P.D. James - Death of an Expert Witness
by Herbert Wise
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Barry Foster, Geoffrey Palmer, John Vine, Ray Brooks (II), Roy MarsdenDirector: Herbert Wise
Brand: Koch International
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Color, Content/Copy-Protected CD, Dolby, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 295 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-06-07
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: KOCH VISION
Movie Reviews of P.D. James - Death of an Expert Witness
Movie Review: Maybe it's me
Summary: 3 Stars
It may just be me, but I found this excrutiatingly slow and very poorly directed. The plot is fine and the casting superb, but there is a low-budget feel to the direction that taints the overall effort. Dalgleish is investigating the murder of a forensics expert in a country-house lab. The interminable opening establishes that everyone in the cast is a plausible suspect. The cast includes such excellent actors as Brenda Blethyn and Barry Foster and Geoffrey Palmer plays the victim (who, by all accounts, deserved what he got). It all sounds good enough, but the lighting and the sound are wretched. In one crucial 'confession' scene, where lip and eye movement are essential, the characters are shot at a vast distance across a graveyard. When we finally come in and can actually see their faces, the laconic, pensive Dalgleish has turned away from the man to whom he is speaking. I get it that Dalgleish is a poet who has recently lost his wife, but he is also an investigator working amid a high body count situation. As others have noted, the result of the direction (and especially the fact that this is shot on tape, not film) is an appearance of utter amateurism on the part of gifted actors. At times the show looks like high school dramatics or small-town dinner theatre. That is a pity, given the quality of the novel on which the story is based. For me, this is a rental only.
Summary of P.D. James - Death of an Expert Witness
Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard, young for his senior rank and suffering the effects of his own personal tragedy, wades through a complex web of desperation, revenge, blackmail and secret love to solve a series of murders at a government forensic lab.Dalgliesh has been hunting a "back seat strangler" in London. When a young woman is found strangled, her body sprawled over the back seat of a car abandoned in a bleak country quarry, he is rushed to the scene. Convinced that this murder is not linked to his investigation, Dalgliesh returns to London only to be urgently recalled to investigate when a senior forensic scientist is found murdered at a government facility not far from the quarry. Dalgliesh has to break through the wall of fear surrounding the tight-knit - and tight-lipped - staff before he can bring the killer, or killers, to justice.
This three-part, 1983 drama remains an honorable and largely captivating effort to adapt the unique structure of a P.D. James mystery novel to television. Despite bizarre production values--including intense lighting (presumably to accommodate the all-video shoot) and a near-absence of tone that often makes good actors look as if they're knocking about between rehearsals--the show holds up where it counts.
James's extensive, pre-murder set-up survives a script translation, and the terrific cast infuses urgency into the story of a forensic scientist (Geoffrey Palmer) bludgeoned to death by any one of many suspects: among them a hostile ex-lover (Meg Davies), her brother and the victim's boss (Barry Foster), and an angry cousin (Brenda Blethyn) living as "a friend" with the deceased's ex-wife. So many possibilities, and the rather dour but thorough Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgliesh (Roy Marsden), burdened by the recent death of his wife, sifts through them all with deceptive impartiality and quiet self-disapprobation. --Tom Keogh
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