The Forsyte Saga [TV] (1967)
Directed by David Giles, James Cellan Jones

Film Review

Remember the 'Swinging 60s'?  The decade of the mini-skirt, The Beatles, the first lunar landing and a flurry of cultural and technological revolutions that would transform western society in the twinkling of an eye.  In Britain, it was a time of unprecedented hope and change. Everyone was eager to bury the past and embrace a future that promised so much new and exciting stuff.  Then, in the winter of 1968/9, the nation succumbed to a bout of collective nostalgia, the like of which had never been seen before.  The cause: a prestigious BBC television series entitled The Forsyte Saga.  Adapted from John Galsworthy's six Forsyte novels, first published between 1906 and 1928, the series followed the fortunes of an upper middleclass family from the 1870s to the mid-1920s.  For 26 weeks, from September 1968 to March 1969, The Forsyte Saga was compulsive Sunday evening viewing, attracting an audience of 18 million viewers for its final episode.

The series became so popular that the pubs were deserted and church services had to be re-arranged.  It even influenced fashions, with designers adopting Victorian styles and motifs from the 1920s to capitalise on the Forsyte craze.  The series was not only a hit in the UK, it was widely exported around the world, and was famously the first program the BBC managed to sell to the Soviet Union.  It is estimated that the series was watched by 160 million people around the world.  This is the show that re-established the classic serial as a major genre in British television and set a new high standard for programme making which the BBC and its rivals at ITV had to work hard to maintain (ITV's Upstairs, Downstairs, which began in 1971, is an obvious close cousin of the series).  It also re-awakened interest in Galsworthy, a writer who, despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 for his Forsyte novels, had been all but forgotten by the 1960s.  This may have been a decade of heightened political awareness but the issue that polarised Britain most in the winter of 1968/9 was not a political one, it was whether you sided with Soames or with Irene, the two central protagonists in The Forsyte Saga.

What makes this outbreak of Forsyte mania so hard to fathom is that this was not the first time the series had aired on British television.  The series had originally been commissioned in 1965 for the new channel BBC 2, which had started broadcasting in April 1964 and was struggling to attract an audience.  For almost a decade, Donald Wilson, the Head of Serials at the BBC, had lobbied hard for a prestige adaptation of Galsworthy's family saga; his efforts were frustrated by MGM's unwillingness to surrender the rights to the first novel in the series (The Man of Property), which the studio adapted in 1949 as That Forsyte Woman (with Errol Flynn as Soames, and Greer Garson as Irene).  When the BBC finally acquired the rights to the novels, Wilson immediately resigned his position and dedicated himself to the production of what was to become the most ambitious drama series so far undertaken by the corporation.  His one regret was that he had to make the series in black and white; if he had waited one more year, it would have been made in colour.  Ironically, BBC 2 began broadcasting regularly in colour on 1st July 1967, the day on which the original transmission of The Forsyte Saga on that channel ended.

With a budget of a quarter of a million pounds at his disposal (an astronomical sum at the time), Wilson was not only able to hire some big name actors, he could also call upon all the creative resources available to him at the BBC.  The series took fourteen months to make and had a total screen time of 21 hours and 40 minutes, divided into 26 fifty-minute length episodes.  As BBC 2 could only be received by around nine million viewers at the time, it was a huge gamble, but the gamble paid off better than anyone could have imagined.  Following the broadcast of its first episode on Saturday 7th January 1967, its audience soon grew to six million, ensuring a repeat on BBC 1 the next year.

Headlining the series in the role of Young Jolyon Forsyte, the likeable maverick of the family, was Kenneth More, who had been one of Britain's leading film stars in the 1950s.  By the mid-1960s, More's popularity as an actor had waned considerably and the series provided a welcome boost to his flagging career.  Eric Porter, one of Britain's finest character actors, was an ideal choice for the part of Soames Forsyte, the most complex character and the only one to appear in all 26 episodes, whilst the role of Irene, the main female character, went to up-and-coming New Zealand actress Nyree Dawn Porter, who would later star in the popular thriller series The Protectors. Complementing these established performers was a brace of bright young things - Susan Hampshire (perfect for the role of Fleur), Nicholas Pennell, Martin Jarvis and Michael York (Logan's Run (1976)) - and an impressive roll call of exceptional character actors: Fay Compton (Britannia Mews (1949)), Margaret Tyzack (Quatermass (1979)), Cyril Luckham, Terence Alexander, Joseph O'Conor, Jenny Laird (Painted Boats (1945)), Derek Francis and John Bennett.  Few other television series can boast such a colourful and distinguished cast, and, above all else, it is the performances that make the series so utterly compelling.  Susan Hampshire would take the lead role (that of Lady Glencora) in another prestigious BBC period drama, The Pallisers (1974).

