House of Cards

1990

Seasons & Episodes

  • 1
  • 0
8.5| 0h30m| en| More Info
Released: 18 November 1990 Ended
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Country: United Kingdom
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0082dzs
Synopsis

Frustrated at a new moderate Conservative government and deprived of a promotion to a senior position, chief whip Francis Urquhart prepares a meticulous plot to bring down the Prime Minister then to take his place.

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Reviews

Alicia I love this movie so much
MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting
Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.
Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
grantss Francis Urquhart is a senior member of the British Government. He expects a promotion when the new Prime Minister, Henry Collingridge, takes office and is bitterly disappointed when this does not take place. He sets in motion a plan to usurp Collingridge and become Prime Minister. Part of his plan involves manipulating a junior political reporter, Mattie Storin, in order to gain more favourable press coverage than Collingridge. This works well initially but then Storin starts digging into recent political events.Superb political drama. Very intriguing and highly plausible with some very sharp dialogue. The political machinations are quite believable. Quite Shakespearean in its wheels-within-wheels, examinations of the worst parts of human nature and outcome. Great performance by Ian Richardson as Urquhart. He embodies all that is to be loathed, and yet grudgingly admired, about politics, and does so with a cunning charm and spot-on delivery. Good support by Susannah Harker as Mattie Storin.I much preferred this, the original House of Cards, to the far more famous recent US version. The US version seemed all about Machiavellian machinations just for Machiavellian machinations' sake. There was no point to many of the intrigues and sub-plots, other to fill up space. This, the UK version, was much more focussed, was far less gratuitous in its scheming and knew when to stop.
chaos-rampant The story is riveting. Chief Whip of the Conservative Party gets the short stick in the new government (it is the first elections after a decode of Thatcher), and so resolves to destroy his Prime Minister and elect himself in the position. The acting is top notch. Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart whips up a frenzy of Shakespearian machination: Iago in the scenes where he advises the PM, Macbeth at home with his conspiring wife, Richard III in the halls and secret meetings.It is overall a joy to watch.So, I would recommend it without reservation to anyone interested in a great piece of narrative. The satire is sharp, even though the plot is sometimes too convenient to really buy. But I have to qualify this with a personal observation; I am interested, above all, in films that set aside contemplative space for the viewer. Film is the ideal medium, because the camera can sketch that empty space in the gaps of story, whereas theatre has to rely on the spoken word to sculpt images, at least the British tradition inherited from Shakespeare. And that is what we have here, great theatre that just happened to be filmed.Imagine this: the same story (as a primary text, it is superb), but the narrator is truly untrustworthy and fabricates Nabokov-like parts or all of the environment. In the film, Urquhart as the narrator manipulates everything except our gaze.So we go from one malicious ploy to the next, Urquhart confides in the camera in the first person, winks, hums, invents, seduces, a wry devil, but none of it is abstract enough to allow us to lose control of reality and co-conspire in the fabrication of missing bits.In this mode, we (the viewer) would be Urquhart's nemesis in the hunt for power over the story, a role which in the film is set aside for the young journalist—Urquhart's Lolita Haze. My guess is the writer wanted to write this in the Nabokov vein, but missed the main stratagem.Richardson 'gets' it, having played Lolita on the stage as apparently Nabokov himself.I salivate at the opportunities. In the meantime, you will see this and write one of the best movies ever about political intrigue.
dimplet Here we go again.If you haven't already seen this brilliant series, now's the time. If you have, now's the time to watch it again. Do I have to spell it out to you Brits? Of course, readers of News of the World probably don't watch such fancy fare, so I suppose I do, except there isn't an News of the World, anymore.In Britain, it's hard to tell whether art is imitating life, or life is imitating art, particularly when it comes to journalism, and that's certainly the case with House of Cards. Instead of using an old- fashioned microcassette tape recorder, they hacked directly into cellphones. I had the misfortune to work with a British editor once, and he had absolutely no compunction about making things up out of thin air to liven up my accurate, factual story. He also liked to dress up as a woman and have his picture taken.But in all fairness, Rupert Murdoch is not a British citizen, though that's no excuse for News of the World being the formerly best selling paper in the country. Murdoch is an Australian, though he took on American citizenship for business reasons. And he's been messing with our media world, too.What I want to know is whether Rebekah Brooks viewed Mattie Storin as a role model in her ruthless quest for power, or whether David Cameron even saw that there was anything wrong with the actions of Francis Urquhart?Speak up! I can't hear you.
moviemaster It takes a lot to make Rove and bush seem like complete amateurs at the political game of deception, but Francis does just that. He is more Machiavellian than hopefully any man could be... and yet the series rings with such truth. Seekers of power will let nothing get in their way...what's a little murder or two or three. There are three parts to this work, filmed from 1990, 1994 and 1995. They were presented on BBC and PBS then. All three are brilliant not only for the writing, intrigue and perceptive look at human nature, but also for Ian Richardson's superb acting. I usually don't like it when the actor addresses the camera. But in Richardson's case, he easily convinces me that he is addressing me, directly, not the camera. It's a true gift. And his performance, with facial expressions which are so precise, so accurate, so revealing... is a great joy to watch. He is incomparable. If I were running an acting school, I would get this series, 10 hours long in toto, and have my classes watch them over and over. There is no better teacher than a great Shakesperean actor. I rarely give a "10." This work deserves every bit of it.

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