Episode 4 again emphasizes Demelza’s self-reliance: she is shown to give birth with just Prudie’s help (Eleanor Tomlinson, Beatie Edney) — this is one of Horsfield’s additions
Episode 5 ends in moving funeral for Captain Henshawe (John Hollingworth — another actor who will be missed), with again the emphasis on the group, the community, here upholding E.M. Forster’s value of friendship before any abstraction (“country” aka nationalism)
Friends in Poldark,
I thought the series went onto a new level of power in Episode 5 especially it had not quite done this season thus far. All the new additions of motive and feeling (scenes, dialogues not in the book) and all the changes (having Caroline and Dwight married before he goes on board ship, making George a magistrate and inventing all sorts of scenes where he is egregiously unjust to the starving, homeless, jobless whose plight he and his kind are largely responsible for) come together to give an undertow of intense emotionalism in the story of the rescue of Dwight. In the book, Black Moon and in the 1977-78 mini-series, while we have the romance of Morwenna and Drake seen against the backdrop of the Rev Whitworth and his aristocratic mother selling themselves to marry him off to a connection of George and the new capitalism, the intense antagonism of George and Aunt Agatha, the actual adventure is done at length with no interruptions – and it is well done, carefully showing just how dangerous it is to each individual, no step left out, in ways that leave no room for sentimental emotion. In the book an 1975 movie it’s Joe Nanfan who is murdered and he is not as important an individual presence as Captain Henshawe, so there are no deeply moving grieving scenes, no funeral at episodes’s end. There is no doubt – testing this on my own response that this particular new Poldark episode is far more inwardly felt than the previous comparable one. We do feel intense camaraderie: Ross is like (to given this a very contemporary spin) the small boat owner played by Mark Rylance in the movie Dunkirk: the deeply loyal person who will not throw his friend under a bus, will risk his life, lose lives that mean much to him.
If you can see him in the dark, Dwight (Luke Norris) in the dungeon prison, intensely startled to see “Ross!”
One of Turner’s great moments as Ross in this episode: “My friend” (they have come for him)
In the new Poldark the adventure story is continually interrupted, that is we move back and forth between it and George and Elizabeth’s failed attempts to ingratiate themselves into the aristocracy of Cornwall. We are ever switching back to see George and Elizabeth’s ball to which the important people do not come and then to a ball which George and Elizabeth were first not invited to. In the book and in the 1977-78 film Caroline is still somewhat estranged from Dwight and knows nothing of what’s happening to him, is not involved in politics at all; in this new Poldark she is politicking first to find out if Dwight is alive, and then simply because she feels she must and she takes Demelza to the second ball with her.
Before the second ball, Elizabeth (Heida Reed) knows the necklace is overdone, too gaudy, showing insecurity
George (Jack Farthing) seething with resentment: “Extravagant?”
We see George sneering at Ross while we watch him risk all, and when Lord Falmouth turns from George in disgust after we have watched Dwight in prison with Armitage (Falmouth’s nephew by his side), George looks mean and contemptible. In the book and 1977-78 versions we hardly see Dwight until Ross rescues him; but in this new one a skein of scenes shows Dwight working hard to save people who are then taken out and shot for fun; Dwight active all the time whether crying or ironic, starving yes, but basically coherent. When in the book and 1970s Ross finds Dwight he is half-mad, very sick, very weak, trying desperately to save people but not managing it, and unaware of Armitage’s presence. The book and 1970s version are more probable; the new one more romantic and heroic and emotionally wrenching.
