Customer Reviews

The Belle of Amherst [VHS]

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This astonishing video performance of Julie Harris' one-woman show about poetess Emily Dickinson's life and work is a true tour-de-force. Ms. Harris' range of expression both physically and vocally evokes Emily Dickinson so precisely that one can hardly imagine that she ever looked or sounded any other way. The poems which are featured in this script are so deftly and subtly interwoven that the entire presentation feels seamless and eminently REAL. I am a Theatre Arts/Speech teacher at a small High School in Virginia, and my students are perpetually astonished at the humor and relevance of a video made more than twenty years ago - usually, they want to tune out anything "old". This is a rich and sumptuous piece of living literature with a tremendously broad appeal - not just Dickinson's poetry, but her unique life is showcased in this privileged interview. This is EXACTLY the kind of "living literature" that we need most in our homes and in our schools - by bringing authors and works of note to life, we can perpetuate the essential reverence for the power of the written word which has perenially distinguished our culture. Please don't let the relatively high price of this product deter you - it is an investment which will repay itself many times over!

Of all the highlights of Julie Harris' illustrious career, "The Belle of Amherst " is her masterpiece. This extraordinary one-woman, two act play by William Luce is exquisitely written and laced with Emily Dickinson's poetry, and is by turns hilarious, as she tells us the small town gossip, to profound and moving, when she speaks of her poetry, her parents, and Dr. Charles Wadsworth, a preacher that captured her heart and soul.
It takes place when Emily, who was born in 1830, is 53 years old, and she invites the viewer into her home, and describes in wonderfully staged vignettes, the many phases of her life. Dickinson was unknown during her lifetime, and was a recluse, but said "I never had to go anywhere to find my paradise".

You will get the recipe for her famous Black Bread, which has as ingredients: 2 lbs. each flour, butter, and sugar, 19 eggs, 5 lbs. raisins, 1 ½ lbs. each currants and citron, ½ pt. each brandy and molasses, 2 nutmegs, 5 tsp. cloves, mace and cinnamon, 2 tsp. soda, and 2 pinches of salt. I have tasted this Black Bread (which is more like a fruit cake), and it's delicious !

Julie Harris is "The First Lady of the American Theater", with a record five Tony Awards with her name on them, as well as an Oscar nomination and 10 Emmy nominations. Ms. Harris has captivated many an audience with her impassioned performances, and her portrayal of Emily Dickinson is as if they shared the same heart; this is a unique theatrical experience, directed by Charles Durbin, and filmed live in a small theater in 1976.

This was a gift from a generous soul, to whom I am very grateful, and this film would be equally treasured by anyone who appreciates poetry and Ms. Harris' magical talent. "The Belle of Amherst" would also be an excellent study tool for literature and women's study groups, as well as drama students.
Total running time is 90 minutes.
Not in Vain
"If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain".

I am thrilled to see that this production is finally out on a decently priced DVD. I haven't seen this production, which I think was on PBS many years ago, since it was on TV back then. However, I was fortunate enough to see Miss Harris perform the play in Boston about five years ago. In all my 55 years, of all the plays, concerts, films, etc. that I have ever seen, this was absolutely the finest piece of art I have ever witnessed. Julie Harris is easily the greatest actress of the 20th Century, and this is her greatest role. Absolutely spell-binding, moving beyond words.

Moreover, I agree with the reviewer who says that "The Belle of Amherst" is an outstanding way to present Emily Dickenson to students. This goes for the general public as well. A remarkable play.

Well, what more can I say? I can't wait to see the DVD. Hope it is of good quality.

I saw this years ago, and just recently rediscovered it. I remember watching Julie Harris and wondering who is this woman? I ran right out and rented "A Member of the Wedding," "The Haunting," "East of Eden" and "I Am a Camera." However, it is "The Belle of Amherst" which remains dearest to my heart. Such a loving portrait. A bravura performance which earned the actress her fifth Tony Award for Best Actress, as well as a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Recording. This is a must for poetry lovers and theatre lovers alike.

THE BELLE OF AMHERST is one of those artistic gems that is no less brilliant for seeming somewhat imperfectly faceted. By this I mean that I disagree with the dramatist's interpretation of Emily Dickinson's personality, but love the play anyway for the sake of Julie Harris' star turn performance and for the script's being essentially a quiltwork of pithy quotes and juicy anecdotes drawn directly from The Divine Emily's life and works.

My problem is with the depiction of Emily as neurotically, almost pathologically, shy, nerdishly awkward, scatterbrained, giddily unsure of herself... none of which seems to match the historical Emily I have come over time to understand and love. Unfortunately, the play's interpretation is based mainly on the only extensive account of what the mature Emily was like, as recorded by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, literary style-and-form czar of his day, as a very conventional-minded authority who seemed to find the poetess and her creations about equally baffling. My cavil is that this was not the true Emily, but rather an Emily hopelessly unnerved and overwhelmed by her meeting, after years of futile poem submissions and correspondence, with this great literary eminence grise, as obtusely unsympathetic arbiter of the worldly fate of all that was most precious to Emily, namely her poetry.

