Here are some trailers for new/upcoming costume dramas I really want to see. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but those that readily came to mind.

Downton Abbey

From Time to Time

The First Men in the Moon

The Three Musketeers
(Not a trailer, but photos from the film shoot)

The King’s Speech

The Tudors: Season 4

Sherlock: The Blind Banker (PBS, October 31)
Sherlock: The Great Game (PBS, November 7)

(Okay, so these are contemporary and not historical/costume dramas, but I couldn’t resist including them. Watch the first episode, “A Study in Pink” and specific previews here for the remaining two episodes.)

This is one of my all-time favorite romantic comedies.

Based on a 1938 Winifred Watson novel, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a colorful story about lives stalled in middle age but kick-started again by the follies of youthful lovers all around. Guinevere Pettigrew, a middle-aged London governess, finds herself unfairly dismissed from her job. An attempt to gain new employment catapults her into the glamorous world and dizzying social whirl of an American actress and singer, Delysia Lafosse. Starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams and featuring Tom Payne, Mark Strong, Lee Pace, Shirley Henderson, and Ciarán Hinds. “Full of Art Deco trappings and paced with a vintage, screwball comedy energy, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is like watching a contemporary version of a Hollywood classic.” (From IMDb and Amazon)

Within the first three minutes of this film, our main character, Miss Guinevere Pettigrew, loses her job as a “governess of last resort,” doesn’t get the week’s wages she’s owed, loses all her worldly belongings, and is denied even the most rudimentary of comforts when the bowl of soup from the soup kitchen is knocked from her hands before she can eat it.

The daughter of a vicar, who lost her one chance at marriage and security when the man she loved was killed in World War I, Miss Pettigrew has a hard time keeping a job as a governess because she wants to live by the morals with which she grew up—and holds the people she works for to the same standards (while losing a little girl in the park for six hours and inciting two little boys to attack a man because she thought he looked like a German spy). As the head of the employment agency tries to tell her,

“Our clients don’t adapt to suit your needs, Miss Pettigrew,
you adapt to them.”

Desperate for a job (and something to eat), Miss Pettigrew resorts to subterfuge and swipes the card of a client and goes to the very fancy flat on her own. There, she meets Delysia Lafosse—who, in a matter of moments, turns Miss Pettigrew’s entire world upside down. It isn’t just a mother too fond of the sherry Miss Pettigrew has to deal with now, but an aspiring actress trying to balance relationships with three different men—talk about not living up to Miss Pettigrew’s standards!

Sucked into Delysia’s world, Miss Pettigrew finds herself making excuses and alibis for Delysia so she can keep all three men ignorant of each other (as much as possible). But when Miss Pettigrew meets Michael (Lee Pace, who could have used a lot more dialect coaching for his accent), she realizes that Delysia has a chance at what she herself has lost and never hopes to find again: true love.

“I am not an expert on love. I am an expert on the lack of love, Delysia, and that is a fate from which I wish most fervently to save you.”

This is a two-strand romance: not only do we get Delysia’s exploits as she figures out which man she wants to be with, but we get the much more mature, quiet, and understated (and, for me, heart pounding) romance between Miss Pettigrew and lingerie designer Joe Bloomfield (Ciaran Hinds). Granted, I already have a soft spot for Hinds, due to his portrayal of my favorite Austen hero, Captain Frederick Wentworth, in my favorite Austen film adaptation, Persuasion 1995. Maybe it’s just another sign I’m getting older, but it was their characters’ finally finding someone they could relax and be themselves with that made the movie for me.

Costumes
The late Depression-era/pre-World War II costuming is brilliant—especially the lingerie in the fashion show scene. When we first meet Guinevere Pettigrew, her physical appearance makes it obvious she hasn’t had access to disposable income for quite some time—if ever. The physical transformation that McDormand’s character makes through the film, especially in the makeover scene, is marvelous. And yet even though she goes from a duckling to a swan, who she is never changes—she only allows it to shine through for everyone else to see and love.

If you have not yet seen this film, you need to, right away! Amazon has it available on DVD for only $5.99, and it’s well worth the purchase price! And it has a fabulous soundtrack, as well.

“Might I be old-fashioned?”
“Indeed you are. And all the better for it.”

In 1985, ABC premiered a “novel for television” based on North and South, John Jakes’s novel about the rising tensions between the Northern and Southern American states and bought us, in full costumed and accented splendor, Patrick Swayze. This was a year after his breaking role in Red Dawn and two years before what is arguably his most famous role of Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing.

What will surprise people unfamiliar with the miniseries or the books is that North and South actually covers a span of about twenty years . . . from 1842 when Orry Main (Patrick Swayze) and George Hazard (James Read—oh, man, was I in love with him back then!) are on their way to matriculate at West Point as cadets at about seventeen or eighteen years old, to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861.

