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Foyle's War - Set 1Rating:
Release Date: 11 March, 2003 Retail Price: $59.99 OUR Price: $47.99 You SAVE: $12.00! Cast: |
Foyle's War - Set 1 Reviews
Just the beginning -- it gets better
I find most of PBS' second hand mysteries dull vehicles and some have ruined so superb book characters. This is one of the few exceptions, probably the best. There is some uneveness but nothing that would dull the enjoyment.
It goes against the grain. . The actress playing Sam with a highly improbable name. The over-the-top pilot son. A first rate police inspector working from backwater? The amputee war veteran detective. C'mon, the last big thing that happened in Hastings came in 1066.
BUT Honeysuckle Weeks seems a real name and an insiduoussly good actress. appears to be her real name and the quality of her performance is insiduously good and her looks grow on you as well. The rest of the cast grows on you and then there's Michael Kitchen who grabs his role by the throat while eschewing the curtain. This is in a sense one of the roles of his life because he defines the character and makes it look easy. Only the best do that. Then there's unspoiled beautiful Hastings which needs only a bit of cosmetics to cover a bit of modernity.
Happily for those who love it, Hastings faded into the background after the War. Until now.
The visuals are excellent and the rare special effects work is very good and puts to shame the cheesy work done on supposed war documentaries. The bucolic setting allows more of a period feel without a excess of overdone museum cars and the rest.
The series moves ahead in time with the war, from the early disasters. It's not rose-tinted glass, all heroism. The Nazi sympathizers were real and numerouss just as they were in the U.S. At the outset, there is the portent of things to come.
So, did anything actually happen at Hastings? There the show takes a few minor liberties, one about the Dunkirk evacuation. But a Hastings author, Victoria Seymour, writes of "a parade of `spies', aliens, pacifists, looters, wartime racketeers and small-time criminals. Added to these were hundreds of usually law-abiding people, who found themselves in court for flouting often not properly understood laws."
This is obviously not a documentary, but in many ways it does a better job of painting an era. While Britain struggles for existence, it must deal with their own version of our Isolationists and right wing Nazi sympathesizers -- and the usual array of scoundrels and fools. Foyle makes judgments as he must, sometimes to his own detriment. He is a man of integrity, not ideology.
There are now five seasons of four television movies each. Some are better than others, but I have not found one to be bad and while each stands on its own, all add to the whole. Despite not having been in Hastings in many years, the local site www.visithastings.com is excellent, enjoys the link the show. There are also good Foyle sites among the obsessive.
The fourth episode shows the level of care in all. Andrew is flying low altitude missions to test the highly-secret British coastal radar which used "curtain" antennas of wires strung between the towers. Known as Chain Low, it had a range of about 100 miles but its low alttitude weakness left a hole for low flying raiders. The secondary Chain Home Low was in fact tested on site by RAF pilots. There have been British "documentaries" that get this wrong.
Exceptional
Maybe the best series out of all of them. A definite good buy.
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