealthy estate. This turns out rather well for "Helen" (now calling herself "Lucy" and posing as a single governess) because the wealthy Lord Audely for whom she is working, though a good thirty years her senior, just happens to be in the market for a young bride and cannot help but notice the striking beauty working in his house. When he proposes she accepts and becomes Lady Audley and is forever freed from the prospect of having to earn a living, or so she thinks.
But, alas, her good fortune does not last as her estranged husband George Talsby (who is still trying to find her) just happens to be friends with Lord Audley's nephew, Robert, and when the two of them return from a stint in Australia and arrive at the Audley estate Lady Audley must do everything in her power to avoid allowing this particular "secret" from her past (and, yes, there is actually more than one) to be revealed. To avoid her estranged husband she simply faints every time she hears him approaching and rushes off to her room. Interestingly Lord Audley never asks Lady Audley about her past even when she wakes up in the middle of the night screaming in horror from the memory of it and from the fear of being found out. To Lord Audley Lady Audley is merely a showpiece; she is no more alive to him than a painting. And Lucy's relationship to the portrait that Lord Audley commisions is an especially interesting and telling one. Once Robert and George get a look at this portrait they are both filled with a need to possess her. The nephew is filled with lust and the estranged first husband, realizing for the first time that his friends stepmother is actually his runaway wife, wants her back (although he keeps her true identity a secret). And all of this happens while lightning crashes around the house and guadily lights up the room. Braddon is not above sensationalistic moments, and because of this you are never for one moment bored for every time you want something to happen it does, but despite a series of sensationalistic moments she is sincerely interested in the plight of women in Victorian society. Victorian England offered very little in the way of career opportunites for women and the Victorians seemed to value women's reputations more than they valued women as actual living & breathing individuals with their own complex identities. But Braddon, thankfully, is not afraid to tell it like it is and with "Lucy" we get a devastating portrait of a woman's fate in such a male dominated society. Lord Audley's niece, Alicia, comfortably inhabits Victorian England simply because she has no knowledge of the world outside the estate that she grew up on and so she actually does appear to be the prim Victorian ideal; Lucy, on the other hand, has seen the world and is intimately familar with its realites and she has a complex identity and complex views on just what those realities are. Nonetheless due to strict social surveillance of women and their behavior she has learned how dangerous this society can be to a woman with strong views and she has learned to keep her true views and her true self hidden away. Lucy is forced to be an excellent actress although on occasion the true Lucy does burst through the social facade and on these occasions the real Lucy really lets her oppressors have a piece of her mind. This is admittedly "sensationalistic" fiction and Braddon's heroine is a sensationalistic character but it is also obvious that Braddon is genuinely interested in investigating a society whose social codes require women to live secret or double lives.
Once they get a glimpse of the real Lucy the men all view her as "cold, rational and remorseless" but it is clear that its the injustices of this lop-sided male dominated society that force her to become the self-preserving and calculating survivalist that she becomes. Upon hearing her justification for doing each thing that she's done a psychiatrist deems her "mad"; the Victorians with their oversimplied views on women are not equipped to understand a creature like Lady Audley.
As Lucy's past, and Victorian society's moral authorities (including the scorned and smitten nephew turned into a wanna-be Sherlock Holmes who busies himself gathering clues with which to convict her), begin to catch up with her we see her in more and more cramped spaces until she is finally held in her room like a prisoner by her husband and the smitten nephew. Lord Audley fears for the damage that would be done to his reputation were his wife's many "secrets" to be revealed, but the nephew is more interested in exacting revenge and punishment on Lady Audley for refusing his own amorous advances. Thus Lucy becomes a symbol for what happens to women in a repressive society that cannot see or value women as individuals but can see them only as embodiments of the virtue that they themselves aspire to or of the vices that they cannot escape.
So although this is a sensationalistic film with a lurid twist or a salacious turn every 3-5 minutes and with an ending as unexpected as it is unfaithful to the original novel on which it is based; both film and novel (each in their own way) effectively turn that prying Victorian lens back on Victorian society itself and implicate the entire society in creating Lady Audley. Once she is found out Lady Audley strikes out not at Victorian society nor at the men who made her what she is but at her own portrait. The implications of lashing out against her own portrait are threefold: 1)her dream of wealth has been ruined, 2) the portrait represents the fiction that she was forced to play in order to survive in Victorian society, and 3) the realization that she is not the person in the portrait makes her face what she really might be (mad). This last fear is a fear instilled in her from childhood when her father told her that her supposedly dead mother was actually mad and that this madness was hereditary. This is the real "secret" she has concealed from the world. And the real innovation of the book is that it offers the Victorian definition of madness. For the Victorian "madness" becomes a term used against those that fail to follow conventions. Thus among everything else that Lady Audley must contend with (unjust social conditions, extremely narrow definitons/expectations of Victorian women, mens arbitrary exercise of power over women) she must also deal with a primitive pre-Freudian Victorian psychology which chooses to see unconventionality, and especially unconventionality in women, as a disease of the mind.
This is certainly a fascinating side of the Victorians that we would not get were we to confine ourselves to reading only the more conventional literature of the day.
Lady Audley, not Cousin Rachel 
2006-05-10 - This program was SUPPOSED to be based on Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, not Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel, but it seems to resemble du Maurier's work. A man goes after a woman not so much because she is a murderer, but because she doesn't return his love. Braddon's book wasn't like that! Robert is a far more sympathetic character in the book, really struggling to make the right decision, and Alicia does not like Lucy at all. I understand that the person who developed this for TV sympathized with Lucy's character more than Braddon did, but this person changed the story too much. And the book's ending was much happier. A real disappointment!
