Noble House

Noble House is an eight-hour Classic TV Miniseries produced and broadcast in 1988 by NBC. Based on the fantastic and richly detailed novel of the same name by James Clavell, it features a large cast headlined by Pierce Brosnan, who portrays business tycoon Ian Dunross.

This was NBC's second Classic TV Miniseries adaptation of a Clavell novel, the first was 1980s Shogun. Both take place in the same fictional universe, Noble House even featuring connections to Shogun and yet another Clavell novel, Tai-Pan.

For this miniseries, the timeframe of the original novel was changed from the early 1960s to the 1980s.

Other actors include Denholm Elliott, Deborah Raffin, Tia Carrere, John Houseman, Julia Nickson-Soul, and John Rhys-Davies (who also appeared in Shogun.)

Noble House centers around big-business piracy in Hong Kong. The miniseries opens with Brosnan driving through the rain to meet Denholm Elliott, who plays the outgoing "tai-pan" in Hong Kong's oldest and leading trading firm: Struan & Company.

"Tai-pan," a Cantonese expression, means "supreme leader," and at Struan & Company the title has been passed down at least 150 years

Dunross' arch rival and enemy, Quillan Gornt (Rhys-Davles), is tai-pan of the second leading trading company. Not only does Gornt wants to destroy Dunross and take over Noble House, the two men have racing horses that compete against each other as well.

Meanwhile, two American tycoons (Raffin and Ben Masters) have come to Hong Kong to make a financial deal with Dunross.

But in Clavell's Hong Kong there is no such thing as a single deal. Double-dealing and triple-crossing are more the style of the international wheeler-dealers here.

Diverse players here include bankers, government officials, police and a man called "Four Finger Wu" (Khigh Dhiegh), who runs an opium-smuggling syndicate from a junk boat in Aberdeen Harbor and has a mistress one-third his age named Venus Poon (Carrere).

The eight hours practically sizzle, thanks to Bercovici's articulate script (he also wrote the script for the Shogun miniseries).

Viewers a treated to a manipulated run on a bank, selling short on the stock market, the fixing of horse races, a kidnaping, seductions and murders. Running counterpoint are the burning and sinking of a floating restaurant and a catastrophic landslide.

Add to this a couple of juicy love stories, especially the one between Brosnan and Raffin (who brings a light comic element to her role as the tough wheeler-dealer), while everything is done in ravishing cars, speedboats, mansions and casinos.

But, the biggest and brightest star of the show is clearly Hong Kong, which is more like a video game than a city, filled with the exotica and intrigue that you used to find in old movies. Early in the show, a character who's just landed at the airport asks, "What's that smell?" His host answers, "That's the smell of money."

The $16-million-plus production included eight weeks of exteriors shot in Hong Kong and another eight for interiors in the De Laurentiis studio in Wilmington, N.C.

Highly recommended.

Why do the DVD producers cut favorite scenes out of classic miniseries? This has been a family favorite since it first aired on television, and we have been waiting to purchase it on DVD for years! We would gladly have paid more to have the COMPLETE miniseries. Instead, the DVD producers decided to arbitrarily cut several favorite scenes out of the 2 disc set. The horse race, the trip to China to visit his friend in the China bank... these and several others are gone. I am torn between wanting to return the DVD in protest and promising the production company I will buy it again and pay more if they would only release the original, perfectly wonderful, miniseries. What I won't be doing is buying additional copies of this DVD for friends and family who have long wanted to see it again. They don't deserve such disappointment.

Noble House is an outstanding story about big business, Hong Kong
and politics laced with intrigue and romance.
Ian Dunross, played by Pierce Brosnan, is the powerful leader of the history laden Noble House. His performance is nothing less than spectacular as it weaves through one exciting plot after another.
This story is so riveting that you'll watch it again and again.
I enjoy it so much that my VHS copy is no longer any good. I sincerely hope it is reprduced on DVD very soon.

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