Pimp post: The Forsyte Saga
Jan. 24th, 2009 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gogmagog
London, 1879. "In England today, there is no more charming and instructive sight than an upper-middle-class family in full plumage. This particular family is called Forsyte, and they live in Park Lane. Indeed, all the Forsytes live around the park; it's fashionable, and convenient, and property values there continue to rise steadily. Yet although each Forsyte is impressive enough singly, their true favor can only be appreciated on the occasions when they gather together at one or other of their well-appointed houses. No branch of the Forsytes has a genuine liking for any other, but as a group, they possess that mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit of society."
The Forsyte Saga is a trilogy of books by John Galsworthy, comprising A Man of Property, In Chancery and To Let. It’s also a 1967 BBC TV series, the first of the great literature-based period-piece miniseries that the BBC is now so famous for; it was a runaway hit – a true phenomenon – and essentially inaugurated the demand for those miniseries. Similarly, when shown here in the US two years later, it was so popular that the then-fledgling PBS, which was showing it, increased its audience considerably, and created a new program called Masterpiece Theatre in order to keep that audience. And finally, it’s a 2001-2002 ITV TV series which has much higher production values but, in my opinion, is vastly inferior to the 60s version (and which I will hence not be talking about).
The 1967 TV series covers both the Forsyte Saga trilogy and Galsworthy’s sequel trilogy, which continues the story of the second generation of Forsytes. Ultimately, it runs over a period of about fifty years, from the height of the Victorian era to the end of the 1920s, and documents the lives of three generations of Forsytes. This post will only cover the first half or so of the series, corresponding to the first two books; I’ll do another post later on the events of the second half, which feature the children of the characters of the first half (though most of the surviving older characters play major parts in it).
The first two books essentially cover three time periods. The first book, set in the late 1880s, features the events that result from young June Forsyte’s engagement to Philip Bosinney, and Bosinney’s subsequent affair with the beautiful – and married – Irene Forsyte. There’s an interlude between the first two books, Indian Summer of a Forsyte, which takes place seven years after the Bosinney debacle and features the now-independent-but-impoverished Irene being befriended by June’s grandfather, Jolyon Forsyte. And finally, the second book takes place five years after THAT, during the lead-up to and explosion of the Boer War, centering around Soames Forsyte’s attempts to win back and/or get a divorce from his estranged wife Irene, and showing the way in which his efforts merely drive her into the arms of his cousin Jo.
The television series manages to fit in all of these segments, as well as several preceding episodes featuring the lead-up to June and Bosinney’s engagement, things we get as backstory in the book: June’s father’s affair with and eventual marriage to her former governess, Soames’ original courtship of Irene, Winifred Forsyte’s marriage to Montague Dartie, and a generally more in-depth introduction to the other Forsytes and their idiosyncracies.
This brief plot summary sounds quite melodramatic, and to a certain extent it is; nevertheless, it feels like entirely natural development, especially over such a long period of time. The setting also helps; everyone is very, well, Victorian, and so the melodrama is kept to a minimum (everyone’s too worried about causing a scandal to get TOO rowdy, and generally shows some decorum, if not in the things they do then in HOW they do them). The series itself is beautifully made; though it shows its age, and bears all the hallmarks of 60s BBC TV (black-and-white, some dodgy takes thanks to shooting-as-live, very 60s hair and makeup on the younger women, and lots of studio-bound scenes, though that last works since so much of the series is about the Forsytes' domestic lives). The casting is perfect - certainly much better than the recent ITV series - and the script is amazingly true to Galsworthy's novel, even down to frequently using much of the same dialogue. Add on the fact that the writers choose the most tantalizing places to end episodes, and it becomes very easy to marathon the fuck out of this show (as I did over Christmas break with my parents, all 22 hours of it + two hours of special features).
So, a brief introduction to the dramatis personae:
YOUNG JOLYON “JO” FORSYTE
Jo is our narrator for the first two-thirds of the series, and gives us a bit of an outsider’s view of the Forsytes, though he’s a Forsyte himself. Artistic and with a general air of ironic detachment, he’s clearly different from the other Forsytes in his disregard for money and status. Soon he becomes a literal outsider: in the first episode he causes a break with the rest of the family by leaving his loveless marriage to live with his daughter’s former governess, the Austrian Helene. The rift extends to his own father, Jolyon, and his daughter June. Disinherited and a pariah, Jo and Helene create a life of their own, poorer than the highly-upper-middle-class Forsytes but happy and in love.
HELENE FORSYTE née HILLMER
Helene begins the story as June’s governess and Jo’s mistress – by her choice, not his (she insists that Jo give the mistress thing a try to ensure that that’s what he wants to do before he leaves his wife for her, for the sake of June and the elder Jolyon). Helene is generally likeable and has spunk, but suffers from some sort of vague manic depression: her highs are especially high and her lows are especially low, and this causes minor problems for her in her relationship with Jo (at least, minor for now…).
