3 Poldark 8 & 9: like a song; previously individual dramatized scenes ….

She will have a headstone (Ross and Demelza, Aidan Turner, Elinor Tomlinson, Poldark 2017, Episode 8)

Warleggan harassing, destroying Drake’s business (Sam telling Ross, David Delve, Robin Ellis, Poldark 1977, Episode 8)

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been too long since I lasted posted on the 3rd season of the new Poldark compared to its source book, The Four Swans, and the previous film adaptation: 3 Poldark 6 & 7: Coerced and reluctant Relationships. I was away for at least two weeks of the intervening month but but something more stopped me.

These last two episodes took to an extreme a tendency seen through this season and the first and second. Both are made up of the shortest scenes, sometimes lasting a couple of seconds interwoven or blended into another. Sometimes the scene itself is a pantomime or has one epitomizing line; but often it’s cut up into several independent shots interspersed with other scenes where this is done. In both episodes there is also much repetition: Ross refuses offers of position first by Sir Francis Bassett (John Hopkins) and then by Lord Falmouth (James Wilby); which scenes are recurred to again and again, and half-repeated. We have Osborne Whitworth (Christina Bassington) forcing himself on Morwenna (Ellise Chappell), praying, at least three times indignant at Dwight Enys (Luke Norris) for telling him to desist demanding sex from Mowenna, and countless seductive moments from Rowella (Esme Coy) which become several scenes where Rowella and her librarian accomplice-betrothed, Arthur Solway (Will Merrick) demand slightly decreasing yet large sums. Repeatedly George Warleggan (Jack Farthing) is a cold bully to Elizabeth (Heida Reed); and when she finally rebels at his cruelty to Drake (Harry Richardson), their paired accusations and defenses are broken up and repeated. The men practice war and confront Ross; we have two rebellions. The women writhe.

Morwenna and Geoffrey Charles (Harry Marcus) when Elizabeth visits the Whitworths with her son

The effect on the mood and acting of the episodes is strong. It’s like a song, where language (the dialogues short) and repeating short scenes become like motifs. This dramaturgy is so consistent and so different (let’s say) from the previous mini-series, and even episodes 1-7 of this season that it must be deliberate. We almost don’t think about what’s happening at any particular time. In the 1970s episodes and in Graham’s book, we have reinforcement of explicit agenda: feminist. Insofar as the love and adultery stories go, and the ones on sexual discomfort and even impotence (in the book Dwight and Caroline, Gabriella Wilde, are not a “sane choral” couple but themselves are straining against Dwight’s deep disquiet and weakness), we are made to think realistically about them more. In 1977 the themes was a frank presentation of women’s sexual experiences and feelings as they emerge or are impinged on by their communities (some forced to marry, others stopped); the individual stories are kept original, the scenes given much more time and we get exploration of angles that emphasize anger and hatred and despair prompted by the disloyalties and human jealousies and ravaging demands of others.

In 2017 I didn’t feel individual decisions made by the women. The blending of the four stories of love (Demelza’s, Elizabeth’s, Emma’s, Morwenna’s) and marriage leaves an impression against marriage. That it is a troubled condition for most. Rowella’s actions reinforce this. Were the 2017 to have been true to Dwight and Caroline in the book (incompatible in values, he half-impotent in bed), the inference would have been stronger.

Ross (Aidan Turner) realizing

In 2017 the other political or male-centered theme is, when will Ross realize he has to engage himself deeply in his community according to his rank and capabilities, to try to bring justice and a decent way of life for himself and his neighbors. George (and others) will just continue to gouge everyone unless he (and they) are stopped. This trajectory of taking responsibility and compromising while it’s there in the book does not control it; it’s not the shaping force in the 1977 film; in the 2017 it seems the climax of the two episodes is Ross realizing he is now working for Warleggan to hurt people starving for bread, seeing he has almost been pressured into gunning these people down, and realizing he must define his own role and its function and can only do that with power. All Ross’s friends, Demelza and Tholly (Sean Gilder) and Bassett, have been trying to get him to see this.

The modern adaptation is melodramatic in the original meaning of the word and it’s fitting the episode 8 almost ends on Demelza’s song, and episode 9 begins with Prudie’s (Beatie Edny), and across them Hugh Armitage’s (Josh Whitehouse)’s poetry to Demelza (from the book) is over-voiced either by Demelza or Hugh, with their respective presences overlapping. The older one is theatrical and the psychology of the scenes subtly nuanced (as in the book). To offer an outline of the modern one is monomaniacal, so for this last blog of this season I’ll switch my procedure and offer a summary and evaluation of the 1977 episodes on the blog itself, with the 2017 sing-song in the comments.

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1977, Episode 8 (click for 2017 Episode 8). In order not to be too mono-maniacal, I’ve made the 2017 concise.

It’s a second (the 7th was the first) where the screenplay is by John Wiles, Richard Beynon producer, directed by Roger Jenkins. (There were hardly any women directors, producers or screenplay writers in the BBC in the 1980s.)

Drake and Emma in Drake’s forge, he working, she talking ….

The episode shows how these one hour programs do fit together thematically. The material taken for it is in different places in Graham’s Four Swans. The haggling over money between Whitworth (Christopher Biggins) is just one scene, but here it’s juxtaposed to the increasing dissension and anger and even dislike between the married couples. The 1977 program has it that Rowella (Julie Dawn Cole) may not be pregnant by Solway (Stephen Reynolds) and she and he hatched her pregnancy to threaten Whitworth with; the book only brings Solway in as a deluded man and is mum on what happened to the pregnancy (it is never mentioned in next book, The Angry Tide). Doing it this way enables the 1970s film-makers to de-emphasize the sexual angle and emphasize the give-and-take conflict which parallels Warleggan’s (Ralph Bates) destruction of Drake (Kevin McNally) out of sheer spite. It is bold of the 1977 team to show and emphasize Demelza (Angharad Rees) committing adultery, which done highly romantically of the pair of lovers with a long tracking shot along the beach. The full context prevents us from taking it romantically though.

Several people threaten to kill someone — their rage against life is so strong: Warleggan would kill his brother-in-law, Drake who his step-son Geoffrey (Stefan Gates) prefers; Whitworth keeps saying he’ll kill Rowella who threatens to expose him as having made her pregnant, Morwenna (Jane Wymark) will kill her child by Whitworth if Whitworth tries to rape her again. Warleggan’s men beat Drake and throw him in the water; he could have died. Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) finally turns on Warleggan and lets him know her life with him is a hell on earth if all that is said about him is so.

It opens with George Warleggan’s mad ride across the countryside with his chief henchman, ruthless bully, gamekeeper, Sid Rowse (Michael Cox), who points to Drake’s forge just outside Warleggan property. George nods. The plot to wreck all that Drake has thus far built is signalled.

We switch to the forge to find Emma (Trudie Styler) talking to Drake complimenting him on what he’s done. Drake asks how’s it going with his religious brother, Sam, and she says “comic” and she’d “poison Sam’s godly life honest I would.” “Do you love him?” “I don’t know what love be, but I can’t be free the way I used to be.” “People say I’m a whore. What is a whore. A woman that’d sell her body. I never selled nothing to nobody.” “Since I’ve seen him … I’ve lost the pleasure of things … I wish to God I’d never met him.” They hear a neighing horse and they rush out to see his place set on fire.

As in Graham’s books there is real sympathy for the promiscuous woman; she helps both Drake and Sam in this episode — the action we see her in is not in the book but the thrust of the presentation is the same.

Switch to Nampara: now Sam is telling Ross at Nampara of all the wrecking and terrorizing that has happened since. A messenger scene in effect: “since then there’s been more trouble, they’ve broken his fences & his streams run dry. Last night someone dropped a dead dog down his well … Water well is poisoned too. Drake losing custom because locals told not to go . it’s Sid Rowse. Under Ross’s question the story of how Geoffrey Charles had spent all his time at Pallys shop emerges, “Mr Warleggan put a stop to it boy went on with his visits just the same …”

Then interthreaded are a series of scenes where Rowella and her apparent off-screen lover, a librarian (a little joke of Graham’s own — he seems aware of how librarians are ridiculously despised) gradually negotiate and bully Whitworth into paying a substantial sum to them. In the book there is a scene of bargaining, but it’s not threaded in in this dramatic way. The emphasis in the book is the sex, particularly the sadistic sex between Whitworth and Rowella. This the films avoid and erase altogether — we’ve no idea what sex between Whitworth and Rowella could be. It seems hard to imagine they could manage with her hypocrisy and his crudity.

So we see Vicarage Whitworth in satin yellow reading, Morwenna in green. She says it’s time for Rowella to go home, she seems to spend most of her time with you. She’s just 16, that is why I feel she needs companions of her own age .. Rowella appears. She will go immediately; but both say no. Morwenna says will resume some of her duties … meantime go to her bed. Whitworh doesn’t mind as he has Rowella. Rowella “She knows” .. she tells him “I am pregnant” and he looks appalled.

Back to Nampara, Demelza working on her flowers, Ross talking of what George Warleggan is doing to Drake: “intolerable .. he’s trying to ruin the boy …” Demelza clearly angry about something and it’s not Drake. She refuses to talk, and says going out “Don’t ask me … ask his wife” (Elizabeth).

Back to scene of Whitworth now horrified “go away do you hear … do not touch me.” Rowella offers to take “nostrum’ and he agrees eagerly, she “sometimes they are dangerous to the mother … loud quarrel ..shall I see you later … after blustering, he says yes. Whitworth cries — yet we do not feel for him.