One of Dwight and Morwenna’s many love scenes by the sea (Elisse Chappell, Harry Richardson)
Horsfield’s Whitworth (Christian Brassington) is not the menacing, class-climbing sadistic hypocrite of the book or 1970s: but a slightly comic figure who looks down on George
She has reversed events and strengthened the sexual and religious and economic politics (see Irish Times for what this Poldark series has to say about “late stage capitalism”):
If you look at the changes that Horsfield made, they are all in the direction of showing that the judiciary run by Warleggan, a vicious man who fires people from a company and destroys the company if it’s not making big enough profits for him and shows Ross and Henshawe powerless unless Ross agrees to become an instrument either of Falmouth or Bassett, people transported, hung, put in prison to starve to death or die of disease – are all in this direction. The theme is in Graham and the 1970s, but it is taken much further in 2017. What is this but a reflection of the present reactionary Tory and fascist US rumps running the two gov’ts.
In the older Poldark George discovers Drake’s relationship with Geoffrey Charles and love affair with Morwenna before the final rescue, so Ross makes his effective threat that George will face an intensely raging rebellion if he does not free Dwight first; in the new one this will occur in the 6th episode and after to the forced marriage of Morwenna to Whitworth (in the newer one Morwenna is blackmailed into marrying Whitworth in return for Drake’s freedom, which is wholly unlike the book; in the book she is terrified and morally beaten into this;the older Poldark thus seriously questions the morality of obedience to authority). The older Poldark makes much more of Valentine’s rickets because the older Poldark shows Elizabeth as a loving mother to Valentine – and not someone succumbing to drugs to enable her to cope with life with an intensely malignant fierce George as she is in the new Poldark. Both show Sam intensely worried for his brother, but the first has a kind sweet Sam and the second hostile to love from religious bigotry. The newer Poldark makes it much clearer that the English state is funding a French emigre invasion which Ross hitches onto because Horsfield wants to make a political point that the emigres only make the aristocrats hated further; in the 1970s Baron made the lead aristocrat a very sympathetic comrade and shows us his murder by the French revolutionaries. It’s not clear what his politics are. Aunt Agatha is made more needling but much more pathetic in the older series (Eileen May is intensely memorable in the role); the new Agatha (Caroline Blakiston) is smarter, harder, stronger in the new series – I enjoy the use of the tarot pack as a symbol.
Aunt Agatha telling Morwenna she cannot marry Drake Carne and she endangers him ….
If you allow for a film-maker’s right to make an effective film for her time (and Graham in a letter on Hitchcock’s Marnie, was very open to this), then Horsfield’s version is as valid as Graham’s and Alexander Baron’s (he wrote the first 8 episodes of the second season of the 1970s Poldarks, basically covered The Black Moon and half of The Four Swans). They are just different. How to account for the differences in the art It’s not political vision for book, and both versions are exposing the cruelties of capitalism, the irrationalities of hierarchy, the cruelty and coerced sex of forced marriage for money and rank. Horsfield is decidedly more against the French revolution (presented as insanely violent) but she is also far more explicit about the causes for this: the starving and injustice, the helplessness of those with no office, no power. I think Horsfield’s film has the two sets of episodes going at the same time in order to make her work more full of incident as the mode today is many shorts scenes of high intensity. You are not allowed to concentrate on single story. There is loss and it is the same loss found in the first and second season.
I praised Horsfield’s scripts last year after I got the two books and was able to sit down and read them. They read well, but somehow when acted and directed, they do not come across with any of the complexity and facility of the older scripts which feel like very effective dramatized novels. Last night I rewatched Episode 5 (the rescue of Dwight and death of Henshawe with added scenes of failed politicking for George) and then the incomparable Episode 4: even in the Morwenna/Drake story, there is nothing comparable in the new one to Drake’s accosting of Morwenna in the church, and demanding why she is giving in, and her explanation, defense and grief. My feeling is the new directors just don’t give the actors time and space and some of them are not as good. I feel that the newer actors are less subtle but this may just be the result of the demand they project large emotions quickly and then move on.
Caroline (Gabriella Wilde)’s reunion with Dwight: she is witty: Do I detect Scorbutus?
Dwight as ever holding back, more earnest and serious ….
I want again to say as I did last season that the new actors and scenes have entered my dream life once again and compete with the actors from the older series. I am anxious to reread the books and long to go to Cornwall once again.
