I read the other comments on this miniseries before offering my own observations, and found that some of them inaccurately described the plot and misunderstood the characters and their relationships. So I wish to put the record straight and submit a fairer review.
This serial style film, lavish with luxury and escapism, is a chocolates and velvet experience, intended, I suspect, for susceptible ladies who love a weepie melodramatic love story. As such, it succeeds admirably. I am one of those ladies, always have been. I picked up the film accidentally, as one does, going cheap in a supermarket. How much more have I paid for films and not gained half the value of this one? I settled down in comfort to relish this story, loosely based on the real life story of Merle Oberon, adapted from one of her husband's (Alexander Korda) nephew's (Michael Korda) novel based on the legends /history of his beautiful aunt. Facts, re-interpreted or changed to fit the film's design, intertwine with fiction. Merle Oberon (Queenie Kelly in the film) was Anglo-Indian, did grow up in Kolkata (Calcutta), did go to England and become a film star, did marry Alexander Korda (David Konig in the film) who was, by all accounts, completely infatuated with her. She did disguise her Anglo-Indian origins, pretend she came from Tasmania, disguise her darker-skinned mother as her maid (in Hollywood: her mother died in 1937), and, after divorcing Korda in 1945, marry a cinematographer called Lucien.
The film's additional plot details make a more tantalising drama. Early on, Queenie's rape by a high-up British official in India, resulting in his death and suspicion of murder falling on Queenie, provides a strong plot-line on which to hang lots of dramatic punctuation points. Plausibility is irrelevant - who needed Bette Davis or Hitchcock dramas to be plausible? One review I read of this film described it as 'shoddy'. It is not at all shoddy. The sordid details - rape, seedy clubs and strip-tease dancers, decrepit living conditions in India for poor Anglo-Indians, race prejudice which force non-white people to hide their origins, suggestions of incest, job shortages during the Depression; - all these happened (and still happen), and often to young, pretty, and vulnerable girls at the mercy of a ruthless male world around them. Some of these things may have happened to the real Merle Oberon. We live in a world that is often shoddy.
The film itself must have cost a fortune with lavish sets and glamorous costumes, gorgeous palaces and exotic Indian location (whether the real India or made to look like it matters little), film sets within film sets. Take one glorious scene where Queenie, now Dawn Avalon (her name taken from a loved poem of her childhood) arrives in India to make a big film (The Secret Palace) and is greeted by a horde of Indian press and hoi polloi complete with decorated camels, elephants, and palaces. She looks her most beautiful and enigmatic, stylish and designer-dressed (almost like the real Merle Oberon). India is red-hot with exotic luxury, no expense spared. The fictional film 'The Secret Palace' gives a nod to 'Wuthering Heights', Merle Oberon's most famous film - the fictional end of 'The Secret Palace' mimicks the end of the 'Wuthering Heights' - a neat conceit of which there are several in this film indicating a subtlety which one doesn't usually expect from a miniseries.
Mia Sara excels herself. I had not seen her before but I thought she was lovely. She was graceful and expressive and caught the quality of erotic beauty that Merle Oberon had. Helped by the make-up and wonderful costumes she was so striking and her acting skills were evident in the way her character matured from the determined but naive young girl into a beautiful, consummate actress, somewhat manipulative, and often quite ruthless in getting what she wanted - one example of the mature Queenie was how she managed both Lucien and David Konig, and despite Konig's own ruthless pursuit of what he wanted, she kept the upper hand.
And she was supported by a galaxy of stalwart older actors with impeccable pedigrees, who presumably take these parts because they are committed actors who desire to keep working. Claire Bloom (who starred herself, so many years ago, in Charlie Chaplin's film, 'Limelight' and went on to become one of Britain's leading stage and screen acresses), in one of her stranger roles, darkened up to play Queenie's Anglo-Indian mother, Victoria, complete with appropriate Indian accent; Joss Ackland (a classic British actor) as the British high official in India, Sir Burton Rumsey, and Sara Miles (who remembers her marvellous performances in Joseph Losey's 'The Servant' and David Lean's 'Ryan's Daughter'?) as Lady Sibyl Rumsey, both of which actors play similar roles in another British empire film 'White Mischief'. Martin Balsam and Kirk Douglas (as Konig, a pseudonym for Korda) as movie moguls - what did the TV company have to pay to get them!! - and Joel Grey (remember him as the amazing Master of Cermonies in 'Cabaret'?)
I thoroughly enjoyed 'Queenie'. It doesn't pretend to be a biopic, or even a 'good movie': it does what these miniseries can do so well when they try - produce an entertaining escape out of the humdrum into the sun for a few brief hours.