Nampara, Ross reading something; Demelza comes in late, she had a disturbed night out-of-doors (with Hugh? Brian Stirner), he is riding over to Drake. It’s an acceptance from Sir Francis Basset (Mike Hall) to come to dinner. Demelza “I am no society hostess,” Ross says ask “Caroline (Judy Leeson) to advice you, I’m sorry my dear we are committed to receive them … tells her Hugh Armitage is returning to his squadron … I thought you’d like to know .. ” (quiet sarcasm).

Ross rides to Drake’s place and it’s all in ruins. Drake tied up, “who did this to you?” Drake lying to protect Ross himself: “I don’t know twas the middle of the night .. “I’ll turn the other cheek.” Ross at first rejects Drake’s response: “Well then Christ be a fool for twas his advice,” to which Drake replies: ” Ross, oh spare me” Drake determined to hold out, you put me here, tis my place well.” So Ross plunges in to work with him.

Osborne Whitworth bothered — in suit with book, knock, it’s Rowella who tells of her librarian (who we saw briefly in Part 7), Mr Arthur Solway from county library; he may expect something of a dowry … how much how much…”

Then the dinner party — a fine gay and witty scene. Bassetts, Caroline and Enys (Michael Cadman); the rebuilding of the library. Caroline very witty, and gay, how is it Hugh Armitage has not returned to sea again; he has returned to lodge with Lord Falmouth (Hugh Manning); Caroline to Demelza: “strange Demelza I thought you would have heard ..” Ross’s jealousy clearly aroused: “why should she have heard …:

Now bargaining scenes are threaded in: the librarian obsequious but determined … Whitworth offers the sum of 20 guineas .. “you see Vicar there is just one thing” … Solway knows she’s pregnant and he has no money but a tiny salary as a librarian.

Switch to Nampara with Demelza and Bessy Martin polishing the table. Bassett comes in, he wishes Ross had accepted and stood for parliament … Bassett asks what is the cause of bad blood between Warleggan and Poldark … they are all courtesy to one another.

The bargaining between Whitworth, Rowella and Solway continues: Whitworth is heard shouting “Out I say out out.” Whitworth says that Rowella is a penniliess girl pregnant without hope or prospects,” how can Solway dream of “1000 pounds!” Rowella comes in, and says she thought “at least 100 pounds.” “Oh you thought that. did you?”

Nighttime storm, Nampara; Demelza and Ross. He: “damn the weather.” She: “I said jealousy and bad feelings shouldn’t be between people … but he’s a man” and then she turns the conversation “Look why shouldn’t I have heard that Hugh Armitage is back … why shouldn’t he write to me why shouldn’t anyone write to me?” Ross stalks out and she sits over fire; a voice-over of Armitage reading his poem to her aloud

Demanding money

Another bargaining scene: shot of Solway and we hear “30 pounds” “a thousand” “40 pounds” “a thousand” “45 pounds” The librarian seen shaking his head, a thousand .. there 100 pounds that it’s …shakes head “a thousand”

Now vicar and Rowella are talking in attic, and she cites the miserable conditions of Solway’s large family. “100 pounds that”s what I’ve gone to try him once mor. “Oh Osborne do

Librarian “My final word: 120 pounds, 900, I cannot go below 900” Vicar: “Are you mad?” We now see Rowella nods to Solway: we can see, they are in cohoots. Solway: “it will take us all of 700 to support ward and child, then there’s the question of a cottage.” She mouths to him and he says “and the furniture” Now Whitworth goes up to 200 pounds; Rowella signals to Solway and he turns and says 850. Whitworth: 210 He: “800 not a penny less”

Morwenna upstairs in bed listening

Drake tries to pass gate to get to Mrs Warleggan and is beat up badly It begins with him saying to the gamekeeper and his bullies “I”ve come to ask a favor or Mrs Warleggan that maybe she’ll see me for five minutes.” They accuse him of poaching; beat him badly, then they throw him in river to drown and die. We see only the water

Rowella now writing, and she finds and reads aloud a letter about a vicar suspended for 3 years for getting young girl with child. Whitworth comes in as she’s reading : “I shall kill you” Rowella now says he may be persuaded to take a somewhat lower figure of — 600 pounds! Whitworth’s reply: “I’ll see you dead first,” to which she replies “I should think it quite likely Morwenna heard too …”

Now we are in Drake’s forge and Emma and Sam comforting and nursing him. “They could have killed thee.” “Course” he knows. He’s now determiend to go to Truro and speak with Misstress Warleggan. He feels she would be fair. (She is pro-hierarchy but fair).

Whitworth in attic (we hear church bells). He now threatens to return Rowella to her mother: “I know nothing of any baby.” Rowella: “I shall accuse you Vicar I’m a dean’s daughter,” and she knows details about his anatomy “You have a scar on your belly made by a boy you were tormenting at school …” Whitworth again “I will see you dead before I pay a penny to you.” Now she says 500 pounds. He looks down defeated.

Church scene, the marriage and we see Solway and Rowella laughing together and we wonder if the baby is his after all. (In the book this is not so, it is Whitworth’s.)

Ross tells Jud to saddle my horse he has a list of addresses of people he must go to. Ross getting involved in politics slowly. The dinner was the first sign he sees he must.

Demelza with Drake in his forge: “What do you think she can do …:” Drake: “She can talk” Demelza says that Ross off with volunteers at Falmouth — so French politics impinging too.

Morwenna

Morwenna sewing, Whitmore reading. Now she is strong and bitter. (This is most unlike book where she remains abject until she finally flees to Drake.) She says she was conscious of the liaision every day every minute of every night. Then the startling threat (which is in the book): If he resumes his physical approaches to her, she will kill his son. “This is how it will be until the day death separates us.”

Now at Truro and the Warleggan mansion there (a set): we see Jill Townsend as an indignant Mrs Warleggan: “How dare you” It emerges Drake is there and he stays controlled, respectful: “Everyone has seen them.” When he cites as one of George’s motives “the business of Miss Morwena,” she jumps up “I don’t wish to hear about it.” She knows she did Morwenna wrong to marry her to Whitworth at least. George comes in, becomes an ugly bully to Drake, threatens to kill him. George turns round to demand she go to London with him, to which she replies: “to London … if what I Just heard is true, I would rather go to hell first ..”

Demelza and Armitage

Then the final very long sequence which ends in love-making between Armitage and Demelza: Armitage come to see Demelza (Ross gone from house) “I am begging you” to come with him to the islands of seals they spoke of. She says the seals are not there, “to lead you to something that doesn’t exist.” “To grant me a favor .. ” Then she yields “oh wait I’ll have my horse saddled — then series of long tracking shots, over the countryside, round the cliffs, then sea by coast. We hear a bit of conversation: the seals are several cliffs away, in a place that look like a cathedral beyond cove and cove .. (where all) booms and crashes. Flute music as they run amid the rocks. When he tells her he’s not on leave, he’s going blind, she finally yields and it ends on a passionate kiss …

Freeze frame.

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1977, Episode 9 (click on comments to see 2017 Episode 9 tapestry). The 2017 kept shorter though material confrontations so fascinating.

I will keep this summary more compact too; merely saying the dramaturgy is as the eighth episode above. Much of real interest, and a good deal sheer transposition from the book. Ross is coerced by Bassett into putting into jail the leaders of the miners and agricultural workers who had attacked a granary and corn place and taken the corn. They were starving and the price never came down nor did the government provide a subsidy. Ross loathes having to do it, but he does obey this law. He is made to see that were he an MP he might have power to ameliorate — he could have pardoned the man whose body we see hanging and rotting on a gibbet as the community returns from a ritual Sawle Feast (3/4s through the Part).

Elizabeth trying and failing to reach George

Elizabeth now threatens to leave George. She will not live with him if he carries on his horrible behavior to Drake; he tries to deny what he is doing, trivialize it, but she is having none of it. He demands to know if she loves Ross and she laughs, then they finally confront one another over the issue of whose son Valentine is. She on the Bible swears she has never had sex willingly with any man but her first husband and George. George does not recognize the gap in the oat,h but in any case he gives in only because she would indeed leave him.

The role is very hard to play: Elizabeth is supposed an upper class woman taught repression and guardedness, also a kind of frail character unable to act out high emotional scenes; at the same time high self-esteem and adherence to hierarichal norms governs here. She is destroyed by these norms acted out by George and Ross over her pregnancies and children — she tries to make her third child appear to be 8 months by a dose which brings on a labor that kills her (the plan Ross hatched in the church meeting which in 1977 occurred in the 7th episode). She is also highly intelligent and realizes just how imprisoned she is, straining at the frustration, anger, itself partly at herself for having married George. She does refuse to go with him to London full-stop even if he wins the new election.

Sawle Feast done superlatively well. Like the Rudruth fair, done with real flair, not overproduced, the height a wrestling match between the bully henchman of George, Sid Rowse, and Sam Carne, egged on by Emma who offers to come to church for 3 months if he fight. Sam almost wins but at the last moment throws the hard struggle because he sees her wanting him to win and he actually fears she will pull him from his strong adherence to his God and faith which is central to his world view and self-esteem.

the 9th episode of 1977 takes us much further along in The Four Swans. As in soap opera aesthetics (which most of these mini-series costume dramas use) the fair is a place where we see all the characters come together and interact characteristically. Ross has bet George 100 guineas, but the guineas are to go to a fund for the starving — so when Sam loses, it matters not to Ross. Whitwoth is there with Morwenna now holding her own through her threat and having made her body off-limits; he has discovered Rowella was not pregnant and she is again making up to him (for his money). Demelza and Drake hover over Sam.

At Falmouth’s house where Demelza again meets Hugh

We have the visit to Falmouth’s house, an election where we understand the electors vote publicly and are under pressure from who they owe money to (Warleggans), vote by personal liking and other norms of admiration. Ross makes it by one vote.

