British television of the 1980's managed to produce scores of movies and miniseries based on classic novels. Name a book by a British author of the 19th or early 20th centuries, and you can bet there's an adaptation for British TV. Most of them are faithful, well-acted, full of authentic period details, and don't have the same nettlesome commercial sensibilities of American TV. A lot of them are very good: for example, the long series of Sherlock Holmes stories starring Jeremy Brett, or Fortunes of War with Emma Thompson.
One problem: they tended to crank these things out, with the same actors and directors, so that one period piece set at an English country manor featuring well-spoken actors in tailored tweeds looks and feels more or less like any other period piece set at an English country manor featuring well-spoken actors in tailored tweeds.
With Evelyn Waugh, that's a big problem. Waugh is a hilariously funny writer, even when he's writing about infidelity and death and the other terrible things that happen in "A Handful of Dust". So the film version, with Kristen Scott-Thomas, Alec Guiness, and Stephen Fry in a small role, follows the plot of the book, and uses much of the dialogue, but they've cut out most of the humor.
Take a scene from the book where Tony and Jock get very drunk and telephone Brenda (Tony's wife) and stagger around to her flat in the middle of the night. In the book this scene goes on for several pages -- they phone her, get lost, phone again, have a few more drinks, etc -- but in the movie it lasts all of two minutes. In another part of the book there's a parish priest who recycles his sermons from thirty years earlier, all of which were written while he served in the army in Afghanistan; the parishioners don't mind the references to deserts and jungles and tigers. That's not in the movie at all.
It's not a bad movie, just very disappointing if you've read the book. "Bright Young Things", Stephen Fry's more recent adaptation of Waugh's "Vile Bodies" was a much more accurate version of Waugh's black humor and satire. The humor is almost entirely missing from "Handful of Dust".
One problem: they tended to crank these things out, with the same actors and directors, so that one period piece set at an English country manor featuring well-spoken actors in tailored tweeds looks and feels more or less like any other period piece set at an English country manor featuring well-spoken actors in tailored tweeds.
With Evelyn Waugh, that's a big problem. Waugh is a hilariously funny writer, even when he's writing about infidelity and death and the other terrible things that happen in "A Handful of Dust". So the film version, with Kristen Scott-Thomas, Alec Guiness, and Stephen Fry in a small role, follows the plot of the book, and uses much of the dialogue, but they've cut out most of the humor.
Take a scene from the book where Tony and Jock get very drunk and telephone Brenda (Tony's wife) and stagger around to her flat in the middle of the night. In the book this scene goes on for several pages -- they phone her, get lost, phone again, have a few more drinks, etc -- but in the movie it lasts all of two minutes. In another part of the book there's a parish priest who recycles his sermons from thirty years earlier, all of which were written while he served in the army in Afghanistan; the parishioners don't mind the references to deserts and jungles and tigers. That's not in the movie at all.
It's not a bad movie, just very disappointing if you've read the book. "Bright Young Things", Stephen Fry's more recent adaptation of Waugh's "Vile Bodies" was a much more accurate version of Waugh's black humor and satire. The humor is almost entirely missing from "Handful of Dust".