The Gazette - November 29, 1985

"Viewers face some tough choices Sunday night"
Mike Boone

At 8 p.m., we've got the opening episode of Anne of Green Gables on CBMT-6 and John and Yoko: A Love Story on CFCF-12.

Then, after you've spent an hour frantically clicking back and forth between the TV adaptation of Lucy Maude Montgomery's Canadian classic and a drama based on a great rock 'n' roll love affair, Masterpiece Theatre comes along at 9 p.m. (on Vermont ETV-33) with the first episode of an eight-part TV version of Charles Dickens's Bleak House not to mention Perry Mason Returns on WPTZ-5.

Decisions, decisions. Whaddaya gonna watch?

Calm down, your TV critic is here to help. The Gazette doesn't pay me just to insult CFCF radio you know. This is a consumer information column.

Your best bet on Sunday night for family viewing is Anne of Green Gables.

Megan Follows is sensational in the title role; and Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth are equally excellent as the sister and brother who adopt orphan Anne Shirley. While the story is a bit dated and the pacing not quite up to the standards of rock videos, Anne is superb family entertainment well worth trying to get youngsters seated long enough to watch.

Viewers are advised to go with Anne of Green Gables, watch Bleak House in its Channel 33 retelecast at 11:10 Sunday night, hear about Perry Mason at the office Monday morning and then catch up with John and Yoko on Channel 5 Monday night after the election is in the bag.

Source: The Gazette

The Whig-Standard - November 30, 1985

"A First-class Excursion to Avonlea"
Greg Burliuk

I DIDN'T GROW UP reading Anne of Green Gables (what boy did?), so maybe that's why I enjoyed so much its latest film rendering. CBC Television presents a four-hour version of Anne's escapades tomorrow and Monday from 8 to 10 p.m. on Channels 4 and 11 (Cable 4 and 10).

The problem with Lucy Maud Montgomery's seven Anne books is that they arouse such vivid images in the minds of their readers. A woman friend told me, "I couldn't watch Anne on television, because I have such a strong picture of her in my mind." But having made the acquaintance of the young lass from Avonlea only via the stage musical, I had a much fuzzier picture in my mind. The handsomely- photographed CBC production focuses and clarifies that image beautifully. Aside from its story, the film is worth seeing just for its sumptuous travelogue of Prince Edward Island.

The male half of the population who spurned this series of books while they were growing up can now watch and, yes, enjoy it without fear of ridicule. Its author's dry Canadian wit shines through the adopted guise of a rambunctious red-haired girl to poke fun at a poker-faced society.

The two-part mini-series takes us just up to the second of the Anne books, at the point where Anne and Gilbert are about to start their teaching careers. If you can see only one part, choose tomorrow night's opening episode, which deals with the coming of the orphan Anne Shirley and how she turns the tiny village of Avonlea on its ear. The three main stars are so perfectly suited to their roles that not even a die-hard Anne fan could find fault with them. Megan Follows is only 17, but already she's become familiar to us through her many television appearances, most notably as the first girl to play in an organized boys' hockey league. With the required dyed hair and some carefully applied freckles, she not only looks the part, she plays it beautifully as her Anne changes from being the fiercely precocious orphan always getting into trouble into the not- so-self-assured but generous young woman.

You know she's going to be fine when shortly after her arrival she blithely asks Matthew whether he'd rather be "divinely beautiful, dazzlingly clever or angelically good."

Speaking of Matthew, stuntman-turned-actor Richard Farnsworth (star of The Grey Fox) was born to play the part of the shy but warm Matthew, whose shuttered life is aired out considerably when "Anne- spelled-with-an-E" comes into it. Farnsworth speaks volumes with only his eyes and does full justice to the hilarious scene in which he buys a garden rake and 10 pounds of brown sugar at the general store before finally stammering out that what he really wants is a dress with puffed sleeves for Anne.

The real star of the show, however, is veteran actress Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla, the very proper lady who is appalled but secretly amused at Anne. Dewhurst has a way of making Anne's outrageous comments uproarious by her facial expressions alone, and we are wholly caught up in her struggle as she gradually opens up to her young charge. Dewhurst's deadpan technique is the perfect vehicle to express Marilla's dry sense of humor.