Another thread of the series is the real love affair of Hugh Amitage and Demelza. Part 8 ended with them making love on the seals’ beach. IN this part as at the end of The Four Swans Armitage dies; his blindness a symptom of a larger disorder gotten in the prisons of France; Demelza called to his side. Threaded in are scenes where Ross is aware she is in love with this man and tolerant of it; in one he tells her of his continued affection for Elizabeth and how he can understand hers, but he cannot it seems when he discovers a compromising poem tolerate physical infidelity. The last scene has her having wandered out in the moor and come back to find Ross incensed. Where have you been? he angrily asks and so the episode comes to an end (the previous ended on her adultery).

The 1977 film most differs from the book by its presentation of Rowella and Whitworth and Solway, the librarian husband. The film softens this enormously: that Rowella and Whitworth enjoy nasty sex together is central to the book’s story, and not here (but it is so in the 2017), and Solway is a lower class innocent sensitive man who is quite unaware of the liaison between Whitworth and Rowella; and when he discovers this reality, that the vicar is giving Rowella money his love turns to rage and murder (another motif in Graham but more in evidence in his murder mysteries).

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Touching moment (pun intended) as he reaches our to her and she slips into his arms: Demelza and Ross as 2017 season ends

It’s telling that the older series was much more interested in the fates of women, while this new one has imposed a new trajectory so the story of Ross gaining power and respect becomes the central interest. The final season of the new episode 9 centers on the inner life of Ross as much as the inner life of Demelza. Both mini-series, 40 years apart try for depictions of 18th century lives while mirroring analogous situations for the years they were made in: Marriage, customs and politics too.

In 1977 the next episode or The Angry Tide started the following week; this year we have to wait a whole year for the ending of The Four Swans and The Angry Tide.

Ellen

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3 Poldark 6 & 7: Coerced & reluctant relationships; Agatha’s death, Ross’s refusal, Demelza charmed

Agatha Poldark: this is from one of her earnest conversations with Ross; but she has the same expression when she urges Morwenna that she cannot marry Drake (2015 Episode 6)

Agatha now near death, muttering, asking Elizabeth’s now frightened forgiveness because she knows she should not have responded to George’s tormenting of her with tormenting him (2015 Episode 7)

Dear friends and readers,

My header this time refers more or as much to Graham’s books, The Black Moon and The Four Swans, and the 1977 second season episodes 6-7 as it does to this new third season episodes 6 & 7. Horsfield has begun to depart as radically and anachronistically from Graham’s books as Jack Pullman did in the first season of the 1975 Poldark Episodes 1-4, which so incensed Winston Graham. She is not merely taking liberties but she is changing the meaning of the events crucially.

It will be said that if this pleases and is understood by the TV audience of 2017 (much larger than the numbers of people who will read the Poldark books in question), so what? I answer the original presentation is understandable by a contemporary audience and would teach them much more about the history of women, which sheds light on their present condition. The new sensational dramas where remarkably contrivance has replaced plausibility may excite an audience more, but if the reaction of the online and paper press is any measure, the reaction is increasing mockery (see the in-house Guardian snark of Viv Goskop, on Episode 6 and Episode 7).

George’s contrived question: what would you give, Morwenna, to see Drake acquitted

Morwenna as a frightened animal caught in headlights in a traffic accident (2015 Episode 6)

Take how Morwenna Chynoweth (Elise Chappell/Jane Wymark) is pressured into marrying the sadistic hypocritical vicar Osborne Whitworth (Christian Brassington;Christopher Biggins): in the book and in the 1970s series it is a slow application of pressure; from Elizabeth (Heida Reed/Jill Townsend) and George Warleggan (Jack Farthing/Ralph Bates), from her mother, and from her sense of what her class status demands, what the norms of her society demand of her. Several scenes. As Verity wanting Captain Blamey and the abused penniless Demelza leaping at a chance to be a landowner’s wife in Ross Poldark; the widowed harasssed Elizabeth in Warleggan, so Morwenna has no “right” to “a choice of life;: subdued and oppressed by loaded phrases like “your natural place,” “your bounden duty,” “a false and romantic idea,” “obduracy” rather than the “gratitude” due someone (BM II:4, 276, III:12, 519), Morwenna falls back on vague mutterings like “I cannot see myself . . . I cannot think that this is [to be my life]”. In the book and the 1970s Elizabeth genuinely hesitates and feels unable openly to countermand her husband George’s plans for Morwenna, asking herself “why she was not more afraid of him.”. “Flight” is not an option. Instead we are given the improbable swift bargain that Morwenna agrees to marry Drake to stop George from hanging him for having Geoffrey Charles’s Bible in his cabin. In both the book and the 1970s, the threat of another riot is what gives him pause — plus he knows GC did give Drake the Bible as a gift. Is this weak of Morwenna? how do women fare up against laws and customs against abortion, supporting male rape, smaller incomes, men with power and property, the demand they marry successfully, have children? instead as re-told by Horsfield the story becames fodder for a joke.

I enjoyed the new episode 6 and 7, for all the reasons of the 2017 art (uses of montage, fine acting, the costumes, setting), but the book and the 1970s versions are in this case superior and in my summary and evaluations of these in my comments I do the two earlier episodes the respect and justice of serious recapping before we go any further. This for those who’d like to remember and for those who’ve never seen these. Then I’ll proceed to comparison.

The 1977 Episode 6

Dr Behenna pitying Elizabeth stuck with George, but giving bad advice for Valentine’s rickets

George like some dark spirit unreasonable, harassing Elizabeth (1977 Episode 6)

The 1977 Poldark Episode 7

At Tehidy Demelza charmed by Armitage

Caroline disappointed in Dwight (bored), also charmed (1977 Poldark Episode 7)

Morwenna’s and now Elizabeth’s is not the only coerced relationship. In the book and 1970s Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson/Angarhad Rees) falls in love with Armitage because he is the first young man ever to court her, the first time she is romanced, offered poetry, valued for her singing: Ross was much older than she, and took her as his servant; his marrying her was ethical of him, and he has learned to value her sexually and as a wife from a realistic relationship. She couldn’t care less if he accepts a political position or not. She does see that if he did, he would do some good, and says this but she is not disgusted with him for his lack of ambition for status. Demelza? Importantly left out of this new iteration is Bassett’s (John Hopkins/Mike Hall) support of William Pitt in the book (a deep reactionary, who made of the 1790s a kind of McCarthy era) and his voiced expectation that Ross would support Pitt. This is not brought into the 1970s series, but not as much is made of either refusal.

It is to Horsfield’s credit that she sees that the trajectory of the three books is to pressure Ross into compromise, into accepting the patronage system and working within it, but she is using it to present Delmelza as falling in love with a callow romantic young man. In the book and the 1970s series Demelza says she loves Ross still and after sex on the shore, much more than Armitage. People have complicated adult conflicting emotions. Certainly Ross does.

Invented scene of high anger between Ross and Demelza (not in book or 1970s) where she is disgusted because he won’t obey the world’s ways and he is angry she wants him to follow her advice because it’s hers (2015 Poldark Episode 7)

In the book and the 1970s Ross says he cannot forget his love for Elizabeth but he at the same time loves Demelza and differently, as his wife. I’ve read that the film-makers are hesitating over going on to a fifth season because Turner and Tomlinson will ask too much money. Hitherto it was also said that would demand they move forward ten years (Stranger from the Sea is set in 1810, with Jeremy and Clowance grown into young adults): should they “age” Turner and Tomlinson (a lot of trouble) or hire new actors (and lose the audience they hope is into worship for this pair of people). If so, why invent Ross’s suspicion Elizabeth’s baby is his. Why have him and Demelza give one another pointed looks over his refusal to accept any responsibility for what is happening to baby and soon young boy Valentine? The tragic results of this in a twisted personality emerges in The Miller’s Dance and The Loving Cup (Poldarks 8 and 9) and the catastrophic dark conclusion of Bella (Poldark 12). why prepare for what you don’t intend to film, especially if in the book Ross has no suspicion the child could be his and is not an 8th month baby (why would he? he hardly ever has seen the baby) until the scene in the churchyard with Elizabeth in The Angry Tide. The treatment of this in this new series is ludicrous. If you don’t want to comb or brush Ross’s hair and leave his black curls all awry (but in the era he would care for his hair or, as in Ross Poldark, he’d fear lice), don’t give this to the baby as a sign.

Obligatory romance scene between Dwight and Caroline (2015 Poldark Episode 6)

Enough is the same as in the books and the 1970s episodes to give the new drama and interpretations depth, interest, passion. Yes when Dwight Enys (Luke Norris/ Richard Morant/Michael Cadman) comes home, he is depressed and guilty that he survived; he cannot lend himself to sexual passion at first; Caroline (Gabriella Wilde/Judy Geeson) wants an aristocratic idle prestigious life and he yearns to return to his profession. Theirs is another reluctant relationship, a half mismatch. Yes there is a beautiful romance between Drake (Harry Richardson/Kevin McNally) and Morwenna, the boy Geoffrey Charles (Harry Marcus/Stephan Gates) values the inner spirit of Drake, who is very young and risks bodily harm to spite George with toads; who when he loses Demelza falls into a deep depression. Yes Sam (Tom York/David Delve) falls in love inappropriately with the wanton Emma (Ciara Charteris/Trudie Styler). Yes at the end of The Black Moon George is incensed at Agatha (Caroline Blakiston/Eileen Way) and refuses to allow her to have her 100th party, and she retaliates by planting suspicion in his mind that Valentine was a full term baby, after which as she lays dying she regrets having hurt Elizabeth for life this way.