FRANCES FORSYTE née CRISSON
Jo’s legal wife and June’s mother; she refuses to give Jo a divorce, so he and Helene must live in sin until Frances dies in a hunting accident. Jo accuses Frances of being as much a Forsyte as if she’d been born one, and in some ways this is a valid remark: certainly she shares the mainstream Forsyte obsession with status, property, and reputation, even if it means a loveless marriage for both her and her husband.
SOAMES FORSYTE
Jo’s cousin - the "man of property" - and the second of the three focuses of the series. His father, James, is Jolyon’s brother, and while James and Jolyon have generally got along, Soames and Jo quite dislike each other. Soames is a barrister, and the most Forsyte of Forsytes; he seems to have an appreciation of beauty, which comes out both in his collection of paintings and in his courtship of the lovely but distant Irene, but he has no way of expressing that appreciation except through exerting ownership. This works fine with paintings, but not so well with wives. Though Soames can at times be a horrible person, he’s the closest thing we get to a protagonist in the series – as the only character who appears in all 26 episodes – and there’s a certain sympathy that we feel with him as an audience, even when his actions are clearly reprehensible.
IRENE FORSYTE née HERON
Ahhh, Irene. Irene is the key to the series, in many ways; it’s ultimately through her that the great split in the Forsyte family occurs, and her relationship with Soames is the great Greek tragedy of the series (well, Greek tragedy by way of Victorian England, anyway). Irene is beautiful and musically gifted, but is also very good at projecting an unruffled and emotionally impenetrable exterior. She marries Soames in haste, as a poor young woman with no other real options, and repents in leisure. Soames attempts to get through to her, but in entirely the wrong ways, and her dislike of him (no, perhaps loathing is a better word) is one of the few constants of the series.
Really, the great tragedy of Soames and Irene is that she is, as Galsworthy wrote, "born to be loved and to love." Soames does truly love her, even if he can only express it through possession of her as another piece of property; unfortunately, because of this, she can't love him back, and he can't deal with this. This is ultimately manifested in episode 6, when Soames, jealous of Irene's affair with Bosinney, rapes her; it's a sign of Galsworthy's skill that, even though we hate him for a while for it, we can have sympathy and even liking for him later, and it's even MORE a sign of his skill that he does it without ever sweeping the rape under the rug. It is the rape that more than anything cements the split between the two halves of the Forsytes, even unto the next generation: not to spoil the next half, but very little will nip a youthful romance in the bud like being told that your girlfriend's dad raped your mom. XD
In fact, one of Galsworthy's great strengths, and something that's preserved in the TV series, is his ability to reverse or shift our sympathies. For example, Irene was my least favorite character for much of the first half - I thought she was selfish, melodramatic, and overly in love with the idea of being in love (which funnily enough I didn't feel when reading the same section of the book later). Nevertheless, by the end of the series Irene was one of my favorite characters. Similarly, Soames starts out by being a bit of a misunderstood woobie, then HOLY SHIT IT'S RAPE O'CLOCK, then he ends up infiltrating his way back into our sympathies, even if he never really becomes a woobie again. And the same process of shifting sympathies, increasing or decreasing or sometimes flat-out reversing, happens with so many other characters throughout the series - Bosinney, June, Helene, Jolyon, and in the later generations Fleur and Jon. Really, the only characters who are thoroughly likeable throughout the series are Jo and Winifred - with everyone else we experience that shift of sympathies to a more or less radical extent.
WINIFRED DARTIE née FORSYTE
Soames’ sister, Winifred begins the story as a giddy young woman, freshly betrothed to the dashing Montague Dartie. Delighted to be marrying her beloved Monty, the marriage quickly deteriorates when Monty is revealed to be a spendthrift and gambler who essentially leeches money off her wealthy family, but nevertheless Winifred loves him and staunchly sticks by him – she’s made her bed, and she’s prepared to lie in it, at least until he goes too far...
MONTAGUE DARTIE
Winifred’s husband, and an unmitigated bounder. Nevertheless, she does love him for some of the truly good behavior he displayed towards her in better days, most notably his gift to her of a string of expensive pearls (which he soon after the wedding reveals he couldn’t actually afford, so her father ends up actually paying for them to keep the couple from bankruptcy – that’s the kind of person Monty is).
There's also a lot of the older generation of Forsytes - Jolyon's brothers and sisters - who play relatively large parts and are totally lovable and awesome but who are not all that directly connected to the main plots, and so I haven't listed them here.
Then, the story skips forward, to the engagement of June to Bosinney...
