La joya de la corona

The person who wrote the other review here dismays me. I loved The Jewel In The Crown and highly recommend it! I think it's a very skillful and successful adaptation for TV from fiction.

My own views about this series have changed -- from good to better. A few years ago, I rented it and watched it over a couple days. I thought it was very good, a haunting, tragic story very well done. I realize now that I watched it then very literally, very matter-of-fact, and saw it mostly as a straightforward series of events in the lives of these people trying to cope with the turmoil of the last days of the British in India. I viewed it mostly as a sort of soap opera.

Recently I read all four of the books from which this story was taken, and what an illumination! These novels are brilliant, and I'm stunned with admiration for the talent of the writer, Paul Scott. So after turning the last page, I hot-footed it down to my local video store and rented the whole shebang AGAIN -- and this time saw it as a giant allegory, laden with symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony. The acting is top notch across the board -- you won't find better -- and it's visually striking. There are scenes in this movie that I'll never forget, in the same way the characters are haunted by them.

Instead of a meandering and random soap opera, I saw how event built upon event, how characters affected one another, how chance meetings changed lives, how it all slouched inexorably towards the climax -- or anticlimax -- of the devastating conclusion.

I am amazed at the skillfulness of the screenplay -- to compress those four novels and all their layers of complexity into this TV series. It really is astonishing how the *intent* and *spirit* of the story is communicated... it's not bashing you over the head, but it's *implied*.

I love how the story does not spoon-feed you. I love how the characters don't make sense and we must puzzle them out for ourselves. We're left with a hundred questions about why they did what they did, and I will enjoy speculating about that for years to come. (If you like pat answers, steer clear of this one.)

I loved this series, I intend to buy the videos, and I highly recommend it.

The haunting story of Paul Scott's THE RAJ QUARTET brought to the screen with flawless acting and character interpretation. While the story is not a pleasant one, the screenplay captures the scope of the problems created by nearly 300 years of British presence in India. Peggy Ashcroft, Fabia Drake, Judy Parfitt, Art Malik and above all Tim Pigott-Smith, to mention but a very few of the cast, create memorable characters that come alive on the screen and will live on in your memories. Superb...

I think that this series is absolute perfection. The acting is magnificent, the story is fascinating and the characters are so real that one thinks that one is actually watching a documentary about the final days of the Raj. It is a marvelous adaptation, not a spare scene and it is beautifully directed. It is tightly woven and tells its tale with enviable clarity. I can not find one flaw in this stupendous series. Literate, complex, compelling, this series is singular and an out and out classic. I fear that we will never see anything like this again. Given the current vapid and stupid landscape of American and British television, "The Jewel in the Crown" is THE exemplar of the height of drama.

There's a small scene in the first 2 hour episode of Jewel in the Crown about 80 minutes in. Susan Wooldridge, a gangly maladroit, clearly not cut out for India, is sleeping. The long awaited rain wakes her and she gets up and walks out onto the balcony. The obsessional loving care and artistry that is evident in just this single minute tell you everything you need to know about the quality of Jewel in the Crown. The set and the lighting on the sleeping figure momentarily transforms the character who will later be known, pejoratively as "that Manners girl" into the Diana-like beauty she always imagined she would become. Wooldridge is convincingly asleep and wakes naturally, and surprise, delight and relief register on her face as she revels in the feel of rain on her face. Nothing is out the book. It's all fresh, original, new. A great piece of acting by Wooldridge, never surpassed or even approached by all the other actors and actresses who have had to play this popular little scene, present in so many other movies. A great piece of directing, lighting, scene setting and costume design.

Aside from this one, there are 649 other minutes and the same care and devotion is taken with all of them. In the episode "The Mughal Room", Sara Layton and Guy Perron spend Guy's last afternoon exploring the Governor's Summer residence at Pankot. 7 minutes go by without any dialogue in this little elegy for the cobwebbed glory of the Raj before they settle down in one of the bedrooms to make love. You won't find anything else like it in mainstream television. Very hard to do but very beautiful.

But then the whole story is excellent, beautifully paced, tragic, funny, pathetic, illuminating and exciting by turns. I've watched it a number of times and I never want it to end.

It really is the best drama series ever made.

I really loved this series. I think I've seen the whole series about 7 or 8 times, and I see something new each time.

The Jewel in the Crown tells the story of individual people trying to live their lives in a world in the process of changing beyond recognition. The acting quality and execution of the entire production has never been equaled. You really believe that these people lived in this extraordinary time, the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Some are able to move forward into the new world, some are destroyed, and all are changed forever.

I actually think that the series is better than the sum of the books, but nothing beats the first book in the series (The Jewel in the Crown) as a stand-alone novel. It's all about human perspective. Similar to the film Rashomon (or Courage Under Fire), the novel Jewel in the Crown tells a story from every point of view except one. You have to think about what that means. The series captures this effect differently, but it does so beautifully.