The Jewel in the Crown

Our DVD Price: £37.99 RRP: £39.99 Save £2.00 (5%)   Availability This product should be despatched within 2 days.  This product will be despatched from the UK. Delivery times   Earn 185 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info

Film Description

This sumptuously packaged DVD box set of ITV’s 1984 production of Jewel in the Crown brought Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet to life, and established Art Malik and Charles Dance as national heart-throbs.
Set during the twilight of British rule in India, Jewel in the Crown’s 14 episodes examine the historical and political
changes through the personal lives of a small group of characters.
Shot with the production values of a feature film but at a length allowing far greater attention to detail, Jewel in the Crown represents the high point of 1980s TV drama, and features a fantastic cast that includes Tim Pigott-Smith, Susan Wooldridge, Geraldine James and Peggy Ashcroft.

Film Information

DVD Extras

Digitally remastered; 4 discs; Audio commentaries; Cast interviews; Colonial history featurette.

Technical Details

Film Media

9 Stills

View Stills

Reviews & Articles

Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review

Review by Barry Forshaw on 1st April 2005

To mark the 21st anniversary of the broadcast of the multi-award winning series, this collector’s edition has been digitally remastered and includes tempting extra features, amongst which are exclusive commentaries with Geraldine James, Art Malik, Tim Pigott-Smith and a documentary interview with a colonial historian. Looked at today, Jewel in the Crown boasts a truly stellar cast, including Charles Dance, Geraldine James, Art Malik , Tim Pigott Smith, Peggy Ashcroft and Warren Clarke. Based on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, four novels published between 1966 and 1975, the series addresses the issues that surround the final years of the British in India. Set against a backdrop of World War II and using the rape of an English woman as its dramatic centre, Jewel focuses on a moment of crisis and change in British national history.

View more reviews by Barry Forshaw

Review by Michael Brooke on 1st April 2005

In March 1983, Richard Attenborough's Gandhi romped home at the Oscars. A year later, ITV broadcast The Jewel in the Crown, the longest and most complex of the mid-1980s flurry of films and programmes exploring the British Raj – and also the most fondly remembered, not least for establishing Art Malik and Charles Dance as national heart-throbs. Seamlessly streamlined from the 2,000-plus pages of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, and set in the final half-decade of British rule in India (1942-47), its fourteen episodes conveyed the historical and political background through the shifting relationships of a relatively small number of people. Hari Kumar (Malik), a British-educated Indian, and Ronald Merrick (Tim Pigott-Smith), a grammar school-educated policeman, are both fish out of water - Hari culturally, Merrick socially. Both take a shine to Daphne Manners (Susan Wooldridge), an Englishwoman whose idealised view of the Raj is graphically overturned when she is raped by an Indian in an unmistakably symbolic fashion. This event, and Daphne's subsequent death in childbirth, has repercussions that echo down successive years, not least when Sarah Layton (Geraldine James) tries to find out what happened and also becomes involved with Merrick. Meanwhile, the dottily eccentric missionary Barbie Batchelor (Peggy Ashcroft) undergoes a loss of faith which represents the general failure of Christianity to come to terms with India's very different spiritual traditions, while dashing British Army sergeant Guy Perron (Dance) turns up near the end to oversee the end of British rule. Shot with the production values of a feature film but at a length allowing far greater attention to detail, The Jewel in the Crown now embodies a double nostalgia: both for the Raj itself, and for the days when ITV still produced ambitious and challenging drama series.

View more reviews by Michael Brooke

Browse all Film Reviews

See Also...

Hand-picked recommendations of related films

Heat And Dust Dir: James Ivory Classic film about two English women and their fatal fascination for the sub-continent where it appears that the... More >

Gandhi Dir: Richard Attenborough Richard Attenborough's award-winning epic that recounts the life and times of Mahatma Gandhi and immortalises hi... More >

Merchant Ivory In India Dir: James Ivory Contains the Merchant-Ivory features Bombay Talkie, The Courtesans Of Bombay, The Deceivers, Heat And Dust, In C... More >

Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Customer Film Lists

MovieMail's Top 100 Box Sets by MovieMail

We've cut the prices of all Box Sets at MovieMail, and to celebrate, here's a list of MovieMail's Top 100 selling Box Sets of all time! Encompassing both TV and Film, this list is a magnificent selection of quality viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

Create your own Film List!

Customers who bought this also bought...

Recommendations from fellow customers

The Leopard

by Luchino Visconti

War And Peace (Bondarchuk)

by Sergei Bondarchuk

Fortunes of War

by James Cellan Jones

Civilisation

by Peter Montagnon / Michael Gill

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

by John Irvin

Other films by...

More films starring Charles Dance

Alien 3

by David Fincher

Gosford Park

by Robert Altman

Fingersmith

by T V

Black And White

by Craig Lahiff

Rebecca (1997)

by Jim O Brien

View more >

More films starring Peggy Ashcroft

A Passage To India

by David Lean

A Perfect Spy

by Peter Smith

Caught On A Train (Poliakoff)

by Peter Duffell

Edward and Mrs Simpson

by Waris Hussein

Dennis Potter at London Weekend Television (Volume 1)

by Various / TV

View more >

More films starring Eric Porter

The 39 Steps (1978)

by Don Sharp

The Forsyte Saga (1967) (Box Set)

by T V

Hamlet (BBC, 1980)

by Rodney Bennett

The Belstone Fox

by James Hill

Hands of the Ripper

by Peter Sasdy

View more >

More films starring Saeed Jaffrey

The Chess Players

by Satyajit Ray

My Beautiful Laundrette

by Stephen Frears

Hullabaloo Over George And Bonnies Pictures

by James Ivory

Gangsters - The Complete Series

by Various / TV

Partition

by Ken McMullen

View more >

More films starring Tim Pigott-Smith

Bloody Sunday

by Paul Greengrass

North And South

by Brian Percival

Measure for Measure (BBC, 1979)

by Desmond Davis

Henry IV (Part 1) (BBC, 1979)

by David Giles

View more >

For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk

© 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail