The Secret Garden

6/6/2021

_**Beautiful, reverent, awe-inspiring**_ To be honest, I remember seeing previews of this movie way back when it came out (in 1993) and thinking to myself, "WHY would anyone want to see such a film and why would anyone make it?" Well, about five years later it appeared on TV one night and I started watching, fully expecting to turn it off within 20 minutes or so. WOW -- was I ever wrong! What I saw was beautiful and captivating, artistic and entrancing -- filmmaking of the highest order. "The Secret Garden" is a movie of such artistic quality that it ranks up there with the hallowed original "Apocalypse Now" (although they're totally different genres). It's no surprise that Francis Ford Coppola had his hand in both pics -- he was, of course, the director of "Apocalypse Now" and he's

10/8/2026

I always remember loving the BBC's Sunday tea-time adaptation of this from 1975, and this is about as close to that as I've seen from the cinema. It's really quite a simple story of the young "Mary" (Kate Maberly) who has to go and live with her uncle (John Lynch) at his stately home after her parents are killed. He proves to be a man with demons of his own which keep him from his home more often than not, and so that leaves her in the care of the fastidious but not unkind "Mrs. Medlock" (Dame Maggie Smith). Left largely to her own devices, she manages to convince her guardian to allow her a small patch of land to plant some flowers. He agrees without realising that the area she has picked has hitherto been closed up and he is also unaware that her explorations around his home one day had