Tholly Tregirls (not Jud) (Sean Gilder) is the gravedigger but when Agatha’s plain coffin is brought with no ceremony, Ross buries her — this is a moving moment

But why must we have these debasing exaggerations. At no point in the book or the 1970s does Demelza mock Sam’s religion. Emma is a daughter of Tholly but she is kindly. In the book and 1970s George does not openly rejoice at war because he is hoping to make more money; Farthing is made into a cardboard silly (transparently so) villain. Although George is deeply suspicious once Agatha alerts him, and does go about to question people (Drs Choake, Richard Daws, Behenna Hugh Dickson/ and Enys), it is not until The Angry Tide that he feels he has evidence to demonstrate that Elizabeth’s child is Ross’s son — which at that point brings ends the book in great tragedy. And neither Elizabeth nor Ross is really sure — how could they be? Horsfield disrespects her audience in many of the changes of these two episodes — or she is desperate for very high ratings (and a budget to support a fifth season).

Like Demelza Drake takes on a dog for a companion (there is a pro-animal theme in Graham, 1977 Poldark Episode 7)

Most of all what is hard to take is the violation of the characters as Graham conceived them and in the second season of the 1970s Poldarks (1977-78), to which Alexander Baron and John Wiles remained true. Demelza has made Ross the center of her meaning; he deeply bonds with her. They do not bicker; the sex she knows with Armitage is not fundamentally serious; his love for Elizabeth is vestigial. This core of validation of a marriage for love despite life’s ordeals is lost. A eecondary one is the defiance of the world’s perverse values; as in the first season, Horsfield again reverses and reinforces deep compromise (though how seriously we are to take this here it’s hard to say except we can see in her scripts art as saleable commodity).

Not that Turner and Tomlinson do not play their roles with what depths they are offered from the script and direction. Elizabeth is an interesting character as is George; he is the world’s successful man, she the woman caught up because she has twice been for sale. There is opportunity for Drake to come back (as a man he is given a profession to develop his talents as a blacksmith; he gets himself a dog), but for Morwenna she is rescued too late, and is forever shattered. Sam and Emma are a contrasting pair, with Emma as a hard well-meaning (she is well-meaning in the book, not a slut) and Sam a kind idealist, who church officials want to put down as revolutionary (this is lost altogether as his religion is turned into bigoted fanaticism over sex when it is also about all souls being equal before God). The lowest are the desperate Rowella (who sees in the Vicar an opportunity to rise somehow) and the vicious state clergyman given a big income and status. She does not have sex with Whitworth for her sister’s sake (what nonsense): her sister, Rowella, does not have sex with the Vicar for her sister’s sake, but for herself — as eventually will be seen unless Horsfield changes the story line altogether in the fourth season and I can’t see how they can (I see the librarian to whom Rowella is married off is in the coming cast)

Rowella (Julia Dawn Cole) and Whitworth about to use one another sexually (1977 Poldark Episode 7)

My reader should read the books and watch the previous Poldarks which are available in good digitialized versions. See my blog on “Poldark Rebooted: 40 Years On,” and Graham’s Four Swans and The Angry Tide.

Ellen

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New Poldark 3:4-5: a deeper emotionalism; a loss of verbal subtleties; late stage capitalism replaces exciting adventure

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

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Poldark 3:3-4: the difficulty of returning to material 20 years dormant ….

George (Jack Farthing) and Elizabeth (Heida Reed) overhear Sam and his “flock” singing (Episode 3)

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) looking down thoughtfully, worried — her care, her concern, all her activities show her to be the conscience of this episode

It would take too long to analyse the creative stirrings and conflicts which decided my change of course … it may have been my absence away from Cornwall at that time, which was one of the factors conducive to the return to the Poldarks — Graham in Poldark’s Cornwall

Friends and readers,

I regret to say I was not able to watch Episode 4 for even a second time of this third year of Poldark films, and I can’t come near Episode 5. I’ve a DVD copy of episode 3 and uncertain memories of the new episode 4. If the BBC would allow non-UK residents to pay the license pay (in effect support the network), I would be delighted to; but I am given no opportunity as a US computer, to support these channels. A quick summary of the central trajectory of Black Moon as it evolves from its hard opening on George and Elizabeth waiting for the birth of Valentine: Ross still cannot get himself to join a corrupt Parliamentary outpost of a gov’t. Ross and Demelza are invited and go to two different powerful political establishments; we see her holding her own. I also wanted to see if the new Horsfield team reached Ross’s rescue of Enys (and as a bye-product, Hugh Armitage) from the French prison, the return home to Caroline and Demelza, and a new let-down after Ross does not take two different offers of roles in powerful organizations (local Justice of the Peace which had been Francis’s and MP under Bassett’s auspices). The Black Moon is the first Poldark novels not to end on a reconciliation of Ross and Demelza; here it’s Aunt Agatha cursing George because he forbids her a birthday party, and sowing seeds of doubt about Valentine’s parentage, and Elizabeth’s perhaps not early parturition.

What cannot be too often stressed is 20 years went by between the first four Poldark novels (Ross Poldark, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark, Warleggan) and the second three (The Black Moon, The Four Swans, The Angry Tide). Much life and change has gone by for Graham; he is now not an outsider trying to break into literary society; he’s at some of its centers in London. In this novel Graham is struggling to get back into his material, to bring his characters back to life after 20 years of life’s experiences for him. A good deal of The Black Moon is taken up by politicking with society — reflecting Graham’s own life in the literary world in the between time. No longer is this a story of two people who don’t fit in, their turning to one another and away from their Cornish societies. It’s not a private story at all; as a historical fiction, it is about the intertwining of public and private life.

Demelza, Zacky Martin (Tristan Sturrock) and Sam Carne (Mark Frost) disappointed because George is now refusing to honor Francis’s promise

Demelza’s words bring out how the thriving of a community is the central ideal/norm of this new mini-series

The church Francis (Kyle Soller) promised them

Grief this structure is being allowed to corrode and vanish ….

The weakness felt in both mini-series adaptation is the film-makers want to keep Ross and Demelza at the center as they are the most sought-after popular characters (so they feel) while in Black Moon the Warleggan group are frame. They also don’t want complicated scenes of politicking; both series seek to simplify what happened and give us but one politicking salon. What to substitute? Alexander Baron’s scripts show how in 1977 the expedient was to bring forward the small scale invasion of Ross and his mining-friends into France, Ross coming near senseless execution, and do these swiftly with intense suspense, action, excitement. Both mini-series show how and why methodism is seen as a radical threat to property-owners and the powerfully-connected. They both keep Drake’s mischievous plantings of frogs to torment Warleggan.

But they both marginalize the core of the three books: that Ross gradually learns he cannot be free, and must take responsibility. Instead in both George’s paranoia is played up so he begins to believe that all that occurs on his property which he can’t control (and comes out of the methodists, and Drake’s affair with Morwenna) is set up against him has been engineered by Ross. By Ross’s having refused the position, he leaves his fellow Cornishmen and women at the mercy (but George has none and no sense of justice) of a cold ruthless corrupt tyrant. Horsfield has added scenes showing George to be an utterly corrupt MP and Justice of the Peace: knowing the son of a powerful man has been arraigned for brutal rape, George makes ground for himself by accusing the girl of perjury; we see him transport starving people who killed one bird. Horsfield also brings out much more strongly and early that Elizabeth is horrified by George’s behavior, put off by her own child (by Ross) and cold to the baby; and to live with herself in this condition, resorts to laudanum (Godey’s Lady’s Drops were very popular in the later 18th and early 19th century — what pain-killers were there?).

Shots of several swans together threaded through signal that material from The Four Swans is in this episode — there are now five, including Verity

She has added Verity to the mix (who is marginalized in this later trilogy so that Caroline becomes Demelza’s close friend): in the new Poldark Verity provides a contrast to Elizabeth in her genuine fulfillment and love of her child; she provides a reinforcement of Demelza and Caroline’s fears that neither Ross or Enys will ever come back when for a time Verity is led to believe Captain Ramey’s boat was shipwrecked (this latter wholly made up by Horsfield). Demelza provides contrast to Verity and Elizabeth too: she is developing into her own woman, making decisions about the property and people while Ross is gone.

Ross (Aidan Turner) and Tregirls (Sean Gilder) at Callais

I thought as a whole Horsfield’s additions were justified; the way she presents George and Elizabeth so starkly is theatrically effective, and she does keep and match the sublime and touching scenes of Drake and Mowenna falling in love at the seashore and delving caves while Geoffrey Charles bonds strongly with Drake. Here they are as they meet, intensely happy over the coming few hours together:

Geoffrey Charles (Harry Marcus) — the most forward

Drake (Harry Richardson) — catching up,a little gingerly

Morwenna (Elise Chappell) — not far behind, and self-contained, remaining “proper”

I also thought very effective the way Horsfield and the actor developed Sam’s character and his slowly creating a congregation for himself, and then when George will not honor Francis’s promise to give Nanfan and other dissenters a place for worship, finding through his sister on Ross’s land another building. On the other hand, Horsfield too much buries the central thread of these three books: Ross’s bringing himself to act centrally in his world through office. But she does have him brooding about not going and makes a big fuss about how evil George is, so this thread may become major by episode 5. (For the comparable Episode 3 from the 1970s, click here).

When I’ve gotten more material, namely on DVDs episodes 4-5 at least, I’ll write a longer blog taking the art of the two mini-series into account. I am pursuing my book project and have read a series of non-Poldark novels and seen two superb non-Poldark films (Hitchcock’s Marnie, and The Walking Stick). I expect to write a blog on these books as a group (The Little Walls, The Walking Stick, Marnie, The Tumbled House; Greek Fire) and how Graham’s work seems to lend itself to development in film. I’ve two to go: After the Act, and Angel, Pearl and Little God (almost made into a movie starring Marlon Brando), and then I’ll try a few short stories.