I have put specific comments on the equivalent episodes in the older series in the comments (4 and 5).
Last on a TV channel one may find a screening of the 1995 single time (2 hour) film adaptation of Book 8 of the Poldarks, Stranger from the Sea.
This earlier version was a flop, partly because the fierce pro-Ellis-Rees fan club adamantly dissed it and got people not to watch, and partly because it was a 2 hour non mini-series which dropped the interesting larger theme, anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist in the novel. The novel includes in its purview a dramatization of the peninsular war and the American corporations which were big funders refused to include it — they wanted pure romance. It is actually an interesting film (Mel Martin and John Bowe deliver creditable performances as and older Ross and an older Demelza) if you are willing to allow the larger political and social themes of the Poldark novels to be eliminated …
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
1977: Poldark, 2nd season: Episode 4:
Morwenna’s distress as she is bullied by George
Geoffrey Charles (Stefan Gates) gives Drake a Bible as a present
Both Season 1 and Season 2 could taken straight from Albion’s fatal tree. We get scene upon scene of the horrors of prison life with an insistence that many people were thrown into them for long periods to die miserable, at the will of magistrates intent on making an example or personal vendetta.
In Episode 4 George Warleggan (Ralph Bates) throws Drake Carne (Kevin McNally) in prison for stealing his stepson’s bible. Drake did not, he is accused and has no recourse. Warleggan is the magistrate. He wants to put an end to Carne’s love affair with his cousin-by-marriage, he loathes Carne as Ross’s brother-in-law. George will prevent the stepson from testifying and hang Drake. And we get a scene which implies the necessity of threatened (and real) violence. George will not listen to Ross’s pleas for justice or truth and so Ross says he will not stop another retaliation of the men thrown off their land or out of jobs through George’s use of enclosure and substitution of flunkies at the mines.
George lets Drake go.
We see Ross (active-adventure hero) rescue Dr Enys (Robin Ellis) from a vile prison where most are dying just as he did Jim Carter in Season 1. Here it’s complicated because Ross travels as part of a envoy of emigres in the counter-revolution. Now we see as the previous episode Orwell’s dictum: alll torture and kill and all lie about it. In the previous episode Ross was almost executed by the emigres who caught him, now it’s the turn of the revolutionatires to be those determined to keep people in prison to die and kill anyone trying to free these men. Again we are bucking whoever is in authority. (Very Graham this.)
Poldark and his men are almost killed by the French soldiers, and one thing I admired was that the violence was not overdone nor underrated. Ross himself kills others lest he be killed (they can afford to take no prisoners he says), and one of his band is killed: but it’s not glamorized and (as in the first season) feels realistic. The head of the emigres is brutally killed — his family had been guillotined. A hard role not that well played but at least it’s there.
Ross and his men’s boat was spied and an ambush set up; they being our heroes spy the spies and kill them first. I felt also some knowledge of what warfare is (marauding bunches of men, bonded together, destroying and murdering) was before us. As with To Serve Them All My Days (which I mentioned and described last time) we are to feel that pacifism won’t do — each person is out for himself in this new France and is just as egoistic.
They do outdoors or location scenes in this second season as brilliantly as they do them in the first. The actors appear to enter into it fully. Robin Ellis does ride his own horse and we get closeups of him exhilarated. The scenes of the boat by the coasts are not computer generated but photographed scenes the actors really did.
The whole sequence takes up much of the episode. It’s sandwiched with the opening cruelties of coerced marriage backed up by Morwena’s (Jane Wymark) having bought into how she cannot marry Drake as beneath her and being sneered at, berated as “loose” and “a wanton” for meeting Drake in church. The same pastor who drove Sam Carne (David Delve) from the church to make one of their own snitches on the pair to make brownie points.