Higginson was a well-schooled "expert" in matters of poetry. Emily was, by contrast, a genius, born with a magical ability to compose the stuff that Higginson was an expert in, but otherwise almost completely unschooled in it. The situation there was peculiarly American; America loves and trusts its experts, rewarding them for the work and dedication they have put into their life-business, but it neither understands nor loves nor trusts its geniuses, whose natural-born accomplishment in the same fields is so invidiously undemocratic as to set one man, the walk-on born genius, so strangely and unjustly above another, the schooled expert, thus threatening the very fabric of our whole received ideology of human equality and merit. It seems an irony that might otherwise have amused Emily that this great literary lion, only remembered today for his connection with her, should thus be given the last word on what sort of person she was. Paradoxically, it is partly the fault of Emily herself, whose will had called for her letters to be burnt after her death, that we know far too little about what the ordinary world made of her, for which the incidental testimony of a Higginson seems a peculiarly unhappy substitute.

A broader view of the essential living Emily persona, inferrable from the testimony of her own works taken together with the incidentally preserved scattered comments of people who knew her well, might seem to paint a different picture: Emily Dickinson was, albeit eccentric, eminently sane, for one thing. Her normal social personality was bubbly, outgoing, spontaneously improvisational and pawkishly witty, poised, "posed" and sharply and sensitively focused, rather than scatterbrained, and somewhat too puppyishly affectionate toward people she loved, which seemed to be, at least in her youth, practically every respectable and even sometimes disrespectable person she met. Her main flaw, if flaw it be, was the tendency of her natural precocity to make her personally overwhelming. As long as she was entertaining a crowd, such as with her storytelling fugues and singing and piano improvisations, Emily was fine. One-on-one with her natural energies and maxim-gun wit, on the other hand, for any length of time, could doubtless be, for the feebler sensibilities of most ordinary folks, a mentally and spiritually taxing experience, to say the least.

Emily, of course, came to understand this over time... which is why she
gradually withdrew from a world that she loved, yet came to feel born into by accident, on the wrong planet. People like to imagine Emily's reclusion as somehow pathological, inspired by a jilted love affair or some such ordinary soap-operatic trauma, because they forget that she was a genius, and that geniuses simply don't think or act or make choices like the rest of us. Emily was jilted alright... by the ordinary world she loved so much, despite its hopeless "common" ordinariness. The main culprit here seems to have been evangelical Christianity, which swept its frenzied waves through her world time and again, picking off her family and friends one by one and exerting such tremendous social pressures to accept Jesus and be saved. Emily, seeing through the maudlin hysterical banality of the whole business and already betrothed as bride to the Jesus of her genius, simply couldn't stoop, for mere social acceptance's sake, to chiming in on the same kinds of convenient hypocrisies as all those church-ladies with their "dimity convictions," or the platoons of ham-fisted preachers who "argued themselves narrow" and "made God's love seem like bears."

The curse of Christianity of this sort is that it is an importuning ideology of the sort that poorer souls seem to thrive on but which Emily's keener instinct found most gratuitously repulsive, much the way a dog's keener hearing will find insufferable sounds that we humans can't even hear. Ideologies systematically exclude and shun the unwashed, which is what happened to Emily, as Salvation wrapped its tentacles around her social circles, costing her one "love" after another in a dizzying succession of spiritual alienations. This circumstance seems too underappreciated by critics, most likely because Emily, the farthest thing from a whiner or complainer, says so little about it directly herself. Her work, however, says a great deal about it indirectly, artistically, subversively, accumulating to a damning mass of seemingly dispositive evidence, once one knows to start looking for it.

In her art, Emily often manages to reinvent the English language. In her lifestyle, she managed to retreat to an artistically reinvented world where she could "tell all the truth but tell it slant." Pathological? only to the extent that eyesight might be considered "pathological" in a world of the blind, or in a world that includes, in our tally of human pathologies, such syndromes as uncanny instinct and towering eldritch genius.

I saw this on PBS back around 1979, and it started a frustrating love affair with the poet which culminated in my writing a play which is kind of a sequal to this. I corresponded with the playwright, William Luce, and with Richard Sewall, Emily's most respected biographer. I have come to see that Bill Luce's portrait of Dickinson may not be a faithful exhibit of her real personality, but as an introduction to her thoughts it serves a good purpose. Julie Harris is superb, of course. If you want a painless way to get to know the background of Emily's life, this is it.

I have to say that England has Dame Judi Dench and America has Julie Harris. Two actresses that should work together. Only in this DVD, Julie brings to life of Emily Dickinson, American Poet and Literary Genius to life. You can tell that Julie has transformed herself into bring Emily's legacy, vision, and works to life as only a master actress can do without the praise. Julie Harris is one of America's finest living actresses of the stage, film, and television. This performance does justice to the actual legacy of Emily Dickinson. We know that she researched the role thoroughly connecting with her memory. The stage version is kind of rough because of the audience but the quality holds up.

I saw Ms Harris in this play when it toured and came to Denver in the late 70's and she was astonishing. Learning about Emily's life and hearing her wondorous verse spoken by such an artist was truly invigorating. The play suffers some being taped, but it's highly recommended to those who have seen it before and want to relive the experience, and people who want to see it for the first time. Ms Harris is physically very small, but she filled the stage with her presence, everything a one-person biographical play should be. I think Emily Dickinson herself would be proud and elated with this artful homage to her life and works.

Julie Harris manages to bring the elusive poet Emily Dickinson to life in the play Belle of Amherst. Julie's Emily is alive, vivid, real. An excellent show!

I saw Miss Harris in London's west end in this play in the late seventies and had the good fortune to meet her. What a gracious lady! I had loved her work ever since I was a young boy and watched her movies on TV with my mother. To now have the DVD is a real treat. Sadly Julie Harris hasn't been too well lately, she had a stroke and has heart problems, so this excellent DVD is a testament of her unique talent.