American Lit Chick Flick: The Buccaneers

Thanks to the convenience of my new laptop along with Netflix instant play, I watched "The Buccaneers", a BBC miniseries based on an Edith Wharton novel. The Netflix instant play is great because you can stop watching the movie, and when you start again, it's in the exact spot that you stopped, unlike our DVD player. This is great, because I fall asleep easily and then, of course, there's life that interrupts. It's four or five hours long, so it took a couple of weeks to watch.

I had never even heard of this one until it presumably popped up on a recommended list, I don't really remember. It's disappointingly lacking in handsome male actors (I'm shallow, I know) and that feel-good romantic aura you get with something like Pride and Prejudice, but it was tragically gripping after about an hour or so. Here's a summary from Amazon:

Deemed nouveau riche and shunned by elitist New York society, sisters Nan and Virginia St. George, along with their friends Lizzy Elmsworth and Conchita Closson (Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino), try their luck in London. The girls' New World spontaneity and impertinence constitute nothing less than a social invasion of Old World society and they soon find themselves courted by a coterie of fascinated admirers. But as the old and new worlds come to clash, something has to give.

There's some ugly stuff in this one--marital abuse, desperate affairs, etc., but I liked it enough to want to read the book. Apparently it was unfinished though.

I definitely feel grateful to live in this time and have more choices and options than these women depicted in the 1870's. So, while there's no Colin Firth in this one, I'll end up giving my own wonderful husband a few more kisses (when he gets home from Oklahoma, that is!)

Here's the one video clip available on YouTube: