The Bretts
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Barbara Murray, Belinda Lang, David Yelland, George Winter, Norman RodwayDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 60 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-04-29
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Bfs Entertainment
Movie Reviews of The Bretts
Movie Review: One Episode a Night Is Delicious
Summary: 5 Stars
Wonderful series for late night when you want to cycle down with a comfy bunch of on-screen friends you wish you knew. In the first minutes, you wonder what genre is this? And by the end of the first episode of all the delicious episodes, you get it: it's a TV series shot frankly on a stage set which is a functional "pun" because these are show folk who know there's no business like show business. They live their lives on stage even at home in this "back-stage" story.
A lissome vet of the fetching series "To Serve Them All My Days," the wonderful Belinda Lang plays "Martha Brett" as an over-the-top actress who, pre-figuring Christopher Isherwood's Sally Bowles in "Cabaret," is virtually dragged up as a gay man trapped inside a woman's lovely, lively body. Martha never met a piece of scenery she can't chew, a mink she can't drag across the floor, a man she can't best, or a line of dialog that she can't spin across the room. She owns this series which is like a dozen nights at the theater back in the 1920s.
In the crisscross of generations, while Norman Rodway as the father is often reduced to bluster, Barbara Murray as the wife is sunny peaches, and the children are forward-thinking in rising to the challenges of live theater being replaced by the new medium of movies. David Yelland, blessed with the matinee-idol looks of the period is brilliant as the family swashbuckler and stud.
Brit stage characters like the exasperated cook, the engaging Irish chauffeur (Billy Boyle), and the Russian countess manage to reveal the theatrical tradition in which they were invented, and yet are able to capture your human interest. Tim Wylton (as the actor playing the butler playing the actor) stands out.
One problem: the bastard second son, seeming gay, and thought by his family as perhaps "closeted," is revealed as straight, and in that lies a "sexist failure of nerve" in this script: except for one impersonation of Christopher Isherwood, it is absurd that there are no gay characters in this 1920s-1930s family of actors and their friends.
Otherwise, often topical, the plot dramatizes headlines about children conceived out of wedlock, union strikes, cocaine addiction, adultery, casting couches, women's sufferage, and the Irish Troubles.
Frequent musical numbers are entertaining because they seem really performed by real and vulnerable actors who are not being over-produced. Even Brecht and Weill make a cameo when the younger "gayish-but-not son" takes a sojourn to Weimar Berlin, and chances upon the opening night of "Threepenny Opera" and hears "Mack the Knife."
Of course, everyone smokes and smokes and smokes, which ultimately hurts your suspension of disbelief, because after awhile you begin to worry about the actual health of the actual actors themselves as people. You can't "act" smoking; you have to really smoke. When will directors learn that "acting is not smoking?"
But that's just me picking at a tasty little series whose charm is addictive enough that you wonder whether you should really just limit yourself to one episode a night to savor it---or watch them all at once. Ibsen and Shaw this ain't, and that makes it fun. And it's far finer fare than most else made recently during this Great Dumbing Down of Western Culture.
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