"Noble House" (SD DVD)

Synopsis

In Hong Kong, Ian Dunross (Brosnan) becomes Tai-Pan, the head of Noble House, which is a trading company, a.k.a, Struan & Co., when Struan retires, turning over the company to Ian.

As Tai-Pan, Ian finds that the company is in deep financial trouble, and tries to secure loans to at least temporarily fix the problem.

An investment orgainization from the USA, headed by Linc Bartlett (Masters) and Casey Tcholok (Raffin) want to take over Struan, but they don't tell Ian their true motives when inquiring about investing with the company.

In the meantime, Gornt & Co., run by Quillan Gornt (Rhys-Davies) also knows about Struan's financial mess and wants to take it over himself.

Ian must now decide if involving himself in the drug trade, by borrowing money from Four-Finger Wu (Dhiegh) is worth the risk in order to save the company from being taken over by his competitor, Gornt.

Commentary

This is a TV mini-series from 1988, and it is very good. I watched an episode every night for nearly a week. In those days, they really knew how to keep audiences interested, without extreme violence, explicit sex, bad language, or computer generated special effects. It was all story and characters. In this case, the story was by James Clavell. Tia Carrere was early in her career, making an appearance here as a concubine named Venus Poon.

Technical

For being 20 years old, the film was obviously in excellent shape. I didn't see any evidence of color shift, scratches, or dust. It's mono, but that is not a problem, because you will be focused on the storytelling.

It is presented in widescreen, so I don't know how it was shown in 1988, when we didn't have widescreen TVs. It appears to be a European production, so it may have been cropped to 4:3 for American TV audiences.

Extras

None.