Noble House
Starring: Pierce Brosnan, John Rhys-Davies, Deborah Raffin
Director: Gary Nelson
The film: Students of the James Clavell school of Hong Kong studies will already be familiar with the goings on in the TV mini-series Noble House through that writer's sprawling novel of the same name and his earlier Tai-Pan. But while the two Clavell volumes were once considered required if predictable reading for foreigners heading to Hong Kong for an extended spell, this six-hour condensation was, and still is, best avoided as a primer for new arrivals. In fact, it's hard to imagine Noble House being less authentic if it had been adapted as a Broadway musical with characters breaking into showtune numbers called Bad Joss and Call Me Taipan.
Several of the novel's subplots were cut for the screen adaptation, but every Hong Kong cliche and Chinese proverb in the book remains, driven home with all the finesse of a property developer's piledriver. Clavell was also an accomplished screenwriter, and it's a great pity he didn't pen the script for this instead of just picking up an executive producer's credit.
Just reissued for its 20th anniversary, this new DVD edition at least has some nostalgia value, and while we sit through the corporate battle between Ian Dunross (Pierce Brosnan, below) of Struan & Co (a thinly veiled version of Jardine Matheson) and his nemesis Quillan Gornt of Rothwell-Gornt (TV-movie regular John Rhys-Davies on top pantomime form), there's plenty of local sightseeing to be done.