Part One deals with Anne's childhood escapades; Part Two is more sedate as Anne goes to Queen's college on her way to becoming the new school teacher at Avonlea. Matthew's death is handled sensitively without adding the corny melodrama it invites. A problem all the way through the production, however, is the music by Hagood Hardy, who still sounds like he's writing tea commercials. He makes the show seem cornier than it really is.

This production will be perfect for the home video and foreign television markets. It's a universal story that families everywhere can enjoy. The extra good news is that the anti-climactic ending seems to herald a sequel.

Source: The Whig-Standard

The Ottawa Citizen - November 30, 1985

"Anne of Green Gables; CBC effort does justice to a Canadian classic"
Noel Taylor

As Canadian classics go, Anne of Green Gables may well be unique - a success story, if you like, instead of one of survival. So when you transfer it to the small screen - which CBC-TV is doing Sunday evening for two hours, with two more on Tuesday - you take care, or millions of readers in 22 languages around the world will want to know why not.

And this production by a 29-year-old Toronto film-maker, Kevin Sullivan, who first met Anne in a Grade 4 classroom, is careful. Good, too... and heart-warming, faithful, charming, and most other adjectives that transmit the spell Lucy Maud Montgomery has cast over generations of young readers.

Here a word for the hard-nosed, the cynical and those others, like me, who have been brought up without Anne of Green Gables. Be prepared to surrender.

Sullivan, who has spent four years and a budget of $3.5 million on the TV Anne, negotiated the movie rights for what he will only call "a respectable amount of money" with the Montgomery estate. For some reason it had been assumed they belonged to Don Harron, creator of the Anne of Green Gables musical.

Sullivan says modestly, "They seemed comfortable with what I had in mind for Anne... They've seen it several times and seem quite overwhelmed."

Viewers on Sunday will see why. Though it was conceived originally as a commercial-free series of three one-hour films, Sullivan says the shorter format cut out too much, and another half-hour was written to bring it up to four hours, with breaks.

Anne is played with energizing spirit by 16-year-old Toronto actress Megan Follows. Sullivan auditioned 3,000 for the part across Canada, but in the end returned to Follows. Though she may have seemed a bit old for Anne's early days from 11 on, her acting talent was the deciding factor.

As it happens, Follows slips smoothly into each of the intervening years, from the carrot-haired rebel of 11 to the poised young teacher of 16. Follows, the daughter of actor Ted Follows and actress Dawn Greenhalgh, now is at high school in Los Angeles, bent on an acting career for which this part is a prime credential.

She is in every scene, a pig-tailed dreamer in a purse-lipped society, who sees drama in the merely mundane and philosophizes wordily about life ( "life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes" ) to the consternation of almost every grownup around.

There are exceptions of course. Matthew, for instance, the old man played quietly by U.S. actor Richard Farnsworth, is like every child's dream of grandfather. He picks up Anne at Avonlea, fresh from the orphanage in Halifax, and falls for her freshness and the renewed life she brings to the home he shares with his sister Amarilla Cuthbert.

Of all the casting though, the coup is surely Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla. Dewhurst, who has had a summer home on P.E.I. for the last 20 years, grew up in Montreal and remembered Anne of Green Gables fondly from childhood.

She is Marilla, the stern, sometimes formidable, always fair, matronly upholder of decency. But it's the gradual warming trend in her relationship with the orphan who should have been a boy, which is such a delight. Her scene with the newly arrived Anne who rebels at the suggestion of bedtime prayers - "God made my hair red on purpose, and I've never cared for Him since" - is a heart-melter.

In four hours, without recalling every scene in the book, not a lot seems to have been left out. A few stand out... the garden party, the roof-walk, the soggy re-enactment of the Lady of Shallot and the night Anne saves the baby's life.

Sullivan's hand in all this is sure, resolutely sidestepping sweet sentiment, though Montgomery herself makes it difficult.

Although it was filmed mainly in the countryside around Toronto because Sullivan says that after scouting P.E.I. for two weeks he could find little of the architecture that he needed surviving from the period, Anne of Green Gables looks authentic. Some seashore scenes were shot on the island, but two homes in the Toronto area doubled for Green Gables, shot from different angles.