This serial style film, lavish with luxury and escapism, is a chocolates and velvet experience, intended, I suspect, for susceptible ladies who love a weepie melodramatic love story. As such, it succeeds admirably. I am one of those ladies, always have been. I picked up the film accidentally, as one does, going cheap in a supermarket. How much more have I paid for films and not gained half the value of this one? I settled down in comfort to relish this story, loosely based on the real life story of Merle Oberon, adapted from one of her husband's (Alexander Korda) nephew's (Michael Korda) novel based on the legends /history of his beautiful aunt. Facts, re-interpreted or changed to fit the film's design, intertwine with fiction. Merle Oberon (Queenie Kelly in the film) was Anglo-Indian, did grow up in Kolkata (Calcutta), did go to England and become a film star, did marry Alexander Korda (David Konig in the film) who was, by all accounts, completely infatuated with her. She did disguise her Anglo-Indian origins, pretend she came from Tasmania, disguise her darker-skinned mother as her maid (in Hollywood: her mother died in 1937), and, after divorcing Korda in 1945, marry a cinematographer called Lucien.
The film's additional plot details make a more tantalising drama. Early on, Queenie's rape by a high-up British official in India, resulting in his death and suspicion of murder falling on Queenie, provides a strong plot-line on which to hang lots of dramatic punctuation points. Plausibility is irrelevant - who needed Bette Davis or Hitchcock dramas to be plausible? One review I read of this film described it as 'shoddy'. It is not at all shoddy. The sordid details - rape, seedy clubs and strip-tease dancers, decrepit living conditions in India for poor Anglo-Indians, race prejudice which force non-white people to hide their origins, suggestions of incest, job shortages during the Depression; - all these happened (and still happen), and often to young, pretty, and vulnerable girls at the mercy of a ruthless male world around them. Some of these things may have happened to the real Merle Oberon. We live in a world that is often shoddy.
The film itself must have cost a fortune with lavish sets and glamorous costumes, gorgeous palaces and exotic Indian location (whether the real India or made to look like it matters little), film sets within film sets. Take one glorious scene where Queenie, now Dawn Avalon (her name taken from a loved poem of her childhood) arrives in India to make a big film (The Secret Palace) and is greeted by a horde of Indian press and hoi polloi complete with decorated camels, elephants, and palaces. She looks her most beautiful and enigmatic, stylish and designer-dressed (almost like the real Merle Oberon). India is red-hot with exotic luxury, no expense spared. The fictional film 'The Secret Palace' gives a nod to 'Wuthering Heights', Merle Oberon's most famous film - the fictional end of 'The Secret Palace' mimicks the end of the 'Wuthering Heights' - a neat conceit of which there are several in this film indicating a subtlety which one doesn't usually expect from a miniseries.
Mia Sara excels herself. I had not seen her before but I thought she was lovely. She was graceful and expressive and caught the quality of erotic beauty that Merle Oberon had. Helped by the make-up and wonderful costumes she was so striking and her acting skills were evident in the way her character matured from the determined but naive young girl into a beautiful, consummate actress, somewhat manipulative, and often quite ruthless in getting what she wanted - one example of the mature Queenie was how she managed both Lucien and David Konig, and despite Konig's own ruthless pursuit of what he wanted, she kept the upper hand.
And she was supported by a galaxy of stalwart older actors with impeccable pedigrees, who presumably take these parts because they are committed actors who desire to keep working. Claire Bloom (who starred herself, so many years ago, in Charlie Chaplin's film, 'Limelight' and went on to become one of Britain's leading stage and screen acresses), in one of her stranger roles, darkened up to play Queenie's Anglo-Indian mother, Victoria, complete with appropriate Indian accent; Joss Ackland (a classic British actor) as the British high official in India, Sir Burton Rumsey, and Sara Miles (who remembers her marvellous performances in Joseph Losey's 'The Servant' and David Lean's 'Ryan's Daughter'?) as Lady Sibyl Rumsey, both of which actors play similar roles in another British empire film 'White Mischief'. Martin Balsam and Kirk Douglas (as Konig, a pseudonym for Korda) as movie moguls - what did the TV company have to pay to get them!! - and Joel Grey (remember him as the amazing Master of Cermonies in 'Cabaret'?)
I thoroughly enjoyed 'Queenie'. It doesn't pretend to be a biopic, or even a 'good movie': it does what these miniseries can do so well when they try - produce an entertaining escape out of the humdrum into the sun for a few brief hours.