Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42698 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-01-24
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Colour, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 360 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
If Little Lord Fauntleroy is a crusty, curmudgeonly sort of book, the BBC Film adaptation is even crustier. For here, amongst these 100 over-starched and often overacted minutes, are more frown lines, furrowed brows, and pasty pallor's than you can shake a Victorian walking stick at. It's not that the story isn't compelling: true to the Frances Hodgson Brunett classic, a humble and kindly 10-year-old boy living a hardscrabble life alongside his widowed mother in 1870s New York is summoned by England's Earl of Dorincourt, his dreary and shrunken-hearted though fabulously wealthy grandfather, to claim his title--he shall be Lord Fauntleroy. This is to the old man's distaste, he being of the unfortunate opinion that unmannered scum dwells across the pond. Worse for young Cedric, his mother, more fully American riffraff than he, is relegated to a cottage outside the castle where he is to live. Predictably, the ingenuous lad, a real gee-whizz kind of a kid, soon lights a fire beneath his grandfather's frosty heart. Right when things begin to feel warm and fuzzy though, another foul American, this one a shameless social climber and pretender on her son's behalf to the lordship, elbows her way in, aiming to conquer the castle. Fortunately, a couple of good ol' boys from back home go all out to blow her cover. A morose mood aside, what whacks away at the modern viewer's funny bone is the cast's brittleness. Everyone's too cut-and-dried and black or white, beaming beatifically or incapable of cracking a smile. Still, don't count this version out if you're a big fan, or if certain over-5 members of your family display drama-queen or king tendencies. --Tammy La Gorce, Amazon.com