Hard Times

This is an excellent TV version of Dickens' novel. The actors portraying Gradgrind and Bounderby showed their respective fact-stressing and insensitive natures very well. Louisa was well shown as a woman whose feelings had been kept inside all of her life. There is also the gloom of Coketown, an atmosphere impossible for its citizens to escape from. This adaptation is very close to the book and there are no great departures from the original story. There is another version of Hard Times available (which I have not seen) that had some poor reviews, so I chose to purchase this one instead. Surprisingly, this one was not included in any other Dickens DVD collection, but it is available separately here. If you love Dickens, this is well worth getting since it's one of the best miniseries created. There's not much technology since the series was made back in 1977 on a limited budget, but in the viewing experience there's a great story brought to the screen with some wonderful drama.

Okeydokey

This movie saved my bacon a few weeks ago. I had a major book report on the book Hard Times as well as a test and without even reading the 1st page I got a 100 on the test :) Mind you I also had sparknotes handy and coupled together I was invincible. Definetley reccomend it but don't fool yourself into thinking the movie alone will help you pass, just have summaries available to fill in the missing stuff (although it isn't much). Its kinda captivating as well, gradgrinds sideburns are epic.

Perhaps Dickens' weakest novel, with one of his strongest themes, is very well done, superior to the movie made a couple decades later. The circus folk outshine the cream of society in their humanity. Dickens never forgot where he came from and he could sympathize with those of humbler origins.

Best video version of this lesser known Dickens life crisis allegory.Harder heads than even in those days and heart breaks for some that deserved it and some who did not.

If you like Dickens give this 1970s Granada TV version a go. A nice performance by the cast esp. Timothy West. Would watch again.

Filmed in color in 1977. This movie moves way too slow for this sort of story. The Victorian film "Emma" moves slow, but there is the interest of the large manor houses, beautiful gardens, interesting costumes and lady's hairstyles, fun dancing, and a good story of Emma trifling in matchmaking. In this film, "Hard Times", all the characters are dull and there is nothing else of interest to look at. I paid $17, which includes shipping, which is way too much for a disappointing film, which I will donate to the library. Victorian films I did like are: "Under the Greenwood Tree", "Emma", "North & South", "Pride & Prejudice", "Wives & Daughters", "Nicholas Nickleby", "PollyAnna", "Oliver Twist", "David Copperfield", "Silas Marner", "Old Curiosity Shop 1995 with Peter Ustinov", "Middlemarch", and "Great Expectations-1946".

Hard Times is not that well known. This is a well done British version and must be viewed realizing it in the context of the year produced 1977. Well worth the viewing. Viewed with Amazon Prime Video. Well done Mr. T. West et al. I always enjoy the old British versions of the classics. I am one for the period dramas. Charles Dickens gives the darker side of the often romanized Victorian era. It is Hard Times reading and viewing the conflicts of the laborers, poor and the merchants and the ruling rich.

Ya expliqué a Luis la razón por la que no me había gustado esta versión de Hard Times. Espero me hayan devuelto el dinero de su devolución. Un saludo.

ディケンズの同名の詳説の映像化です。Hard Timesは映像化されたものが少ないので原作を読む前の予習として購入しました。1972の作品で映像に古臭さを感じますが、陳腐さ、映像の乱れなどはなくキレイで現在でも、視聴には十分です。約50分が4話で、物語も面白いですが、字幕がありません。字幕がなくとも話自体は単純で、音声も聞き取りやすいです。気になる人は事前にあらすじを読んでおくのがいいと思います。パソコンで再生し、大きな問題はありませんでした。

je n'ai pas pu autant en profiter que je voulais car il n'y a pas de sous titre en anglais et l'accent y est très fort. Dommage !

Prodotto come da descrizione, tempi di consegna circa 2 settimane. Comprato per mia figlia che dopo averlo visto si è detta soddisfatta.

Hard Times is probably one of the least well known of Dickens's novels, it is also one of his shortest. (Dickens himself regarded it more in the style of a novelette.) Published in serial format in 1854, and sandwiched between two greats"--Bleak House and Little Dorrit--there are fewer characters than in his other novels, this an inevitable consequence of its novelette scale. Moreover, with few exceptions there is little of the humour that is a feature to so many of the other novels and their characters. The title sums it up: it is a grim thesis on the plight of the ordinary dog pitched into a society that knows no level playing field.This has to be one of the finest productions of any Dickens with one proviso: the omission of the final comeuppance of Josiah Bounderby (misspelled Joshua on the cover), is omitted (see later). Apart from the dramatic opening and closing audios, there is no background music of any kind. Indeed there is no call for this sort of distraction, for the visuals and the dialogue alone convey the full message of this harrowing tale. And for this reviewer the absence of a "it all ends happily ever after, despite the ups and downs of the journey before" makes for a more realistic tale--much of Dickens is allegorical, this one--with some small exceptions--could have been plucked straight from real life.Set in an imaginary northern Yorkshire mining town, appropriately named Coketown, we are presented with manifestations of child education (a favourite theme with Dickens) in the mid-nineteenth century along with a number of other social "grotesques" that the author explores with consummate skill.Despite lasting around 200 minutes (still a considerable compression of the work) there is no sense of hurry or distortion through abridgement. On the contrary, some of the scenes are played at a realistic pace thereby giving scope for some acting of anguishing realism. (The humanisation of schoolmaster Gradgrind for example.)But at all levels the parts are played with skill and conviction; and there are some fine performances to relish here: Timothy West as Bounderby, the tempestuous, buffooning self-made mill-owner and banker, who plays on his succession from gutter to successful man of business. (A spurious claim that the production fails to honour when his housekeeper, Mrs Sparsit--herself something of a humbug and played by Rosalie Crutchley--runs to earth the mill-owners effaced mother.) But above all Patrick Allen, as Gradgrind, has us convinced of his mellowing through experience and ageing, again not unknown in real life.The scenes between the estranged mill-worker, Stephen Blackpool (Alan Dobie), ostracized by his workmates for refusing to join the union, and his lover Rachael (Barbara Ewing), especially the final death scene when the man is hauled up from the depths of a disused mineshaft, are very moving; likewise the rapport between Sissy Jupe (Michelle Dibnah), an orphaned young woman Gradgrined takes into care, and Gradgrind's daughter Louise (Jacqueline Tong) connived into marrying Bounbderby.The humour is subtly done non-the-less, thus a direct quote from the book (faithfully reproduced in the production under review). Bounderby's bank has been robbed (by the Whelp, Tom (Richard Wren)--Gradgrind's son--as it happens, with the suspicion thrown deliberately by the former onto Blackpool. Mrs Sparsit, having been placed in rooms above the bank following Bounderby's marriage to Louise, has to recount the activities of the Bank's errand boy Bitzer (Sean Flanagan):`Sir,' returned Mrs Sparsit, `I cannot say I have actually heard him (Bitzer) precisely snore, and therefore must not make that statement (that the boy was sleeping on duty). But on winter evenings when he has fallen asleep at his table, I have heard him, what I should prefer to describe as partially choke. I have heard him on such occasions produce sounds of a nature similar to what may be sometimes heard in Dutch clocks. . . ."`Well,' said the exasperated Bounderby, `while he was snoring, or choking, or Dutch-clocking, or something or other . . .'Beat that if you can!