it is a love story which succeeds in it's attempt to create suspense--will true love be victorious? or will it be a tragedy? The suspense is intermingled with completely unintentional comic relief. It stars Hugh Grant before he became the bumbling fool in so many other movies. This movie is amazingly funny because of its lack of trying to be so. It was not meant to be a comedy, but the one-liners will be recited by its audiences for years after viewing. It was a truly valuable find in our campus library movie collection. Please trust me and rent this movie!!! You will never forget this experience!

This is a CAUTION to any considering the purchase of this title. My comments should not be taken as critical of the production. The key here is to carefully preview any copy of this title marketed by "EXTREAM DIGITAL MEDIA". I picked up a VHS copy at a video close out store. The sleeve had clear images of the principal actors, but the video quality was so poor I could not view the film. Thus my score should NOT be considered as valid. I had to enter something to continue. The video is not viewable, the quality of the image is so poor one could imagine it was made by using a cheep video camera to copy the film from a TV screen. There was not sufficient detail to identify the actors. Copies from other sources may provide a perfectly clear image, but not the copy in my possession distributed by Extreme Digital Media, bar code 674639501834

Get a grip you guys - this is not supposed to be great theatre. It's a fun, tongue-in-cheek adaptation of your typical bodice-ripper tale only rather better done than most (I'm thinking of the American equivalent offerings such as "Black Swan" (1942) or any of Errol Flynn's efforts). True - the transcription to DVD is about the worst I've ever seen outside of old kung-fu movies but just enjoy it for what it is - an early airing of Hugh Grant's talents with some great supporting actors. Everyone takes their part extremely well - especially Christopher Cazenove as the slimy Rudolph Vyne.

This movie was one huge disappointment from beginning to end.Firstly, I bought the DVD. Big mistake. The transfer was by far the worst I've ever seen and I've watched hundreds of DVDs. It actually looked worse than what I can get when taping something off of regular network television using the EP setting on my VCR. Not only was the whole thing blurry beyond belief, several scenes shake like crazy and through the middle of many of the scenes there were video tracking lines like you'd see on a over used low grade VHS tape. Which is what this transfer was probably taken from. The low list price might have prepared me for the lack of quality of the menu, but for it to be of a better image quality than the movie itself was a bit of a surprise.Secondly, the movie itself was awful. I love a good period piece movie and I really wanted to like this one despite my misgivings as to where it got it's plot line (although I like an occasional historical romance book, I'm not a fan of Cartland). But there was just nothing to like here. The story was ridiculous, the dialog was atrocious and the acting was just plain bad. Something that I'm at a loss to explain with all the known talent that was in this movie. I'm sure I can't imagine what the director must have been doing to get such a lousy end product.At first I wanted to give this movie/DVD zero stars, but since I could only go as low as one star I did manage to find one good thing to justify that star. The costumes were wonderful.Fair warning: If you're thinking about seeing this movie solely because you're a fan of Hugh Grant, you can forget it. He barely strings 10 words together in two scenes and two words together in 10 other scenes. He's just not the major character in this movie that he's made out to be by the cover of the DVD.