bsullivan24-1 Review of The Making of a Lady

The Making of a Lady (2012 TV Movie)

Worst Remake of a Good Novel For This or Any Year

[1/10 · 21 February 2014]

I looked forward to seeing this film. Frances Hodgson Burnett's double novel, the Making of a Marchioness and Emily Fox Seton, is a fine minor Victorian work with excellently drawn characterizations and a good plot. The romance develops in a true-to-life fashion, and the author is careful in recognizing the contrast between the action and the expectations of convention at the time. This film production is a burlesque of what it ought to have been. Important characters have been deleted; others changed beyond recognition. The jarring anachronisms could easily have been avoided by following the book as written. The plot elements are impossible in too many ways to mention. The characters' behavior makes no sense. This is another work entirely, bearing no slight resemblance to the Burnett work, and vastly inferior. Even the characters' names are mangled.Why not make a film of the work after which it is titled? What a waste!