Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18497 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-11-07
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 88 minutes

Synopsis
An Eighteenth Century drama adapted from the novel by Jane Austen. Catherine Morland arrives at Northanger upon the invitation of Henry Tilney and discovers that the place is shrouded in mystery and intrigue.

Customer Reviews

Mythical 5 star reviews
This tedious DVD is listed as having two FIVE STAR reviews by Amazon. Where are these supposed reviews? Are they so embarrassed by themselves that they have run away to Barbados?

However big a Jane Austen fan you are, I wouldn't recommend this DVD to you. It is an awful production in every way.

Not what I expected
Having read most of Jane Austen's books and seen many dramatizations I was expecting a story involving her usual portrayal of highly regulated social interactions and restrained wooing of nicely brought up girls by eligible suitors. How different this dramatization turned out to be! Loaded with violent sexual imaginary, predatory males and most of the characters as caricatures of real men and women. I gather from a biography of Jane Austen that Northanger Abbey was an early work much influenced by the Gothic novels of Mrs Radcliffe and that Austen was satirizing the over-blown horror and extravagant prose of that style of book.
I've been re-reading the book and think that the film has been unable to capture Austen's wonderful restrained acidity in describing human failings and foibles, but if you accept this film version as a rather over-blown modern satire of Austen's satire then you can enjoy it and forget what you know and love about all the other Jane Austen's novels.

Cringe
Despite reading all the negative reviews, I nevertheless watched this version anyway. I must say I am extremely disappointed. For starter, you could tell it is an 80's film with all that perm! The hero was not good looking in the least and he overacts, like he was in some Shakespears play. Very muddled so you could not follow if you have never read the book.