I love the series, and it is the best Wolfe screen adaptation.
I’m a big fan of this Poirot series as well and had been in the process of watching through it again. I had never tried the others.
I started watching the Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett and am really enjoying it. Brett is a fantastic Holmes. Thanks for the recommendation! I have to comment that the fighting, especially against Moriarty, looked pretty ridiculous.
I quite liked that series. I can appreciate the comments on Archie, but what did you not like about the portrayal of Wolfe? I read the books after watching the series so I admit I was biased from the get-go.
His presence wasn’t as imposing or commanding as I thought it should be, nor was his voice. I imagined Wolfe to be something like Sydney Greenstreet as Caspar Gutman in Huston’s The Maltese Falcon.
Interestingly, Greenstreet played Wolfe in a series of radio dramas in the 1930s that were apparently not based on Stout’s stories at all. I’ve listened to parts of some of them and was disappointed that his voice seemed too weak and thin for my taste.
He never played Wolfe on screen, but if he had, I think his physical presence might have made up for any perceived shortcomings in his voice. Or he could have been directed to use a deeper vocal range than he did on radio.
But Chaykin was not only not big enough physically, he just didn’t exude the intellectual power I see in Wolfe. And when he shouted at people, he screeched rather than bellowed. It was disappointing.
But I may give the series another chance some day. I see that some of them are on YouTube, which would spare me having to dig my DVDs out of storage.
Wow. The first one is absolutely dreadful.
A show’s theme song should fit the subject matter. It should bring to mind, in some form or fashion, some quality of the character and/or type of story. This one is wildly inappropriate.
By contrast, the Joan Hickson version fits.
Personally, I like Margaret Rutherford. I don’t care for her Miss Marple movies. Bad adaptations. On edit: It sounds like I prefer Rutherford. I don’t. I prefer Hickson, McEwen, or McKenzie --any of them – to Rutherford.
There was a Hildegarde Withers besides Edna Mae Oliver???
Personally, I like all three of the “modern” Miss Marples that have had TV adaptations. But I adore David Suchet’s Poirot. Besides being well-acted, they’re very good productions – lots of period detail, good costuming, etc.
Interestingly, they do a lot of messing around with the original stories (like putting Miss Marple in a story in which she did not originally appear), but they’re still lots of fun to watch. I can’t rewatch Endless Night though because it’s just too sad.
No. Brainfart on my part.
Ah. Thanks. I wondered how I could have missed that!
I agree. In the stories he was never a parish priest, so no recurring characters like Mrs. McCarthy or Lady Felicia. He was posted on special assignments or occasionally he was just on vacation.
I read the books almost 40 years ago so I might not be remembering correctly, but wasn’t he also EXTREMELY socially conservative?
As a devoted fan of Wodehouse and collector of his books, I just wanted to make a few comments about the above. Taken in isolation, the Jeeves and Wooster series are very good and so are Fry and Laurie in their roles. And since I also love the best of British comedy in general, one would think that I would adore this series. Ironically, I don’t, though objectively I appreciate how well done they are. The problem is that I’m conditioned to Wodehouse as reflected in his novels and short stories, a large part of whose charm and humour derives from Wodehouse’s brilliant command of language and his ability to turn comedic writing into a form of high art. No television dramatization can possibly do it justice. Also, IIRC, not only does the series greatly abridge many of the story lines, I seem to recall that it blends some of them together, all in the interests of television production.
Also, FTR, Wodehouse was an incredibly prolific writer, and Jeeves and Wooster represents only a tiny portion of his works, and although they’re probably the most well known, I don’t think they’re particularly the best. Among other series, there are the wonderful Blandings novels and stories, the “Mr. Mulliner” series published as three collections of hilarious short stories, a series of stories centered on the Drones Club peppered throughout various other collections, a smaller series featuring Stanley Featherstonaugh Ukridge – the world’s most hapless but enterprising freeloader – and many dozens of novels completely or mostly unrelated to the series.
I’m just saying that P.G. Wodehouse is an enduring literary treasure and television cannot do him justice.
I agree. I love Laurie as Wooster. He was born for that role. Fry was a competent Jeeves but not spectacular.
As much as I loved watching Laurie play Wooster, I did not like the way they re-wrote the stories. And two of them absolutely violated the rules of Woodhouse world: (1) the one in which they abandoned ship and showed up at the end having taken a raft around the world or something and (2) the one on which they pretended to be women to fool someone.