Monday, March 26, 2012

Kenneth Branagh's A Midwinter's Tale on DVD!

A Midwinter's Tale [a.k.a. In the Bleak Midwinter. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Perf. Richard Briers, Hetta Charnley, Joan Collins, Nicholas Farrell, Mark Hadfield, Gerard Horan, Celia Imrie, Michael Maloney, Jennifer Saunders, Julia Sawalha, and John Sessions. 1995. DVD. CR/WB, 2012.

While preparing an assignment sheet for my Shakespeare and Film class, I discovered that Kenneth Branagh's A Midwinter's Tale has finally been released on DVD!

I've written about the film multiple times (for one of which, q.v.). But the film has been hard to track down—and it's been exclusively available in VHS. But I was thrilled to discover and I'm thrilled to announce that a DVD of the film has been released. Even though it apparently lacks the usual bells and whistles of the modern DVD, it is available, and that is an enormous step forward.

One of my favorite scenes involves the auditions. Watch this, and then see if you can resist buying the DVD immediately:


Complete kudos to whoever decided that it was time for a DVD release of this magnificent (and magnificently-funny) film.

Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

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