Elizabeth has learned a (wrong) lesson from life: it’s not so much that you need not marry for love and marriage has nothing to do with love, but rather that you, as a woman, should sell yourself for money and for family aggrandizement. That “should” does not follow. We get a story where Elizabeth and George are trying to coerce Morwena into marrying an unfunny Mr Collins type, a sycophant who has bargained for her; Whitworth (Christopher Biggins), a very Solmes from Clarissa, only he’s such a fatuous ass. Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) is driving Morwena to marry Whitworth. Elizabeth stands by and watches her husband bully her son, bully her cousin, insult her aging aunt, and it’s clear Elizabeth doesn’t love him. Complicit in a quiet retired way that is probable, she lets things happen — true to the book and perhaps the time. She is a just woman (not the tyrant George is) but only according to the misguided codes of her day.
Ellen
1977: Poldark, second season, Episode 5:
From the long adventure sequence: Tholly Tregirls (as scout,Duncan Lamont) finds a locket, evidence the French are nearby (in background Zacky Martin, Forbes Collins
Aunt Agatha anxiously intent on her invitations to her birthday party
Poldark, Season 2 Episode 5
I rewatched this last night. While it begins to have continual strengths, the weaknesses are still there: in the inhibition of the acting, especially the presentation of sexual relationships in a sheerly romantic or stereotyped way.
The latter part of the rescue of Enys is done brilliantly: it’s the understated quiet real feel that makes it. The music is simply a light drum beat. The killing is individual and not overproduced so it’s felt as real. Their boat was spied and an ambush set up; they being our heroes spy the spies and kill them first. I felt also some knowledge of what warfare is (marauding bunches of men, bonded together, destroying and murdering) was before us.
Drake’s offer up of himself instead of Ross to a gun is made central to the adventure home as Enys tries to save him. Drake’s despair in the book is mirrored in these scenes of his not caring enough. When he is told by Ross that it seems Morwenna will not be married and Ross will try to help them, there is much strength, as when later in the house he must be told Morwenna is really married. Alas, this is an occasion for preaching in the film, Ross to Drake to accept. We get a retelling of Ross’s by Ross despair when he learned Elizabeth will marry Francis Poldark and then does. A important difference though is Morwena is forced. This we do not see in most 18th century novels: the heroine somehow escapes this fate.
I like Sam’s worry for his brother, that’s touching.
When Morwenna and her now husband Whitworth visit she is very silent and subdued. Whitworth we see take George in and pressure him for more money on the supposition he Whitworth can offer a corrupt deal over land that will hurt those on the land. We do see that Morwenna is dressed richly and arrives in a carriage.
The series plumps more strongly for Agatha as wise than the books. Elizabeth’s baby is almost killed by the doctor’s prescriptions of bundling, vile medicine, emetics, bleeding. George thinks it’s his heir and bullies and bullies. But at least the baby’s endless crying drives her to drive the doctor away. She herself does first unbind the child and then has to get Dr Ennys now home again to secod her. (We see Caroline override Enys on her desire for a splendid wedding and then try to stop him doctoring.) Again intensity and this time the action private, domestic, the woman’s heroism (Elizabeth’s) consists in rejecting the conventions and what’s she’s told to do. Agatha involves herself in urging Elizabeth to do something about that baby’s wails and said she would not have a party for her 100 birthday as long as the child was sick. Agatha alsio immediately voices Morwena’s misery upon looking at her. Her dialogue with the young woman is the most moving thing in the hour. Morwenna tells how she was pressured, led to fear for Drake (he was almost hung for stealing by George when Geoffrey Charles gave Drake his Bible. The old woman feels for her but reiterates she could not marry beneath her, only there was no need to take the parson. Then we remember she never married. Alas, she should have gone to Nampara with Ross as her nephew-son. Demelza would have been a kind niece-daughter.
Elizabeth becomes an interesting if enigmatic character as she is in the books. She didn’t marry Ross whom she did love; but rather Francis who was the heir but turned out to be weak and faithless — in the novels we are shown how she refuses Francis sex and that’s why he goes to other women (that’s not in the film). Then after Francis needless death (half unconscious suicide) she remarried George who she also didn’t love. In the cases of Francis Poldark she found herself with a weak man who drank, gambled, was promiscuous and managed to loss a lot of their money and died young, partly out of his weakness: he drowns trying to prove to Ross he can help him find copper. In the case of George she finds herself with a narrow minded bully, a much stupider man than Francis who domineers over her. There is no sense of any sexual relationship.
