I did have a hard time picturing Mariel Hemingway in her role, though, and I could not for the life of me picture her in a marriage with Michael York. I wouldn't know, he seemed to fit in well to me. Scenes seemed dropped into the movie out of thin air, and I highly suspect reading the book would be necessary to get a better feeling for these characters.Īnother review said there was a casting mistake in Michael York. Was it originally a 2-night miniseries which turned into 3 hours with all the commercials cut out? Had it ever been in theaters? The dialogue seemed very melodramatic, compulsory and not well-fleshed out. Because I didn't know the movie was based on a book, I was confused for a while as to what the deal with this film was. The length of the movie (3 hours) intrigued me and I recorded it to watch later.

'I have never read the book and happened upon this movie blindly when it was broadcast on cable. Since they are appealing, we would like to see them do well. The appealing characters are Pandora (Jacqueline Bisset) and the Mariel Hemingway character.

This casting mistake makes the main story incredible and also contributes to making the ending less than satisfactory. The actor who plays him has to be a stone fox. Edmund is a guy with whom the most beautiful and interesting women fall madly in love at first sight. There is also a serious casting mistake in the casting of Edmund.

So, even though we come to know who the characters are, who their relationships are, and what their problems are, we don't really get a chance to feel those problems as we do in 'The Shell Seekers'. He doesn't.Īlso, even at three hours, with the large number of characters, we don't get a chance to get into the few interesting characters enough. We are made to dislike Edmund at the beginning and are longing to see him get clobbered. The tension is kept up by two on-going mysteries: who is the dead body shown at the beginning? and what is Lottie going to do? When you set up exciting questions like these, you have to have some exciting answers to them. But on its own, it is quite a respectable movie with much to offer. But it invites comparisons with 'The Shell Seekers' and 'Coming Home', and unfortunately it comes in second by comparison. If this movie had not been based on a Rosamunde Pilcher book, it would probably be very popular. The film is PG-class with no naughty words or bare skin or any of the other things that some people object to. Viewers who like grand-scale period movies such as 'The Buchaneers' or 'North and South' should enjoy this movie, even though the period is the present and the upper-class is Scottish rather than English. A broad sweep of characters and relationships in this three-hour extravaganza.

September rosamunde pilcher book review