The Ruby in the Smoke

The Sally Lockhardt mysteries proved to be a mild disappointment. They are not up to the usual BBC period drama standards - or rather they haven't gotten the period drama treatment. The story relies heavily on a Victorian atmosphere, but you rarely get this in the film adaptations. First of all, Miss Piper, lovely and talented as she is, has the least Victorian beauty imaginable. She is so much AD 2000 that every scene with her in it loses every kind of credibility. One can argue that women were born with different features in olden days - but they pretty much tried to rearrange their facial muscles to imitate the accepted standards of any given era. Where today's actresses try to make their lips appear lush and succulent, every Victorian girl would have subconsciously made every effort to make her mouth appear as a tiny rosebud. The same goes for eyes, hair, posture, gestures. Miss Piper walks straight out of 2007 and makes everything around her 2007.

Watching the adaptations, one also gets the impression that the Victorian society was very welcoming to different races and accepted them into the society with open arms. Almost in every single shot featuring the London society, there are Asian, Caribbean and Black people, the latter even boosting rasta hairstyle on one occasion. The golden truth however is that representatives of these races only got into contact with The Society as footmen and servants, and never ever mixed with them.

My overall impression was that these adaptations were meant for a young viewer who cares little for the authenticity of a traditional well mounted BBC period piece production. If you want some moderate tension and a fairly watchable entertainment with some good moments, don't hesitate to view these films. I don't regret sitting through them at one go, I only wish I would have been totally overwhelmed.

I haven't read "The Ruby in the Smoke" which probably explains my reaction to this film. Anyway, for the other uninitiated amongst you, this is the basic plot - young Sally Lockhart (Billie Piper) is living with her aunt after her father's ship sank. It turns out there is more to this death than it seems, as Sally receives a cryptic note, eventually leading her to a man named Marchbanks who gives her a notebook and tells her she has an enemy called Mrs Holland (Julie Walters, at her villainous best). This leads Sally through a maze of clues and memories, finding out the fate of her father and the truth of her own origins, and the truth of the elusive eponymous ruby.

I feel this would have done very well as a television series, but as a film it merely felt rushed. The characters introduced promised to be interesting, but weren't really properly developed, and I had trouble keeping up with all the twists in the plot, which were rushed by in seconds. Sally seemed like a fascinating character, but her character development was left to a few scenes of her standing up to her aunt and demonstrating her ability for dealing with figures. This left the film feeling somewhat sterile - more of a puzzle than a story.

I think really for you to understand the movie you have got to read the book first. Its a fairly short read and can clear some of the confusion people have with the movie. Like the guy before me, I think the scenes do jump around quite quickly so you have to pay constant attention. They actors I thought were pretty decent and I thought that Billie Piper was the perfect pick to act out Sally Lockhart. She has those eyes that just caught my attention and right at the start of the movie I could identify her as Sally.

Overall a pretty good movie but i thought it should've have been up around 2 hours long at least since they rushed the movie a little. However, I do hope that they will film the next movie soon because I'm a decent fan of this book series.

Nobody does period like the BBC and after the excellent Jane Eyre which recently aired on Masterpiece Theatre my wife and I were looking forward to the PBS presentation of Ruby in the Smoke. My wife enjoyed Phillip Pullman's "Dark Arts" books so maybe the blame for this mess lies with the adaptation. The cast did their best with the limited material they had to work with and the actors who played the photographer and his sister were truly engaging. The same cannot be said about Billy Piper. By the end of her second season on "Dr Who" she was showing some depth and dimension but here she was strangely wooden. And either they never got around to actually finishing the script or big chunks of this project never made it out of the edit suite. A sad waste of talent and my time.

I haven't read 'Ruby in the Smoke' but I have read some of the other Sally Lockheart books. I was hoping that this film would throw some light on a few things, but instead I found it very hard to follow. One minute we were here, the next somewhere else. I found it quite difficult to work out where all the characters fitted in, or why they acted the way they did. I don't think it was the acting, but the script was so rushed, they barely had time to fit in all the slitting of throats and killing everyone off. I'd thought this was a children's book, but I do rather regret letting my kids stay up to watch it. I hope future dramatisations of the books slow down a little for the sake of clarity. Surely, if you're going to do a drama like this with all the scenery, clothes and atmosphere, you should try to do it justice and not rush it?