The scene at Penrice are stronger than the ones at Nampara once Ross reaches home. Ellis has the terrific advantage he really rides his horse and this is used again and again as he come home to Demelza for example. But once home there is not enough conflict. They are chorus reporting news — this is partly what happens again and again to the Palliser pair at the center of the Pallisers. When the centarl couple are made to embody conventions, there is no conflicrt — this too hinders I now know Graham’s later books.
Just in case the “thrust” of the show is misunderstood, someone gives Ross utterances where he says he disliked that killing and hopes he never has to do that again and the real life that matters, the good one is here with Demelza and his home no matter how threatened — and again we are made to see he can say this because of his rank (but not to think rank means anything more than luck which however gave him the education and confidence and now authority he does use).
The part ends where Black Moon ends. George Warleggen viciously stops Aunt Agatha’s party because he hates her, she gets back by insinuating Elizabeth’s baby was an 8 month baby and so his son is someone else’s. He seems to immediately half-believe her and begins to stay outside the nursery which behavior Elizabeth notices right away. The part ends on his bitter face. Ross has become the admired hero for his exploit saving Enys, Ross is liked and admired by his tenants and friends, by his wife, Demelza. The series today might give us more depth in George and more sympathy for his antisocial behavior and the corruptness he must be surrounded by; that would be sentimental in a way. Leaving him the rigid tyrant in a popular film can be seen as a critique of the powerful hierarchal patriarchal establishment.
The adventured in the older series moves across episodes 4 and 5; Episode 6 begins The Four Swans
Ellen
Do note I’m two episodes behind. I have to wait for my generous Irish friend to make DVDs of the episodes for me, mail them, and then it takes time for them to arrive!
I very much enjoy reading your comments about the new series. As someone who remembers watching the original series, I find the new one sometimes stirs up feelings of frustration that characters are presented in a different way – one which I feel is rather too far from the original as written – so it is informative to read your analysis of the differences.
In the post above, I think you have typed Dwight in a couple of places where you mean Drake (when you discuss George’s discovery of the relationship and the imprisonment).
I look forward to reading your views on the latest episodes.
Michelle Sacks Lowenstein: Ahhhhh …… just what I’ve been looking forward to – one of Ellen’s excellent commentaries!
Jenni Goldsmith I agree that I think it’s because the actors are given less time to act and emote that they have to go in with all guns blazing, giving an overdramatic performance, rather than the subtle theatre-style acting of the original series. It’s more “in your face” than “drawing you in”
I feel that ever since late Series 2, the changes made have been heavy handed and very unsatisfying in the portrayals of George, Elizabeth and Demelza. I’m not even certain if I’ll finish this series or not.
You can’t beat the books. I,too,have been dissatisfied with the writing and portrayals but Ellen is so good in her commentary that I rely on her analysis.
It will be interesting to see what they do with Hugh and Demelza. If they mess that up I’ll be done also and I’ll reread the books.
It is generous of you to say that. But I’ve not read the books to the extent I’ve memorized them and I make mistakes sometimes — happily people who remember this or that detail when I’m inaccurate tell me. But even if I were miraculously gifted in the memory department, there is nothing like reading these twelve books. Not all are equally; there are falling offs (Poldark 9, Stranger from the Sea, has to re-start as it’s ten years later) and Poldark 10 and 11, The Loving Cup and Miller’s Dance are not quite as good as the early sequences, Poldark 12’s story of Bella is weak, but not of Valentine, the book should have been called Valentine).
Demelza has always been in danger of being a Mary Sue. But with the circumstances of Clowance birth, she has truly become one.
What’s a Mary Sue?