In the decade of Dynasty, Falcon Crest, Knots Landing, and Dallas, of course the miniseries had to be very soapy—and North and South delivered in spades, with sexy leading men and tons of daytime and evening soap opera regulars to appeal to female viewers, and gorgeous women in cleavage-creating corsets and battle scenes to appeal to men (though I doubt many men actually watched willingly—and the battle scenes in this series were from the Mexican-American war of 1845).

Because a saga like this must include at least one epic love story, in the first episode, we get the introduction of one of the relationships that would drive much of the emotional drama of the series—the meeting of Orry Main and Madeline Fabray (Lesley-Anne Down, using her best Scarlett O’Hara imitation to cover her British accent). But Madeline is on her way to marry Orry’s much older, dastardly neighbor, Justin LaMotte (David Carradine), leading to Orry’s pining for her and trying to figure out how they can be together throughout the entire first miniseries, which does get annoying after awhile—especially in one of the areas in which the miniseries diverges from the book, when they start an illicit affair.

Better than the Orry/Madeline/Justin story, though is when, in the second episode, George meets and instantly falls in love with the lovely Irish lass, Constance Flynn (Wendy Kilbourne), at a dance after the end of the fighting in Mexico. Oh, how I wanted to be her! (And her father was played by Robert Mitchum—back in the early to mid-1980s, it was amazing the caliber of guest stars they were able to get for these miniseries!)

But beyond even these two epic romances—one unconsummated for more than twenty years, the other deliriously happy—was the “bromance” between Orry and George, which is truly the epic relationship that these novels/the miniseries were based on. (How many times, especially in the second series, does Constance say to George, “Ya’re thinkin’ ’bout Orry, aren’t ya?”)

Running a very close second to George and Constance, my other favorite couple in the series is Brett and Billy—whose relationship follows the typical Civil War–era romance novel scenario: she’s from the South, he’s from the North, and the tensions brought on by the divisions in the country threaten their happiness. But even with as much as I loved them in the first series, I was never overly thrilled with the actor who played Billy, George Hazard’s younger brother—he seemed oddly miscast with his straight, sandy hair, compared to James Read, Jonathan Frakes, and Kirstie Alley as his siblings.

A little trivia from this series: Several real-life romances came out of North & South—most notably, James Read and Wendy Kilbourne, though they did not actually marry until 1988. Also meeting on these sets (and still married) were Jonathan Frakes and Genie Francis, who also married in 1988. Lesley-Anne Down fell in love with a lighting technician, Don FauntLeRoy, whom she married in 1985—and, according to IMDb, they’re still married, too! (Unfortunately, the series wasn’t golden for everyone’s relationships—Kirstie Alley and Parker Stevenson, who had been married a couple of years by the time Stevenson joined the cast for the second series in 1986, divorced in 1987.)

Now, speaking of the second series . . .

ABC managed to turn out even more stellar guest stars for North and South: Book 2, based on the second book in Jakes’s trilogy, Love and War—LLoyd Bridges (CSA President Jefferson Davis), Linda Evans, Morgan Fairchild, Hal Holbrook (US President Abraham Lincoln), Lee Horsley, Wayne Newton, David Ogden Stiers, Olivia de Havilland, and Jimmy Stewart. This series opens up with Orry, George, Billy, Charles (Orry’s cousin), and everyone else riding off to war—a war that no one expected to last longer than ninety days. And, as we all know, that estimate was a little bit off. Though the filmmakers took some pretty big liberties with history here, I have to say that this, more than anything else, is what made me fall in love with Civil War history and led to my minoring in it in college.

With the re-casting of Billy Hazard—with former Hardy Boy Parker Stevenson—I fell even more in love with the characters of Brett and Billy, and the second series, focusing on the four years of the Civil War, for me is all about their relationship.

Now, I can’t talk about a costume drama without mentioning the costumes. In both Book 1 and Book 2, costumes were used not only to contrast the different levels of society (the wealthy Northern industrialists vs. the working class abolitionists; the plantation owners vs. the slaves), but also the effect of the war, especially on those in the South. Of course, I believe everyone’s favorite costume from the series was Constance’s “Charles Worth original” (the green and gold gown). And, whether blue or gray, there’s just something about a man in uniform . . .

There was a third miniseries made in 1994, based on the third novel in the series, Heaven and Hell, but my advice is to skip it. They recast many of the main roles, and took characters into places/relationships they never should have been in.

About five years after the first series aired, my sister and I had the opportunity to visit Greenwood Plantation in Louisiana, the antebellum home they used for Resolute, Justin LaMotte’s home. This past summer, I had the opportunity to bring my North & South experience full circle, when I got to visit Boone Hall Plantation just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, which they used for the exterior shots of Mount Royal (discovered when we got there that they hadn’t actually shot inside the house, as they had at Greenwood). My pictures of Boone Hall are here.

And, in closing, my absolute favorite scene out of the entire two miniseries: