Stars: John Carlisle, Rupert Graves, Barbara Flynn, Gina McKee, Damian Lewis

Director: Christopher Menaul

Summary: A remake of the television drama which chronicles the lives of three generations of a powerful Victorian family.

THE FORSYTE SAGA, based on John Galsworthy's novels, follows a powerful Victorian family through three generations. A drama of romance, money, and betrayal, this sweeping tale features an excellent ensemble cast that includes the suitably seething performance from Damian Lewis, detached Gina McKee, bohemian Rupert Graves, fatherly Corin Redgrave and dashing Ioan Gruffudd. A delicious, lavish production, where the Victorian veneers are beginning to crack as the younger generation mature. Their corsetted, entwined lives seeping with an insatiable desire for freedom and love. Some make it, some are not so lucky.

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The Forsyte Sagais often cited as the first television miniseries; it wasn't, but there's no question that it was a singular, powerful cultural phenomenon that deservedly got under the skin of European viewers in 1967. Today the 26-episode production, based on several novels and short stories by John Galsworthy, is a more timeless enterprise than many of the protracted British TV dramas that have followed. While it would be wrong to consider The Forsyte Sagahigh art, it's certainly a mesmerizing and inspired mix of theater, sprawling Victorian narrative, thinking man's soap opera, and some finely tuned, 1960s black-and-white production values that (especially when shot outdoors) are strikingly handsome.

Above all, Forsyteis driven by its characters--perhaps to an extreme, though the two-generation storyline makes no apologies for creating compelling people whose capacity for short-sighted blundering, bursts of grace, and slow-brewing redemption make them recognizably human. Eric Porter towers over everything as Soames Forsyte, a humorless attorney whose guiding principles of measurable value cause great heartache but slowly evolve, leaving him a graying, good father, arts patron, and sympathetic repository of memory. From the cast of 150 or so, other standouts include Susan Hampshire as Soames's troubled daughter, Nyree Dawn Porter as the wife of two very different Forsyte men, and Kenneth More as the family's artistic black sheep. --Tom Keogh

Aspect Ratio:	16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Year:	2002
Release Date:	July 12, 2004
Runtime:	699 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	C C D 30009
Keywords:	Classic, Book, Saga, Off, General, Four, Series, Wide, Screen, Forsyte, Tv, Drama, Period, Discs, Based, Schedule
Genre:	Drama