It's essentially a summertime film, warm and comfortable, on an island of birdsong, blossom and autumn glows, lovingly filmed by Rene Ohashi.

Anne of Green Gables, the television movie, looks as though it's in for a long life. Interest around the world should take care of that. Although he has been more involved recently in getting it finished for the scheduled TV date, Sullivan says it has already been sold to Australian TV based solely on a small promotional film.

If you miss it this time around, PBS, one of the co-producers, will be screening it, as three one-hour films, at the end of February.

He has had "a deluge" of inquiries mainly from Scandinavia, Europe and especially Japan, where schoolchilden write essays about it and the winners go to Charlottetown as a prize. Then there are all the other letters from people who heard the film was being made and wanted to put their children in it.

Raising the money for Anne took Sullivan almost a year. Anne is a co-production with Telefilm Canada (the government agency which invests in mainly independent productions), the CBC, PBS, a German network and City TV in Toronto.

Nationally, Anne of Green Gables is being shown by CBC-TV on successive nights, Sunday and Monday at 8 p.m. But in the Ottawa area, because of Quebec election coverage on Monday, the second night will be Tuesday, at 7 p.m.

Source: The Ottawa Citizen

The Globe and Mail - November 30, 1985

"ANNE'S A WINNER of hearts; A Canadian classic is faithfully brought to television in all her wit, warmth and whimsy"
Rick Groen

EVEN THE curmudgeonly Mark Twain fell head over heels for her. "The dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice," he proclaimed, a gushing endorsement echoed by generations of smitten readers around the romantic world. Indeed, peer into the impressionable mind of any sensitive schoolgirl and you're likely to find a sacred place reserved for Anne of Green Gables, a tiny sanctuary that will brook no defilement, especially from an eager filmmaker in search of cinematic raw material.

All of which makes the answer as rare as the question: what becomes a Canadian classic most? Television, in this exceptional case, a four-hour mini-series (tomorrow and Monday at 8 on CBC) that treats the literary original with the kid gloves it demands and the abiding fidelity it deserves.

More gushing, then. Spearheaded by Kevin Sullivan, a very independent producer working overtime as director and co-writer, this is a signal TV achievement - a perfect melding of cast and content, a happy union that marries sentiment to charm and wit to warmth. The material may be mundane - Lucy Maud Montgomery followed the standard Victorian blueprint for the picaresque orphan-child - but the execution is sublime. True to both the turn-of-the-century period and the coming-of-age theme, Sullivan has managed to squeeze through the tube precisely the quality that animates the book - enough child-like wonder to melt the heart of any card-carrying adult.

His principal ally is Megan Follows and her career-making portrayal of our red-haired heroine. In the sheer time spent on camera and the extended reach of the role, the script imposes enormous demands on a callow actress, expecting her to bridge the gulf (brief in years but an eternity in spirit) that separates the wide-eyed gamin from the emerging sophisticate. Follows is superb at both sides of the spectrum. In the early sequences, she performs comic wonders on her precociously inflated dialogue ("My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes"), making the lines seem funny yet not ridiculous, unlikely yet not unnatural. Later, when the girlish smocks give way to the stylish gowns, she blooms as convincingly as a confident deb at a coming-out ball. The lens loves her and so do we - this young lady is quicksilver on the small screen.

Better still, the central portrait arrives in a glittering frame. As Marilla and Matthew, the adopting "parents," Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth furnish us with a delicious study in contrast - she's all voice, he's all visage. Her spinster sister finds just the right tensions in a warring personality that pits rusted-in piety against freshly-minted joy. And his bachelor brother is a marvel. Pitiably shy, perpetually reticent, the character must say nothing yet speak volumes, and Farnsworth owns the ideal tool for the job - that eloquent face, that icon of gnarled kindliness. (In his scenes with Follows, the camera cavorts to and fro in a veritable orgy of adoration.) Even the cameos are worthy of the name here. For once, they're adorning, notably Charmion King as the feisty aunt, Marilyn Lightstone as an inspiring schoolmarm, and Jayne Eastwood as a wickedly Dickensian harpy. Pleasing, too, is Rene Ohashi's cinematography. In a narrative that is basically a series of discrete set-pieces, the Prince Edward Island scenery - dappled sunsets, rolling seascapes, the waving grass, the beckoning lighthouse - serves beautifully as the visual apostrophes.

