Network has released the 1960 BBC series Maigret on DVD and Blu-ray for the first time. I've watched the first two discs so far, that's eight 50 min episodes, and I've been enjoying them quite a bit. Rupert Davies stars as Maigret and there's a good cast with a nice lot of guest stars. I'm liking Davies as Maigret and the production looks good. Some locations are filmed in Paris, interiors are filmed in the UK.
There was a pilot and 4 series of 13 episodes each, all but one are adaptions of a novel or a short story. The pilot is lost but all the episodes are available. They look fairly decent considering they were filmed off the TV monitor on transmission. Network has cleaned them up as best possible. They look better than many video releases of similar TV programs of the era. In addition they've added a Maigret story from the BBC's The Play Of The Month.
I don't think it's better than the Bruno Cremer series but it's easily as good as the Michael Gambon series. I'm still not much of a fan of the more recent Rowan Atkinson series.
From the Network site: Though Simenon's books have been adapted many times for film and television, Davies's celebrated, BAFTA-winning portrayal won the approval of Simenon himself, who stated: "At last, I have found the perfect Maigret!"
You can see The White Hat episode, from the 2nd series, with an introduction from Barry Forshaw, on the Network YouTube page. I'm a big Network fan, they have a great range of films and TV programs. I'm especially fond of their old film line, The British Film. There are over 500 hundred DVD in that set and some darn good movies to see. The Maigret set only has 14 DVDs or 11 Blu-rays. I got the DVD set since it was cheaper and I can turn the speed up a bit with VLC Player. I'm getting too old not to cut corners, time-wise, when I can. As usual with DVDs from the UK, beware that they are not playable on most US DVD players, you need an all region DVD player or you can used VLC Player on a PC with a DVD drive.
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