JUNE FORSYTE
Jo's daughter, who begins the series as a small girl but is seventeen by the time these events start; raised by Jolyon rather than her disgraced father for much of her life, she's immensely strong-willed but generous and kind to a fault, and everyone comments on her propensity for "lame ducks." Though she has a jealous streak, and occasionally does unintentionally hurtful things and has very little patience for fools (and she would define "fools" there as "anyone who doesn't agree with her"), she truly is one of the nicest of the Forsytes, and one whose innate generosity trumps the grasping Forsytean valuation of property. She truly loves Bosinney, and he seems to have feelings for her when they get engaged; however, when Irene enters the picture, he seems to almost forget June's existence, which is harder for her than just about anything else Bosinney could have done. Nevertheless, even when she's sure he's having an affair with Irene and may have fallen out of love with her, she's still doing her best to help him out by using her influence in the family to get him out of trouble: that's the kind of person June is.
PHILIP BOSINNEY
A groundbreaking but impoverished architect, who has little time for the niceties of Victorian society. This unconventionality makes him attractive to June, and when she gets him a job building a mansion at Robin Hill for her cousin Soames and his wife, it makes him attractive to Irene as well. Ultimately, though, Bosinney is his own worst enemy, and his fate is tragic and undeserved.
JOLYON FORSYTE
Jo's father and June's grandfather. He disowns Jo when he leaves his wife for Helene, but the Bosinney affair brings the two together again, and Jolyon finds himself growing quite fond of Jo and Helene's children. Jolyon has a penchant for defending the weak and the young and the vulnerable: it's what led him to take June's side over Jo's originally, and it's what leads him to re-establish ties with Jo (and perhaps more importantly, with little Jolly and Holly). Finally, it also leads him, years after the Bosinney affair, to befriend the now-independent-but-impoverished Irene - in spite of her role in depriving June of happiness - and, as he grows closer both to Irene and to death, to make provisions for her so that she will never be truly defenseless again.
Then the story skips again after Bosinney's tragic end and the interlude featuring Jolyon and Irene, to the year 1899. The Boer War is just about to break out, and the younger generation is now of age to be attending Oxford...
JOLYON “JOLLY” FORSYTE
Jo and Helene's son (played here by a young Michael York, lol). Jolly is a bit of a stuck-up prig, but nevertheless has a close relationship to his sister Holly and to his father. He and Winifred's son, Val Dartie, end up firmly disliking each other, and when Jolly discovers that Val and Holly are engaged, he dares Val to enlist in the Yeomanry and go over to the Boer War with him. Val accepts, but Jolly is the one who dies in the war (of enteric fever).
HOLLY DARTIE née FORSYTE
Jo and Helene's daughter. Much more accepting and tolerant than her brother, her romance with her second cousin Val Dartie would seem to unite the two warring branches of the family but in reality just makes anything to which in-laws are invited into a holy nightmare. Still, Holly and Val truly do love each other, and theirs is one of the unreservedly happy relationships of the series.
PUBLIUS VALERUS "VAL" DARTIE
Winifred and Monty's son, who inherited a love of riding and gambling from his father but also his mother's stolid common sense. Ashamed when he discovers his father's behavior - especially since he does so through Monty running off with a Spanish dancer, and Winifred's subsequent divorce suit - and motivated by his love for Holly, Val manages to avoid the excesses of his father.
ANNETTE FORSYTE née LAMOTTE
After obtaining a divorce from Irene, through claiming that she and Jo are having an affair (which wasn't true before, but is once he's driven them together), Soames marries the pretty but cold and practical Frenchwoman Annette, with whom he has the child he's been wanting so much: not a son, but a daughter, Fleur.
And the next generation is what the second half of the series is about, centering on Jo and Irene's son Jon and Soames' daughter Fleur and their star-crossed romance and its consequences. Watch for a post on it later!
...so that's it for my pimp post. Hopefully you want to watch the series now! If you do, I've uploaded the first episode to YouTube here (link goes to the first part), to let you see if you like it enough to watch more; if you do, Netflix has the entire series. (Just make sure you're getting the awesome 1967 series rather than the craptastic 2001-2002 series.) And of course if you know me in person, feel free to ask me to burn you the DVDs or something along those lines. I also recommend Galsworthy's books; the early 20th-century writing style takes some getting used to if you're not that familiar with it (the first novel, for example, has about a 95%/5% narration/dialogue split, though that evens out a bit more in the later books).
And an interesting bonus: in the 50s they did a Hollywood movie version entitled That Forsyte Woman, about the events of the first book, for which you can see a trailer here...it features Errol Flynn as Soames (lolwut), Greer Garson as Irene (lolwut again), Walter Pidgeon as Jo, Philip Young as Bosinney, and Janet Leigh as June. It looks very...um...melodramatic. XDDDDDD
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Date: 2009-01-25 07:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-26 01:49 am (UTC)