Cavils? Just one. The second hour drags considerably, threatening us with a surfeit of cuteness. At the saturation point - about when the incident of the brooch makes room for the tragedy of the raspberry cordial - our good will starts to wear as thin as our patience. But the pace quickens again, flagging interest perks up, and the final half races to its sweet conclusion, where Anne the older skips off to that bright tomorrow. Yet, to the enchanted viewer walking with her, momentarily freed from the charmless tyranny of the televised norm, it's the words of Anne the younger that come back to delight, to instruct, and to haunt: "Don't you ever imagine things differently from the way they are?"

Source: The Globe and Mail

Financial Post - December 14, 1985

"On Cultural News"
Arnold Edinborough

THE MAJOR piece of Canadiana this week was a four-hour mini- series television production of Anne of Green Gables. With Megan Follows as Anne, Richard Farnsworth as Mathew Cuthbert and Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla, his sister, the casting was unerringly right, and a pleasant universal mix.

Quite apart from the excellence of the acting and directing, which was sufficiently astringent to balance the maudlin parts of the story, the interior settings and the location scenes were overwhelming.

As Mathew and Anne drove slowly down the avenue of apple blossoms, the countryside itself brought a nostalgic lump into the throat.

The whole four hours was stunning.

Source: Financial Post

Toronto Star - May 25, 1987

"Anne charms U.S. critics all over again"

As a girl, Anne of Green Gables won acclaim across North America.

Now, in a TV sequel to the award-winning CBC mini-series, a more mature Anne is charming American critics all over again.

"Network TV would do well to study Anne Of Avonlea for a maxi lesson in what it takes to make a mini soar," said the Hollywood Reporter, commenting on the premiere of the four-hour sequel this month on U.S. pay TV.

The Disney Channel, a major investor in the project, is showing the program in one-hour segments during late May and early June, while CBC plans to show the series in two-hour segments Dec. 6 and 7.

Disney calls the program Anne Of Avonlea: The Continuing Story Of Anne Of Green Gables, while CBC call it Anne Of Green Gables, The Sequel.

Either way, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales called it a "spotlessly handsome production.

"As in Green Gables, the attention to detail is fastidious and the story warmly told."

Shales also said Kevin Sullivan, who wrote, directed and acted as executive producer, "has transferred the story to the screen with care and affection.

"And he makes it a glowing, pristine depiction of an inviting place and time."

Sullivan's sequel, an adaptation of three novels by Prince Edward Island-born Lucy Maud Montgomery, follows free-spirited orphan Anne Shirley into young adulthood and away, for a time, from her farm home on P.E.I.

Megan Follows returns as Anne, and Shales said she has "perfected the role to the point of basic reflex."

Aside from Schuyler Grant, an American actress who plays Diana Barry, all the returning cast members are Canadian.

Daily Variety, a Los Angeles-based industry publication, said "plot devices occasionally creak," but the show "supplies a glowing portrait of uncorrupted pre-World War I living.

"Under Sullivan's imaginative direction, Follows never falters; her Anne of Green Gables remains a spirited, credible creation.

"Colleen Dewhurst again presents a strong, loving Marilla, and (Frank) Converse as the maturing Morgan Harris is a standout."

Critic Jerry Krupnick of the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, was also impressed with Follows, saying "this red-haired beauty, who's too alive to be just a pretty face, has fire and fight and spunk and feeling."

And Krupnick described the whole production as "far and away the finest thing that has ever happened to children's television."

Kay Gardella of the New York News also hailed it as "one of the finest dramas I've seen in a long time," while the Hollywood Reporter called it "family fare in top form."

The Pasedena, Calif., Star-News found some parts of the program "hopelessly cliched" but overall it was "tender, fun, gentle entertainment."

The Middletown, N.Y., Times-Herald Record was more generous, saying it bore similarity to the Disney classic Pollyanna in being "inspiring without being maudlin, comic without being stupid, childlike without being childish."

Source: Toronto Star