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113 of 115 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Long-Overdue Release of Classic TV Miniseries, January 21, 2008
Noble House is an eight-hour Classic TV Miniseries produced and broadcast in 1988 by NBC. Based on the fantastic and richly detailed novel of the same name by James Clavell, it features a large cast headlined by Pierce Brosnan, who portrays business tycoon Ian Dunross.
This was NBC's second Classic TV Miniseries adaptation of a Clavell novel, the first was 1980s Shogun. Both take place in the same fictional universe, Noble House even featuring connections to Shogun and yet another Clavell novel, Tai-Pan.
For this miniseries, the timeframe of the original novel was changed from the early 1960s to the 1980s.
Other actors include Denholm Elliott, Deborah Raffin, Tia Carrere, John Houseman, Julia Nickson-Soul, and John Rhys-Davies (who also appeared in Shogun.)
Noble House centers around big-business piracy in Hong Kong. The miniseries opens with Brosnan driving through the rain to meet Denholm Elliott, who plays the outgoing "tai-pan" in Hong Kong's oldest and leading trading firm: Struan & Company.
"Tai-pan," a Cantonese expression, means "supreme leader," and at Struan & Company the title has been passed down at least 150 years
Dunross' arch rival and enemy, Quillan Gornt (Rhys-Davles), is tai-pan of the second leading trading company. Not only does Gornt wants to destroy Dunross and take over Noble House, the two men have racing horses that compete against each other as well.
Meanwhile, two American tycoons (Raffin and Ben Masters) have come to Hong Kong to make a financial deal with Dunross.
But in Clavell's Hong Kong there is no such thing as a single deal. Double-dealing and triple-crossing are more the style of the international wheeler-dealers here.
Diverse players here include bankers, government officials, police and a man called "Four Finger Wu" (Khigh Dhiegh), who runs an opium-smuggling syndicate from a junk boat in Aberdeen Harbor and has a mistress one-third his age named Venus Poon (Carrere).
The eight hours practically sizzle, thanks to Bercovici's articulate script (he also wrote the script for the Shogun miniseries).
Viewers a treated to a manipulated run on a bank, selling short on the stock market, the fixing of horse races, a kidnaping, seductions and murders. Running counterpoint are the burning and sinking of a floating restaurant and a catastrophic landslide.
Add to this a couple of juicy love stories, especially the one between Brosnan and Raffin (who brings a light comic element to her role as the tough wheeler-dealer), while everything is done in ravishing cars, speedboats, mansions and casinos.
But, the biggest and brightest star of the show is clearly Hong Kong, which is more like a video game than a city, filled with the exotica and intrigue that you used to find in old movies. Early in the show, a character who's just landed at the airport asks, "What's that smell?" His host answers, "That's the smell of money."
The $16-million-plus production included eight weeks of exteriors shot in Hong Kong and another eight for interiors in the De Laurentiis studio in Wilmington, N.C.
Highly recommended.
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