James Clavell's Noble House Review

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(More customer reviews)Noble House is an eight-hour Classic TV Miniseries produced and broadcast in 1988 by NBC. Based on the fantastic and richly detailed novel of the same name by James Clavell, it features a large cast headlined by Pierce Brosnan, who portrays business tycoon Ian Dunross.
This was NBC's second Classic TV Miniseries adaptation of a Clavell novel, the first was 1980s Shogun. Both take place in the same fictional universe, Noble House even featuring connections to Shogun and yet another Clavell novel, Tai-Pan.
For this miniseries, the timeframe of the original novel was changed from the early 1960s to the 1980s.
Other actors include Denholm Elliott, Deborah Raffin, Tia Carrere, John Houseman, Julia Nickson-Soul, and John Rhys-Davies (who also appeared in Shogun.)
Noble House centers around big-business piracy in Hong Kong. The miniseries opens with Brosnan driving through the rain to meet Denholm Elliott, who plays the outgoing "tai-pan" in Hong Kong's oldest and leading trading firm: Struan & Company.
"Tai-pan," a Cantonese expression, means "supreme leader," and at Struan & Company the title has been passed down at least 150 years
Dunross' arch rival and enemy, Quillan Gornt (Rhys-Davles), is tai-pan of the second leading trading company. Not only does Gornt wants to destroy Dunross and take over Noble House, the two men have racing horses that compete against each other as well.
Meanwhile, two American tycoons (Raffin and Ben Masters) have come to Hong Kong to make a financial deal with Dunross.
But in Clavell's Hong Kong there is no such thing as a single deal. Double-dealing and triple-crossing are more the style of the international wheeler-dealers here.
Diverse players here include bankers, government officials, police and a man called "Four Finger Wu" (Khigh Dhiegh), who runs an opium-smuggling syndicate from a junk boat in Aberdeen Harbor and has a mistress one-third his age named Venus Poon (Carrere).
The eight hours practically sizzle, thanks to Bercovici's articulate script (he also wrote the script for the Shogun miniseries).
Viewers a treated to a manipulated run on a bank, selling short on the stock market, the fixing of horse races, a kidnaping, seductions and murders. Running counterpoint are the burning and sinking of a floating restaurant and a catastrophic landslide.
Add to this a couple of juicy love stories, especially the one between Brosnan and Raffin (who brings a light comic element to her role as the tough wheeler-dealer), while everything is done in ravishing cars, speedboats, mansions and casinos.
But, the biggest and brightest star of the show is clearly Hong Kong, which is more like a video game than a city, filled with the exotica and intrigue that you used to find in old movies. Early in the show, a character who's just landed at the airport asks, "What's that smell?" His host answers, "That's the smell of money."
The $16-million-plus production included eight weeks of exteriors shot in Hong Kong and another eight for interiors in the De Laurentiis studio in Wilmington, N.C.
Highly recommended.

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James Clavell's Shogun (1980) Review

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(More customer reviews)It has been two decades since James Clavell's novel first aired, but "Shogun" is still one of the finest mini-series yet produced and it still holds up. The stranger in a strange land story of an English navigator shipwrecked in fuedal Japan strikes such a strong chord because the audience is in the same predicament as the main character, confronted with an unknown and dangerous world that refuses to make sense. "Shogun" was filmed in Japan with remarkable fidelity to both the original story and local culture.
As Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, Chamberlain is often called upon to do more with looks than with dialogue. As the "King of the Mini-Series," it is easy to forget what Chamberlain can do as an actor given the proper material (I wish his version of Christopher Fry's "The Lady's Not For Burning" was available on video tape). Actually, there is a sense in which Chamberlain's performance is arguable the weakest of the cast, but that speaks more to the strength of the supporting players. Certainly John Rhys-Davies steals every scene he is in as Vasco Rodrigues, Damien Thomas' Father Alvito personifies political machination, and Nobuo Kaneko as Lord Ishido has that glare down perfectly. Ultimately, it is the Japanese actors who carry "Shogun." From the legendary Toshirô Mifune as Lord Toranaga, to the novice actress Yôko Shimada as Mariko, to Frankie Sakai as Yabu and every one of the characters who make up Blackthorne's Japanese household, these actors provide the new word that confront's Chamberlain's character. The choice of producer Eric Bercovici to also adopt Clavell's novel was the ideal choice. Bercovici was not only familiar with the mini-series format, having done "Washington Behind Close Doors," but he was the writer on "Hell in the Pacific," a 1968 movie with Lee Marvin and Toshirô Mifune. During WWII the two men end up on a deserted island. What made the film unique was that it was done without subtitles; Marvin spoke English and Mifune spoke Japanese and the idea was to show it in both countries without subtitles. Okay, unfair advantage to the Japanese, but you have to appreciate the idea which "Shogun" certainly uses to great effect.
Director Jerry London does an admirable job of presenting Japanese culture on its own terms, which is exactly what is right for the story. My understanding was that the Orson Welles narration was added at the, uh, request of the network who felt audiences would not be able to read between the lines. I think that for the most part "Shogun" would work without the excessive explanations, even if you have not read the novel, but we will never know.
If you are looking for something to lose yourself in next weekend, you would not find too many things as intelligent and as fascinating as "Shogun." Just be sure you do the complete original mini-series and not the one cassette mini-version.

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