While there are stretches which show the same man wrote the suspense stories as the Poldarks: the use of a loner who gradually emerges as part of the central group (this is a LeCarre motif too so perhaps part of the suspense novel’s tropes); both Poldark and non-Poldark books have the action-adventure risks of theft, of disobeying central laws and getting away with it (or not). Nonetheless, Graham’s travel books and articles on Cornwall general and autobiographical, writing about his writing, need to be treated separately — as also his sheer life-writing. The genre he was writing shaped everything he wrote so they can almost seem works from a different man. (One way he differs from DuMaurier beyond the masculinis perspective is she remained in this historical-romance in Cornwall genre.) Perhaps I should call these not non-Poldark books but non-Cornwall ones (though some of these suspense stories are set in Cornwall). Cornwall is key.

A Cornwall estuary

Ellen

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Poldark 3:1 & 2: again changing emphases, bringing out sense of community

Halse (Robin Ellis) and Ross (Aidan Turner) discuss the death of Ray Penvenen (John Nettles, a man of integrity, conviction, but also rank, thus standing and considerable wealth in land) (3 Poldark 2)

“Many years ago I wrote four novels about the Poldark family and eighteenth century Cornwall. After finishing them, the modern world [and suspense novels intervened]. Eventually the idea of writing another book about them came to be something not really open to serious consideration. But sometimes the totally unexpected occurs,and one day, for no discoverable reason, it became necessary for me to see what happened to those people after Christmas night, 1793 … to return to an old mood was as much of a challenge as creating a new one. The Black Moon is the result” — Winston Graham, Author’s Note prefacing The Black Moon)

There are three sets of dates: One for the time the novels were written by Graham (the first four 1945-53, the second three 1973-77), one for the time they are said to be occurring (1783-1793, 1794-99 respectively) and now two sets of dates for the film adaptations which mirror the 40 years apart eras they are filmed in (first series, 1975-78, 2015-2017).

“That part of his character [Ross’s] which made him so critical of authority also worked against himself. The same faculty which questioned the rightness of the law and the lawmakers was sharp to keep his own actions under a similar scrutiny … ” (Graham’s The Black Moon, towards the end of the book)

Friends and readers,

How unexpectedly fitting. I begin my series of comparative blogs on the new and older Poldark films a day after Graham’s 109th birthday. On his blog, Robin Ellis (once Ross Poldark) announced June 30, was Graham’s birthday: he had been born June 30, 1908, Victoria Park, Manchester, where his one historical novel not set in Cornwall, Cordelia, written 1949, takes place.

Winston Graham, 1945, around the time he wrote The Forgotten Story and Ross Poldark (thanks to Jim Dring)

Ellis has not been permitted by history, his fan base, and his later career to dismiss his role as Ross, even if he wanted to, which if he ever did (and he must’ve) he has long given up.

Robin Ellis, recent promotional shot, Truro

*************************

Aiden Turner as Ross first seen in the new series

Robin Ellis as Ross, coming home to Demelza (and Jud) from the wars in wars, early scene in older series

These blogs are based on the mini-series as now aired on BBC. This first is on the first two episodes, adapted from The Black Moon and imitating some of the previous mini-series (especially the way the Morwenna-Drake love scenes on the beach are done). I compare them to the older series, for which I provide summaries and evaluations in the commentary and both to the fifth Poldark book, The Black Moon.

I begin with the second episode of the third season of the new Poldark (2017), Ellis is again in the new series, and a pivotal moment. Now he is Rev Mr. Halse (Robin Ellis) in the scenes from The Black Moon (5th Poldark book, 1794-95). Ellis as Halse is given role in the book given to Ralph Allen Daniel (a real local landowner, magistrate at the time), an offer in The Black Moon to become Justice of the Peace (in this latest mini-series episode an MP, a very different role, not local). Ross, wrongly he realizes (ever so slowly), partly because the profoundly vindictive, punitive, reactionary capitalist George Warleggan (Jack Farthing) takes the powerful position (including tax and fee rates, punishment, legal procedures).

We can measure the distance of the first four Poldark books (written 1945-53, Ross Poldark, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark, Warleggan) from this trilogy written 20 years later, (1973-77, The Black Moon, The Four Swans, The Angry Tide), upon which the third and two seasons at least next must be based. In the second Poldark series, Graham chooses to realize truly historical characters (not just invented ones), linchpin capitalists and great landowners, Tory (Lord Falmouth, from mother’s side a Boscawen) or Whig (Sir Francis Basset, later Lord Dunstanville). Not fantasy figures at all. And in both episodes Ross is deeply conflicted over what he has done in the past, and what he should do for the future, and at the close seems to have decided retreat into his nuclear family and friends is the best right option. He will discover that he is wrong here.

Ross and Demelza (after credits and wild scene of Ross stopping Elizabeth from going over a cliff) reflecting on their way of life: she wants to know if he is avoiding thinking about something

He will not let her see inside him, and tells her, she, on the other hand, thinks too much (he means aloud)

The pace of the Poldark world novels has calmed down in the second realization. Graham says in Poldark’s Cornwall, it was “like breaking into a sound barrier.” It’s a lot slower, far more attention to the particulars of politics in the 1790s in Cornwall, London and France. And that is part of the difficulty both mini-series had to deal with. They somehow have to get some of this new matter in. One can see this in the new realization which is far more consciously political. Yes the newer Poldark mini-series is again much more melodramatic than the older, without comedy, literally closer to the books, using cinematographic techniques, montage, interwoven juxtaposition and parallels a lot more than the older series. And a strong depiction of a community, a way of life. But both fill in matter, the 2017 even more so. For example in the newer series, added to Elizabeth giving birth, and all the mortal dangers that brings, Debbie Horsfield has dramatized the death of Ray Penvenen

Caroline Penvenen Enys (Gabriella Wilde) grieving over her dead uncle (from sugar sickness, i.e., diabetes)

and the death of Demelza, Drake and Sam Carne’s father — both referred to at the opening of The Black Moon, but not made into parallel episodes.

Much less is doing in The Black Moon than had been happening in the previous four novels. So Horsfield and before her the great Alexander Baron (the scriptwriter for the first four episodes of the 1977 Poldark, he was a fine novelist and wrote many BBC screenplays for powerful mini-series in the 1770s, especially for Dickens and the 1983 Jane Eyre) invent, they fill in, they don’t get to Elizabeth’s childbed with Valentine until Episode 2, which scene opens The Black Moon. Horsfield also has her characters commenting on the action, reflecting on their behavior and choices, with a (to me) odd didactic effect. Baron’s older series had to deal with the problem that the dramatization of Warleggan had so departed from the book that Trenwith was supposed burnt down and Ross gone for a couple of years fighting in France (they have to bring Ross back, invent a new house, explain who Aunt Agatha is), but there is a skilfull sophistication of dialogue, very novel-like, more subtly suggestive so Agatha in the older series (Eileen Way) really needles George (Ralph Bates) slowly, spitefully, something the new Agatha (Caroline Blakiston) with her relationship with Elizabeth (Heida Reed) is only said to be doing.

I’m not going to recap this year, but leave my readers to read one of the many that turn up on TV blogs (more probably in the autumn, when PBS broadcasts a probably much re-arranged and somewhat abridged version of the third season), even if they are snarky and trivializing or downright mocking (see one, and two). Rather I’ll evaluate selectively in terms of the previous series, attending to how both connect back to the books. In comments I’ll detail the plot-design and events of the 1977 series (click for Episode 1 of the 1977; and click for Episode 2, much more briefly) since they were not recapped originally and are of great interest.

I hope to stir the reader to return to the older series and also read the books. Here are my two blogs on Graham’s Black Moon: Re-entry, Land, politics, love and coerced marriage, religion and revolution; Violence the basis of this order.

My first response is as all previous encounters: I think how this not as good as last year (in this third season the dressers of Ross are back to allowing him to have utterly unkempt hair), and neither as effective, uncompromisingly like the books in spirit, as the 1970s films. Yet — as in previous encounters I admit Horsfield is following the general story and at moments more literally true, elaborating seriously on what is in the books. The 1970s equivalent did not show Elizabeth trying to get rid of the child or bring on parturition, and crudely or melodramatically as Horsfield had the actors clash (Turner as Ross just happens to be on a cliff where Elizabeth seems to be trying to throw herself over); these are incidents George half-glimpses in the book whose significance he fails to understand. It is made pointedly clear in episode 1 that Ross and Demelza (Elinor Tomlinson) believe Elizabeth’s second baby’s father is Ross. Ross cannot resist hanging around Trenwith; after the baby is born, we see him running frantically on the beach to calm himself, bending over in twisted ways frustrated that he can do nothing for this son; Demelza justifies her returning to see her father die despite his abuse of her because there is a special bond between father and child which must not be ignored. Horsfield is developing cores of the books:

I’ve read that Horsfield and Co are not eager to go on to Books 7-12; if so, they are making an implicit fuss about the possible fathering of Valentine by Ross to little purpose. She has added in episode 2 that Elizabeth does not like her new baby, will not hug or soothe him (Verity notices how cold she is): this is not true of Elizabeth in the books: she may favor Geoffrey Charles, but she loves both her sons and shows concern, solicitude, tenderness towards both (far more than she ever did towards Francis her first husband, or George now). Ross’s indifference towards his son, leaving Valentine to endure the mistreatment of George, the stepfather reaches a tragic and twisted climax in Bella (Book 12). It is all over the new series’ nuances, from Ross’s concern, to his guilt, to Demelza’s warning, in the pointed talk about who the new baby resemble, George’s overdone pride in his “heir.” Graham’s Black Moon is quiet about this until near the end when driven by Warleggan’s cruelty to her, Aunt Agatha suddenly rouses his suspicions in a way never to be undone. The 1977 film only hints at this in Prudie’s suspicions that this eighth month baby is a ninth money one (Episode 2) and Aunt Agatha’s final revenge when George forbids her party and she details what a eighth month baby should be missing (which Valentine is not missing).