Whilst Galsworthy's novels were intended as a critique of English bourgeois society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they touched on themes that were highly relevant to a 1960s audience, and this may be one of the reasons for the series' success.  Episode Six concludes with what was, at the time, the most shocking thing to be seen in a British television drama, Soames' frenzied rape of his wife Irene.  This at once ignited a polemic as to whether a husband had a right to assert his marital rights or whether by doing so he was committing a criminal offence.  More generally, the series appeared to have a pro-feminist slant (the women characters are generally stronger, more sympathetic and far more pro-active than their male counterparts), reflecting society's growing pre-occupation with women's rights.  Predictably, the left-wing press were quick to dismiss the series as 'stockbroker soap', but the eagerness with which the British public took to it, across all age groups and all social strata, was a sign that it had universal appeal and dealt with concerns that were very much a part of the 1960s Zeitgeist.

At a time of burgeoning materialism, Galsworthy's preoccupations with possession could hardly be more relevant - possession not only of things, but also of people. Each of the main protagonists in the six volumes that make up The Forsyte Saga and A Modern Comedy is driven by a desire to possess someone or something, and in almost all cases the desire is frustrated and leads to a nasty outcome.  The most obvious example of this is the attempt by Soames, a dour, unromantic lawyer, to possess the beautiful and passionate Irene.  He cannot win her through love so he negotiates a kind of business transaction with her: he agrees to let her go freely if the marriage fails.  When the marriage does, predictably, fall apart, Soames buys himself a second wife (a calculating little French number named Annette), so determined is he to have a son and heir.  This scheme also backfires and Soames is left with a daughter, Fleur, who, spoiled brat though she is, turns out to be the instrument of his redemption. 

Another theme that runs through Galsworthy's novels is the depressing notion that the errors of one generation will inevitably be repeated by the next. Individuals may learn from their mistakes, but humanity as a species cannot.  Fleur turns out to have inherited her father's possessive streak and so her life is also ruined by the failure to possess something she should not, her cousin Jon Forsyte (who just happens to be Irene's son...).  By marrying Young Jolyon, Irene makes herself a Forsyte in both name and deed.  Her own possessiveness asserts itself in her desire to protect Jon from Fleur; this is what leads her to drive a wedge between the love-struck youngsters, thereby creating the circumstances for the tragic series of events that follow, culminating in Soames's own dramatic demise.  The only Forsyte who is capable of loving selflessly is Young Jolyon, a liberal minded drop-out of the kind that a 1960s audience could easily identify with.  Amiable and right-thinking as Young Jolyon is, he is just about the least interesting character in the saga.  He is the ideal modern man and therefore is incapable of improvement.  It is Soames, Irene and (later) Fleur who monopolise our interest and compel us to watch the series through to the end, these flawed representatives of a society which acts as if human relationships were a commodity like any other, to be traded and possessed like a house or an item of objet d'art.

Whilst few regard John Galsworthy as a literary genius (of the calibre of Thackery or Dickens), his novels still have a broad appeal, partly because the characters are so well-drawn, partly because the narrative has so much interest, but mainly because they deal with fundamental truths about human nature.  The strength of Donald Wilson's adaptation of Galsworthy's best known work is that it recognises these qualities and builds upon them, adding depth to the characters and tightening the narrative structure to make it a far more coherent and satisfying work.  The lack of dialogue in Galsworthy's early novels must have provided a challenge to Wilson and his team of writers, but it also allowed them to develop the characters more thoroughly, making it easier for us to relate to them.  The first four episodes serve as a prologue to the first novel in the saga, fleshing out the characters of Young Jolyon, Soames and Irene so that we are better placed to comprehend their motivations and less inclined to judge their actions.  If there is a flaw in Galsworthy's novels it is that Soames's redemption at the end of A Modern Comedy fails to be entirely convincing.  Through a combination of meticulous writing and an outstanding performance from Eric Porter (which won him a BAFTA), this flaw is removed and the saga concludes in a way that is both natural and exquisitely poignant.  As the credits ran for that final episode, accompanied by an extended version of the by-now familiar theme (taken from Eric Coates' suite The Three Elizabeths), a nation could hardly help mourning the passing of Soames Forsyte.  Television drama would never be the same again.

Film Synopsis

The Forsytes are a proud Victorian middle-class family, comfortably situated, thanks to their ample investments, and keen to avoid scandal at all costs.  Imagine then the consternation caused by Young Jolyon's decision to abandon his wife and live in sin with his daughter's German governess!  It is not a social faux pas his cousin Soames is going to make.  Having fallen in love with a beautiful young woman, Irene, he is determined to make a respectable wife of her.  Unfortunately, it is loathing not love that Irene cultivates for Soames, and as the marriage fails she finds herself drawn to Philip Bosinney, the architect her husband has engaged to build a house in the country.  When Soames discovers his wife's infidelity, he is outraged and rapes her.  For Irene, this is the final straw.  But just when she is about to leave her husband to start a new life, Bosinney dies in tragic circumstances...