Cheap The Count of Monte Cristo Collection (Miniseries) (DVD) (Josée Dayan) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Count of Monte Cristo Collection (Miniseries)

An Excellent Story Of Seeing Justice Served
This version of The Count Of Monte Cristo is my absolute favourite. It is completely in the French language, stars Gerard Depardieu and Ornella Muti and is eight hours long.
A perfect movie to watch if you're planning to stay up all night long. The DVD version is a 2-disc set, with two 2-hour long segments on each disc.
The basic plot is that of Alexandre Dumas' novel of the same name, however the movie starts out with Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d'If and having been there for 18 years.

As the story unfolds, we meet the character of Abbe Faria, who teaches Edmond facts about many things and reveals that he was imprisioned by Villefort's father.
Villefort had imprisioned Edmond for the possibility of reading a letter and carring out the motions to get Napoleon back on the French throne.
Wanting to protect his father, Villefort has no qualms about throwing Dantes into prison and letting him rot. What he wasn't counting on was that Dantes would come back and give out swift justice.
However, there were two other people who wanted Dantes out of the way. One was Ferdnand Mondego and the other was Eugene Danglars. Mondego wanted the girl that Edmond was going to marry and Danglars wanted something else, I'm not exactly sure what it was but I think it had something to do with being the Captain of a ship.

To get rid of Edmond Dantes, Mondego and Danglars wrote an anynomos letter denouncing Dantes and claiming him to be a traitor.

Therefore, Dantes gets thrown in prison, Mondego gets the girl, Danglars gets what he wanted, Villefort gets promoted to head gazeek of the French justice system of the early 1800's, and Dantes comes back for revenge and makes them all pay for what they did nearly 20 years before. And then he gets to be with the girl he was going to marry.

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Le Compte De Monte Cristo - Bravo
I have long ago dispelled the notion that any movie production faithfully reproduces a book as written. For those zealots who desire this, see George C. Scott's rendition of Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Alexander Dumas did not write the Count of Monte Cristo as a single novel, but rather as a long series of chapters in a French periodical of the time, hence its almost 1500 page length which would require a movie in excess of 800 hours.

I have always enjoyed Gerard Depardieu in whatever role he portrayed, either in English (Porthos, Columbus) or in his French films. It was said that Depardieu did not portray the stature of Edmund Dantes, but let's face it, Gerard is a big guy. Even Dumas does not describe Dantes as a sickly wretch, even though his food was described as "maggot ridden slop". To paraphrase this, no actor has ever portrayed a role as one invisions when reading a novel, least of all, any actor that ever portrayed Jean Val Jean in Les Miserables.

Le Comte De Monte Cristo captures the essence of the book which concerns a man bent on revenge, yet not so totally consumed that he looses his sense of humanity. I have recently re-read many of the classics that were part of my father's literary collection and must say that the movie ended on a happier note than the book.

The scenes and demeanor of the gentry were extremely faithful to the time frame of the novel, as were the portrayal of the suporting cast of character. Although the movie is presented in French with English subtitles, I feel that this should not dissuade one from seeing it. Since movies are to be entertaining, I feel that this one fits the bill. If one wants the purity of the original, read the book

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Watch everything except last half hour.
It's a superb production in many ways. The detail, the acting (it really doesn't matter that Depardieu is large as some other reviewers mention; he still owns the part), fidelity to the novel. Until the last half hour when the director for some reason decided that it needed a happy (!!!) ending. Mr. and Mrs. Romeo and Juliet are alive and well and living on the beach somewhere...