first shot of intensely sincere Sam, by his father’s bedside

Sam’s (Tom York) religiosity brought out far more. Both were much more melodramatic than the previous series and sometimes look like travel ads, and there is not quite the need for Turner to charge across the landscape regularly. These lead to implicit silliness, but much is good. The Morwenna-Drake (Harry Richardson and Ellise Chapppel replace Kevin McNally and Jane Wymark, whom Richardson and Chappell resembles) scenes are very well done and touchingly done at length. Horsfield brings out how radical politically the two brothers are — somewhat unconsciously

Morwenna and Geoffrey Charles — on the beach, by the seashore

The sweet Drake will lead them into mysterious caves

What she has done that is interesting and new in an original way is reverse events we are shown. The emphasis in the book is on the Warleggan household — partly Graham was feeling his way back after a 20 year hiatus. We begin and end there in The Black Moon. Alexander Baron filled in far more of the Nampara household, but he did not try to rearrange so consciously, and kept Ralph Bates and Jill Townsend to the fore in the story. Horsfield makes a strong effort to show that Elizabeth is learning to dislike George very much (she does not in the earlier series as she is with George in his reactionary hierarchical attitudes, equally resentful of the Carne brothers, though reasonable and judicious). Horsfield is characterizing the era culturally, giving us a sense of what farm life and mining again (the second episode opens on the mine as so much of the first two seasons did) was like.

Verity and Elizabeth

Agatha saying goodbye to Verity — Verity brings out the best in everyone

We have Verity (Ruby Bentall replaced Norma Streader) added (she begins to become a minor character in the second three novels and disappears altogether in the later ones) and her baby, and when it’s thought that Dwight has either drowned or been killed, Verity is led to believe her husband’s merchant ship was lost in a storm. This is another attempt to reinforce by inventing parallels, in this case (I felt successful) because of the power of the actress’s presence (and our memories of Richard Harringtno as Captain Blamey from the previous series). I liked this quiet prosaicism and thought it was carried out mostly by Eleanor Tomlinson in her role as Demelza. I find regrettable Horsfield seems to feel she must characterize the revolution as senselessly violent, and give strong anti-liberal thought talk to Ross and the new Sir Francis Bassett (John Hopkins) at Bassett’s political salon.

There is strong acting, especially among the older actors: John Nettles’s death as Ray Penvenen is to be regretted as he was such a force on the screen; Ellis is again pitch perfect as Halse (he has a real feel for the era). John Hollingforth as Captain Henshawe, Richard Pope as Pascoe. Among the younger actors, Luke Norris (replacing Richard Morant) as Dwight Enys is utterly believable when called to help Elizabeth give birth, married to hard Caroline (politically at any rate), and in closing brief shots seen aboard ship, using overvoice to pen his letters to Caroline, captured, escaping, and then doing what he can to relieve the suffering of the other victim-prisoners in the French prison.

Luke Norris as Enys at the moment of capture

The new series is luxuriating in the number of episodes (10, 60 minutes each) they have been given for 2 and 1/2 books (The Black Moon and The Four Swans will be covered this third season), while the older one was held to a strict four episodes of 45 minutes, with one extra for each of the three novels (they covered all three in 13 episodes). This might account for the more meditative and reflective quality, with more invention of back stories not in the book in the new series, but it is surprising how much the older series included, and they did not drop characters as is now done here.

Since Phil Harris as Jud was not used as comic or subversive foil the way Paul Curran had been, now dropped with little explanation, he is not missed as much as he would be. We’ve never had the moderating Nicholas Warleggan of the book (and older series, presented as a man who is diplomatic and prefers to be honest), only the cutthroat sneering [uncle] Cary (Pip Torrens). There is still little comedy.

The Warleggan (Jack Farthing) of this first two hours is over-the-top in his egoism, drive to ape “his betters” and chip on his shoulder; he is in effect a fool, ruining his own marriage by his coldness; by contrast the Warleggan of the older series (Ralph Bates) was motivated by a passion for Elizabeth, and more inward genuine complicated feelings. The new series again wants more nudity among the males so we are “treated” scenes of Sam and Drake swimming in the nude — without much motivation.

But interestingly (to me) in both mini-series Ross is taking something of a back seat, is in his soul in retreat as he is so conflicted over what he has done in the past and what his future should be. That is why he rejects Bassett and the Rev Halse’s offer. I just wish (as have others) that Horsfield didn’t feel it necessary for Turner to charge across the landscape on his horse, or make him use frantic gestures to signal inner frustration. Graham’s idea seems to have been to keep Ross as private a man as he, Graham, was.

Final scene (episode 1), she melancholy, he withdrawn apart

Ellen

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Trollope’s Golden Lion of Granpere: an unusual sunlight

Marie and her uncle, Michel, in daily life together (F. A. Fraser, the original illustrator of Golden Lion)

Dear friends,

For a few weeks on Trollope19thCStudies we’re reading two of Trollope’s novellas, The Golden Lion of Granpere (written 1867, serialized 5 years later) and Dr Wortle’s School (written 1879, serialized 1880). From the sparse commentary on Golden Lion (my chapter on Trollope’s 14 novellas in my book, Trollope on the Net is one of the rare published criticisms of the story, Chapter 4, pp 95-96), and its infrequent mention, I fancy it is truly one of Trollope’s lesser known fictions. In general, Trollope readers much prefer his long (and very long novels), and I know I was unusual in defending these books as in many ways as interesting as the longer ones, just using a different set of artistic techniques. While I wouldn’t claim Golden Lion a masterpiece, after we finished reading and discussing (about 4 to 5 of us), I want to call attention to it as like other of these novellas and some of Trollope’s stories, it’s a sort of experiment and in this case offers (mutedly but there) a daring insight into human psychology. In brief it presents the story of a father, Michel Voss, who tries to prevent his son, George, from marrying as servant girl in the house, Marie Bromar, because he the father has become so attached to her, he cannot bear to see his son replace him. In this novella, although there is no overt incest, Trollope quietly explores incestuous feelings (as Michel looks upon Marie as a kind of daughter) as in others he explores other verboten areas of human psychology under pressure.

What has happened is George and Marie have more or less grown up in close proximity and fallen in love. The rationale Michel uses is that his son has no right to want to marry Marie until he has created a thriving establishment; although not voiced this way, Marie is also a servant girl (rather like, as one member of the listserv, Diane Reynolds pointed out, Sonya in War and Peace) and George ought to marry someone more in his class; the father waxes intensely angry, driving the son to leave immediately to take over the management of a nearby inn not doing very well under the management of a widow, Madame Faragon.

The qualification here is neither Michel nor his wife, treat Marie as an inferior; Michel shows delicacy towards her feelings (he looks upon Marie’s defense of her love for George as “gallant” and “made notes of it in the notebook of his heart,” p 20). He then sets about to find her a fine match and he does in the person of a successful linen-dealer, Adrian Urmand, who is (from point of view of status) condescending when he agrees. I had not paid sufficient attention to Urmand last time either: another member of our listserv suggested Urmand has gay traits (small, a “dandy,” dressing elegantly and, though the word is not used, effeminate, not masculine, not forthright, physically there in the way of Michel and George). Urmand in fact never cares deeply for Marie; he leaves after the engagement calmly to wait until she’s ready; his pride has become involved when he agrees to engage himself publicly to her, and he would give her up when he reads her letter telling him she does not love him, but that the putative father-in-law insists he must not lose face and come back and claim the fulfillment of the engagement. Last time round I saw mostly the Oedipal struggle between father and son; this material is mined for much more than that.

Michel, the father, telling George, his son, he will protect Marie from George

Trollope said of this novella it was written on the pattern of Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel (written 1865 and 67, published 1866 and 67 respectively), both of which have had strong defenders, including Henry James. Trollope insisted Nina was a better book than The Eustace Diamonds. It does not end tragically (as does Linda, a Clarissa story, and as Nina almost does), but it may be said to support the point of view Prof Jim Kincaid argued for in his brief intervention in the recent Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, where Kincaid suggests that Trollope “can be read as a tragic novelist,” who chooses plot-designs which most of the time don’t end in tragedy, and whose mood is part of the comic low-mimetic mode, but nonetheless participate in the same Dionysus-like emotions we find in tragedy and skirt tragic insights into the human condition (“Trollope’s Tragedy,” pp 137-41), in this novella’s case I’d say the same kind of perverse violations of human emotion engineered by social and economic norms Richard Holt Hutton found in An Eye for an Eye. Using 3rd person indirect discourse the narrator and Michel towards the end realize how perversely Michel is behaving: working hard to send Marie away to live with Urman when he’d be himself desolate without her, the household without its central vital spirit (he does say he “won’t have her hurried,” chapter 9, p 116), knowing (though denying) that she does love his son, and himself loving that son, and preferring him to Armand. Pride, a desire to control everyone else, to be seen to be master, and as (so he says more than once), Marie’s “keeper” (Chapter 18, p 227) drives him on.

Another aspect of its quiet power and Trollope’s originality comes out when one compares it to Lady Anna (a marvelous book, recently adapted into a play, my essay on it in my book is Chapter 7). In Lady Anna (written 1871, serialized 1873), one of Trollope’s medium length novels, Lady Anna rebels against her mother and just about everyone in her world to insist on marrying Daniel Thwaite a tailor to whom she has engaged herself. She has been told that her status as a lady is tenuous, and her mother insists that for the mother’s sake who has sacrificed so much for this daughter, she, Lady Anna, must marry someone who is (if she is legitimate which is questionable) her cousin, and lord (like Urmand, very handsome) in order to secure that status as well as hand the family money over to a male heir who comes from a branch of the family relatively without funds. When Lady Anna finally defies her mother, she does this on principle: she stands up for her right to choose for herself, for her identity and past and memories. She makes an ethical argument intended to free herself of her mother’s control (see Chapter 41 especially, “ten times again did she tell herself that were she to yield now, she would be a slave for life,” p 434).

One of the small vignettes: Marie writing her letter

Marie makes as forceful an argument, only in accordance with the deeply sexual angle Trollope is exploring, she actually insists on her right to marry for love, and not to be forced to marry someone she does not love (which in context does refer to going to bed with the man). First Marie (Chapter 18 of Golden Lion) and then George himself (Chapter 19) accost Urmand (and Michel) on the grounds how dare he insert himself into a situation where the girl does not love him. Urmand is an intruder; hovering over this is an idea that such a marriage would constitute a form of (however muted) rape. Michel explodes with his usual word, “nonsense;” and she will love Urmand after a while, but she insists on a sexual right, on her right to choose who she will know passion with. (Quite different grounds from Lady Anna, grounds the great Solicitor-General and other lawyers who become Anna’s friends might not have agreed so readily with as an ethical principle of liberty and identity.)

For me the fascinating aspect of a number of these novellas, the first two of which Trollope (Nina and Linda) insisted on publishing as by anonymous, is how they break taboos through the exploration of a brilliantly-conceived and then delved dilemma. Critics have famously (well among Trollopians it’s famous) why Trollope at the height of his career (he was the author of the Can You Forgive Her? publishing The Last Chronicle of Barset at this time) suddenly want to try himself out again, court failure again. Trollope offered as an excuse that he wanted to see if he deserved his great reputation and if his books were selling so well just because of his name (brand is the word used today). Was this some self-flagellating gesture, masochism? Perhaps he wanted to publish a different sort of book — one not Anglo-Protestant and upper-class centered? And indeed Nina takes place in Prague, Linda in Nuremburg. Trollope attempts lovingly to create a world of French bourgeois Catholicism bordering eastern France and Germany in Golden Lion. He does not go in for nuance, but large general paradigms in a kind of thick ethnography (the same kind of feel is found in his short stories taking place in French inns, for example, “La Mere Bauche” which ends in a tragic disaster).

I’ve thought he wanted to obscure his name because in many of them he dares to deal with questions of central psychological interest for his period in ways that might disquiet and offend readers. In the second novella we are going to read on Trollope19thCStudies, Dr Wortle’s School, Trollope warns the reader early on he has an unmarried couple and if the reader doesn’t like this, the reader should stop reading right now (close the book and go away). Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite has rightly reminded many readers of James’s Washington Square; Kept in the Dark (also very late story, written 1880, published 1882) is a tale of seething intense sexual anxiety and possessiveness (darker even than the central story of He Knew He Was Right); The Fixed Period is a Swiftian Orwellian satire, where a law decrees that people aged 67 must be deposited in aslyums and the next year killed. Even the old stand-by which most Trollopians know so well was remarkably daring in its references to real living church officials and attack on unmerited sinecures, the whole church caste system.

A beautifully shaded and lined illustration of George and Marie’s reconciliation

To return to this neglected (at the close) sunlit tale. Perhaps it’s neglected because it does end in a comforting way. If this were Cousin Henry (perhaps an even less known novella than Golden Lion) Urmand’s diffidence, sensitivity, hurt pride, and withdrawal would make everyone behave with strong contempt towards him. Not so in this story. As we all agreed, by the end the characters all behave justly towards one another, and throughout the tale too Trollope is utterly even-handed, generous in his treatment of them. It all ends in a picnic no one wants to go to, but is engineers to soothe the wounded ego of Urmand — who all agree has been “ill-used.” Michel does love his son; if Madame Voss is somewhat grated upon by Marie (after all she is much younger than her husband and did not marry for love and has accepted her lot), she yields (as so many of Trollope’s characters in these novellas will not) and never quite brings to the surface her jealousy of her. Madame Faragon wants the savior of her inn to be able to marry Marie.

This can make us overlook one area of thought and feeling which is not resolved away at the book’s close. A priest is hauled in to bully Marie into marrying Urmand by insisting she is deeply sinful if she refuses to marry Urmand. Urmand is Catholic and George Protestant. M. le Cure makes the mistake of equating deep sinfulness with obedience to Michel Voss (and himself). Marie sees through this at once as transparent unfair manipulation, false equations. She reminds him that the marriages he is talking of were made for money. At one point Trollope tells us Marie is a “better hypocrite” (Chapter 13, p 153) than most around her (ironically), but it’s really more that even if she half-agrees to marry Urmand and be a “good wife” to him, she never loses sight of her real feeling which is “that she loved another man” (Chapter 9, p 103). She agrees only to please her uncle; her uncle’s demands, her uncle’s pressure, her uncle’s feelings are what she most attends to throughout the tale; the original illustrations to the tale emphasize this relationship.

Marie and Michel, like to go on long walks together and talk

Overlooked, unemphasized but here is one of Trollope’s motifs throughout his books: religious hypocrisy. The priest is behaving as badly as the Proudies who also manipulate religion to inflict an abusive power; and he never does back away, only disappears. A sidelight here is how frequently in Trollope’s lesser known novels he can also present a deeply sympathetic portrait of a Catholic priest (the first and most moving in The Macdermots of Ballycloran, Trollope’s first and a tragic novel).

As I argued in my book, but here for different reasons, I think this is a fine novel by Trollope, and have written this blog to recommend it to readers who have not read it and suggest rereading to those who have. Among the older forgotten studies of Trollope that would illuminate this book is L. J. Swingle’s Romanticism and Anthony Trollope: A Study in the Continuities of Nineteenth-Century Literary Thought. The novel turns Arcadian in the close but it uses lyrical rhythms in many passages of description throughout; at the same time Trollope shows a real interest in ecology in this book. In its happy ending the characters are enabled to follow an inner innate nature and find contentment in life.

Ellen

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2 Poldark 10: Reconciliation and Forbearance — Finale for now

Ross (Aidan Turner) and Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson)

Elizabeth (Heida Reed), Geoffrey Charles (unnamed) and George Warleggan (Jack Farthing)

She’d say life holds only two or three things worth the having, and if you possess them the rest don’t matter, and if you do not possess them the rest are useless (Graham, Warleggan, Bk 4:Ch 5, p 439; repeated in screenplay but attributed to Ross rather than Demelza, screenplay, 70 INT, pp 578-79)

Dear friends and readers,

[Note: this blog assumes the reader has read Graham’s novels, viewed the 1970s mini-series, and is interested in the art as well as content of the books and this older and the new 2015-16 mini-series. I don’t re-cap, expect the viewer to have seen the film, understood the story, and remember it generally.]

So we come to the end of the second season of the Debbie Horsfield’s new Poldark and Winston Graham’s powerful fourth novel, Warleggan. I was powerfully moved by the new finale, which remained close in most respects to the book, but have to admit I was equally deeply engaged by its counterpart in 1975, Jack Russell’s Episode 16, whose events moved so far from the book so as to present a different story, but whose sense and spirit were a theatrically Jacobin version in spirit of the book (rather like Jack Pulman’s Episodes 3 and 4 related to the conclusion of Graham’s first novel, Ross Poldark). I burst into tears at the 1975 version, not just because Demelza’s beloved dog, Garrick, is shot by Warleggan’s thugs, but at some wrenching of me within as Ross (Robin Ellis) and Demelza (Angharad Rees), continue fiercely to tear at one another.

I didn’t cry during this second iteration because I have a hard time accepting one of the changes Horsfield made: in Graham’s book and in Russell’s rendition, well before Ross’s last visit to Trenwith to talk with Warleggan and (in the book) Elizabeth, Demelza makes the difficult effort to forgive, accept, and let her love for Ross come out and respond to him again so that they could have gone to bed again (Bk 4, Ch 3, pp 413-414 — he feels he will wait until she will feel no reserve once again). In Warleggan they do quarrel angrily in the last scene (over very different and woman’s way of seeing his conduct and his refusal to acknowledge her understanding of what happened is just too), such that they nearly break up as they nearly do in Horsfield’s version (Bk 4, Ch 7, pp 460-66). In my view Graham stopped writing the series for 20 years because he had reached such an impasse, with Ross still at least longing for Elizabeth to acknowledge an ex-love (she won’t, now that he never turned up after the rape, left her pregnant, and she has had to marry a man she doesn’t love and who she knows doesn’t love her, she hates Ross), and Ross and Demelza reconciling themselves to the reality of conflicting emotions they must live with. But Horsfield and Eleanor Tomlinson’s Demelza reached a point of bitterness, sarcasm (she jeers at Ross — “What it is to be married to such a great man!”)), spite in her eyes, hate in a visit to Elizabeth (not in the book)

Demelza confronting Elizabeth

Elizabeth: ‘Why have you come?’
Demelza: ‘I thought ’twas to tell you that I hate you. That you’ve marred my faith and broke my marriage. That I envy you. for the passion you roused which Ross could not withstand. That I pity you … But now I wonder what do any of it matter? what you did — what Ross did — cannot be undone. And you both must live with that. But I need not.

and reluctant grudging silence even in her last scene with Ross, her eyes so narrow, her face so pinched, that I felt alienated from the character I had bonded with. I found it just so painful that she did not seem to value Ross, invest her whole being there (the way I had with my husband and have imagined Demelza does in the book). A part of my deep joy in the novels is the character of Demelza as imagined by Graham and she is never hateful with fierce looks of spite; never stalks anyone. I can respond better to open hurt than rigid withholding of the self and resentment. Horsfield’s conception and Tomlinson’s acting makes deep pyschological sense, but I could find little to comfort myself with here. I felt for Aidan Turner as Ross, remorseful, trying to be honest (she says he is not honest when he is), and clinging to her (Horsfield gives Graham’s Demelza’s words to him (see above). In the long feature to the DVD of this second season, Jack Farthing remarks that the series “is not a museum piece,” but treats of issues, presents characters of direct contemporary relevance today. In book and this episode she does sow doubt in Ross’s mind that she just might have gone to bed with MacNeil (Henry Garrett) and the scene of Ross’s anger at this in this episode’s penultimate scene is word-for-word from the book and very good (and not in the 1970s version where Demelza never moves away from Ross at all), and she does threaten to leave with Jeremy, but in the last pages of the book and here on the cliff again does not.

