The Shell Seekers

I read the book, and saw the movie. The book always has more detail, but I love the movie. I've watched it over and over.

This is a very slow paced film about a grandmother (Angela Lansbury) who spends all her time thinking about the past, and beating herself up for how selfish and greedy her children turned out. The writing is stilted and artificial, like little polished speeches rather than dialogue. It feels as if lifted from pop-psychology books. Nothing much actually happens except some soulful hugs and a lot of complaining.

There are scenes involving sea shells which are supposed to be cosmically significant. It reminds me of the kinds of films my friends made as teenagers full of Deep Inner Meaning.

The adult children are like the rude aristocratic brats lifted from an Agatha Christie novel. It has a non-believable too-happy ending.

Although the plot of this film is a bit thin on the ground, this is made up for to a great extent by everything else .......... picture quality, sets, quality of the acting. The film is plastically very beautiful and serves to remind us that Cornwall is indeed one of the most beautiful parts of England especially seen under clear blue skies. When I was about seven years old I spent a glorious holiday there with my parents and never forgot it ! The actors in this film all put in splendid performances and the cameramen have obviously paid particular attention to lightig, the weather, the beauty of the gardens etc. The plot can get annoying at times with this continuous bickering amongst Lansbury's children and I don't really like seeing people fighting over inheritance or inheritance-to-be. I thought that was a speciality in France but the English seem to go in for it too. The film has some sad moments and makes ample use of flashbacks. I'm glad I bought the dvd of this as I will be able to watch it again and again as I probably missed some subtleties first time round. Not an action film by any stretch of the imagination but it will please those who like films about family relations etc. Quintessentially English, the story should definitely please in places like New Zealand, the USA and Australia. Overall, then, highly recommendable !

Just finished book around noon today, and just finished this TV movie few hours afterwards.

They had two hours to condense a lengthy novel. I think they did a decent job, strayed pretty far from the book, but decent nonetheless. I'm very disappointed they left out several characters, and reduced others to footnotes, but again only two hours.

I think what I appreciated most was they screenwriter/director gave us some dialogue which might (or might not) have been exactly what Rosamunde was thinking when she wrote the book. Their interpretation is what I enjoyed most.

Moving on to the 2006 version now.

The book was one of the most evocative and compelling I've ever read. And I was very happy to see it was being made into what I thought would be a quality film. Unfortunately, the WHOLE point of the book was LOST in this TV version. Major plot elements were changed or dropped. There were only 3 good things that I can say about this version:

#1 Angela Lansbury was perfectly cast,

#2 The scenery was fabulous

#3 The acting was very good for a TV movie. But if you think you'll be viewing a faithful retelling of the classic "Shell Seekers"... forget it! Save your eyesight for the book! PLEASE!