Season 5 - Notorious Woman (1975-1976)
Being a fan of Masterpiece Theatre is sometimes hard, especially if you love the earliest seasons from the seventies. If you're extremely lucky they're available to stream. If you're very lucky they are available on DVD, and it still counts if it's an extra on Maggie Smith at the BBC or part of The Henry James Collection. If you're plain lucky the DVD is out of print but you can find a copy at your library or on eBay. If you're somewhat lucky there was a VHS release or you have the original broadcast taped. And yes, specifically for this reason I still have an old VHS player hooked up. And then there's Notorious Woman. Rosemary Harris won an Emmy for playing the formidable George Sand but this series is notorious in more ways than one because it was never reaired. It was shelved, never to be re-released, with no explanation given. And despite the picture above, there is no indication it was ever released by the BBC on DVD in England. If you're lucky you can find a press photo here and there and that's it. Therefore I resigned myself to never seeing this miniseries. And that was the case until I started trawling YouTube. Oh, thank you to whomever uploaded the entire series, all seven episodes as a single six hour movie. Yes, the quality was variable from atrocious to acceptable, and was obviously taken from a bad PAL tape that had somehow survived at the BBC, but however you got it, I salute you. I also like to think you're a vigilante BBC employee helping those who search out lost media to find their holy grails. And sometimes, those grails aren't worth chasing. There's a reason a show has been lost to time. Yes, I'm looking at you Fall of Eagles, you weren't worth hunting down on the secondary market at all. The least you could have done is let me see the Romanovs executed. But Notorious Woman is in a category all it's own. This series is just magnificent with some of the best writing of any show I've watched from Masterpiece Theatre and it deserves a release. Here's to you Harry W. Junkin, your writing is intoxicating. Notorious Woman is just simply wonderful and I don't know why it never has been released, the music is all in the public domain, and the lesbianism is implied, the male clothing was totally acceptable by the seventies, perhaps it's George Sand's radical embracing of feminism and socialism? Can't have people getting ideas after all, because truth is the one good thing in the world and ignorance is the one bad thing Sand quipped to Flaubert paraphrasing Diogenes. And that right there is why I love this show so much, she's facetious with Flaubert, she's bantering with Balzac, she's charming with Chopin. This is a literary lovers dream come true. The life of Aurore Dupin, later George Sand, led an extraordinary life, and here it is brought to us through the formidable talents of Rosemary Harris. If there's one flaw, aside from not being able to find it, it's that it's too short. Once Chopin emerges on the scene as the love of her life it's like he became her life, the most important but still oedipal relationship in her life. Once he's dead it's like her life was over, but she was very much still alive and active. I wanted that comradery of literati to continue. Like Owen Wilson's character in Midnight in Paris, I long for the salons of another era; Fitzgerald and Hemingway, or as here, Paganini, Chopin, Liszt, Sands, Balzac, all commingling in Paris. All lifting each other up and tearing each other down. I don't think since the Beats have we had true literati. Ah, to live in a time where there was this kind of literary and artistic culture. I want to go to there. This miniseries is sadly the closest I'll get and should be the definitive look at Sand, not that movie Impromptu. Hugh Grant as Chopin? Not for me. I want that guy from West Side Story!
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