Agatha has nearly the last words of the episode as she tells Elizabeth she has made a pact with a devil and warns the baby may come in February (9 months after May 9th, the night of the rape)

For the record the changes in Demelza are not the only way Horsfield departs from the Warleggan (perhaps, some would say, modernizes). Some of the material comes from Black Moon (Book 5); so too George’s attempt to part Geoffrey Charles from Elizabeth in Black Moon, Elizabeth’s fuller realization her coming baby might be Ross’s – she suspects, worries but the realization comes later. Here it comes at the close from Aunt Agatha’s (Caroline Blakiston) insight; entirely new (not in book, not in earlier series) is the way Horsfield has developed the relationship of Agatha and Elizabeth. Agatha functions in the way the fool did in Elizabethan drama: she tells Elizabeth truths Elizabeth doesn’t not want to hear but knows in her heart. In Warleggan she realizes George has married her as a trophy, is not manageable or comfortable to be with as Francis, but it takes the time passing in Black Moon for her to see she has married a mean bully in George.

The mob scene is the invention of Jack Russell. There is none in Warleggan (as Pulman invented the idea that Charles Poldark took a needed £300 from Ross after he borrowed it from Pascoe, and Horsfield changed that to Charles trying to bribe Ross to leave). Horsfield has not allowed this natural result of enclosure and destroying the tenants’ houses to move into open riot, murder (the crazed lonely Paul Daniel is shot through the chest by Warleggan in 1975), nor allowed Trenwith to burn down, but the episode does give us a theatrically effective rendition of the rage the tenants and all around Truro George’s behavior is causing. Having Trenwith burn down in the older series made havock with Black Moon and Ross and Agatha’s deep resentment and George’s exultation to be in Trenwith. I object to the new way it’s done where Horsfield far more blames the workers (as a foolish group, not a starving deeply wounded people with nothing to lose) but the new episode gives Ross a chance to redeem himself by stopping the riot and appealing directly to Demelza to come home with him. He has come for her.

Demelza climbing up in front of Ross once more

Jack Russell has Ross called to war to join his regiment (this is anachronistic), so that at the close he leaves Demelza with Jeremy; there is nothing like this in the book — for the very good reasons Pascoe (Richard Hope in this version) and Dwight Enys (Luke Norris) in the new episode tell him not to: he needs to be there to develop his thriving tin business, to keep up his family. But Horsfield picks this up too as theatrical; he joins Dwight in London after the disillusioned Dwight (he has been told wrongly that Caroline has engaged herself to a Lord Coniston) has signed up, but cannot get himself to leave. Horsfield conveys the ominousness of war through having Jeremy play with toy soldiers against the larger background of taverns, and men readying themselves. There is much less romance to it than there was 40 years ago.

The two friends reunited

Much was done very well –- and the parts that were closer to the book finer in conception, subtler, making more true sense than what Russell concocted (see my account in the comments). In general throughout both seasons 1 and 2 of this Poldark and the whole of the previous, where the writer is closer to Graham, the series is better. As so common, it opens with Ross and (now) Henshawe, Paul Daniel all working at the mine. Only now Demelza is not there; she is not helping but acting out the “elegant” lady, walking in the meadow. We move to Trenwith where George is having Francis’s picture removed, placating Elizabeth with a dual portrait of them in its place(by the “celebrated John Opie — “oh George,” says the fool, “you spoil me”), all the while thinking of how he may part her “reasonably” from Geoffrey Charles (a good school you see) and plotting with Tankard to shoot people on sight who take the hitherto public right of way, and by the next scene seeking to wrench from Ross the shares he paid Elizabeth for from Wheal Grace while they were worthless. In this second scene, Elizabeth lurks by the door and does realize for the first time that Ross had tried to help her, but after a ferocious physical battle where Ross tries to burn George, and he has his men eject him after smashing his face, she seems to side with George. Jill Townsend’s Elizabeth was cooler, assessed George better (as does Graham’s), knew she was caged upon marriage.

Townsend’s face hardens as she realizes George will not keep any of his promises (to take her to London, to provide her with a great lady social life ….)

Reed is ever soft: the scene ends now with her telling her boy, George will be his papa now — the child is not impressed

The Dwight and Caroline (Gabriella Wilde) scenes and especially when John Nettles as Ray Penvenen is there are very well and carefully realized. Nettles is a fine actor, and a deeply appealing uncle, who conveys complex feelings: we have the scene where Dwight tells him he has “the sugar sickness” and will not get better by altering his diet (no wine) but may prolong his life.

I cannot warm to Horsfield’s conception of Caroline as a shallow egoistic heiress slowly growing up; by contrast Judy Geeson is shown as genuinely caring for the beaten down impoverished Rosina Hoblyn:

Jack Russell’s Caroline hires Rosina as her maid (very anachronistic). Neither is quite Graham’s conception: Graham’s Caroline is a hold-over from the gay witty lady of Restoration comedy, and becomes humanized through her flirtatious relationship with Ross, friendship with Demelza and her ambiguous marriage to Dwight (she does emasculate him somewhat, and in the later books he holds himself apart). But there is something touching about Wilde’s behavior, how she holds her body, when Ross comes to thank her, and brings her back to Dwight (she stands there looking more penitent than ever seen before). It’s pure romance:

I was moved when after the lovers’ night together, she returns to her lonely uncle to care for him.

I also warmed to the added scene of Verity’s (Ruby Bentall) childbirth: her step-daughter has now sofened towards her; the whole scene is not literally in the book but a fair extrapolation. And it gives Horsfield a chance to have the sympathetic Verity try to talk Demelza into accepting and forgiving, into remembering, believing Ross does love her — and not to let go of that.

Verity is dropped from the books, marginalized as a character from the time of Black Moon on. In Graham and the 2nd season of the 1970s Poldark (1977-78), instead Demelza’s great friend becomes Caroline Penvenen Enys. I hope Horsfield changes that, and keeps the sister-friendship up as she has developed the aunt-niece relationship of Agatha and Elizabeth.

Turner in one of several scenes between him and Demelza where he is reasoning with her, trying to apologize, to explain himself.

I thought Turner superb in the episode: it was a hard part. He had to be didactic and explicitly say moral things left to interior thoughts in the book and he did it very well. I found him very appealing throughout. He has become this complicated character thoroughly, driven, with many conflicting loyalties, rightly fiercely protective of everything good which Warleggan would blight. Given the present horrible things going on in the US where a man has taken power and is inflicting pain and deprivation on the majority of Americans, treating non-whites as semi-criminals (they are not safe in the streets anymore), having immigrants snatched up and deported to anywhere, prosecuting parents, increasing private prisons (shown to be cruel to prisoners), Ross Poldark is now an important hero for our time in a way he has not been since the 1940s when he was conceived as an antidote to the barbarism and nightmare war of mid-century Europe. His finally striking out at George, meaning to kill him almost unless stopped is another moment of understandable rage for the character who is emerging as flawed but meaning and doing well often (exemplary in most ways). Farthing is acting George as he is in the book (and as Ralph Bates acted him in the 1970s), we see the banality of evil, cold selfishness, no care for anyone but himself and those he deems extensions of him. I regret they dropped his father Nicholas as a semi-moral villain, slightly comic, amusingly acid (Allen Tilvern); we are in an era where there is no room for comedy and so we have the icy relentless Cary Warleggan (Pip Torrens).

A telling repeat image in this episode is that of people writing letters to one another; we see George writing, and and switch to Ross writing and back again:

There are scenes of signing, Dwight leans down to sign his return to the navy (as a doctor aboard a ship), Ross nearly signs, he takes documents from Pascoe to London. George is continually among his documents, looking at them (as was Ralph Bates in 1975). No longer boxing and fencing with someone, but attacking the world through ownership and lawyers.

Not a museum piece as Farthing said.

I aim to reread the coming novels, Black Moon and The Four Swans this summer and am now eager for the third season and for all twelve novels to be adapted into this film adaptation. I also hope they will keep the same actors when after The Angry Tide, the series must move ahead ten years to The Stranger from the Sea. As with The Pallisers (where they age considerably) or I, Claudius, I would enjoy seeing the actual presences grow older and change and endure on.

The working mine the set-designers keep to

In Maureen Turim’s book, Flashbacks in Film, on history: she makes the point how Hollywood films seem always to tell a political or historical story through the story of individuals; one must. Her philosophical criticism is that this must distort realities, especially as often the film-makers choose exemplary characters and of course they get to chose what example they want to present, and often provide a happy ending. One way the history film can get past this is the use of flashback, montage, retrospective, wide far shots, the characters remembering: well at the close of Poldark on the cliff and in the returns to the symbolic buildings, Trenwith, Nampara, the village, that’s precisely what the film-makers are suggesting.

Next up: Outlander, the second season, when I’ve finished War and Peace. Just now I am watching in a row all the Anna Karenina movies, and especially loving the 1978 13 part BBC mini-series written by Donald Wilson, the same man who wrote much of the 1967 Forsyte Saga. Keep hope alive, my friends, keep hope alive. And I will be writing on books too.

Ellen

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