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Originally Posted by kwoldtimer
Whiteoaks of Jalna - please discuss.
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Wow, you're dating yourself, I remember it as it was meant to be a big deal on CBC. I didn't watch it because I was too young for it but Jalna as you see below was a famous series of novels. To win the 10 grand cash prize back in those days would have been a major bonanza. Of those who acted in the series Blair Brown, Antoinette Bower and Don Scardino went on to have pretty good careers on the bigger stage.
Jalna, first published in 1927, won the Atlantic Monthly Press's first $10,000 Atlantic Prize Novel award. De la Roche went on to write about the Whiteoak family for the next 30 years, establishing a place for herself in popular Canadian literature. The Jalna series has been translated into many languages and was adapted for stage, radio, and television. John Cromwell directed a 1935 film adaptation, Jalna. In 1972, it was filmed for television as The Whiteoaks of Jalna.
The Whiteoaks Of Jalna Sun 9:00-10:00 p.m., 23 Jan-30 Apr 1972 Sat 8:30-9:30 p.m., 27 Apr-17 Aug 1974 (R)
Clearly the success of the BBC's The Forsyte Saga inspired the CBC to embark on this large-scale production of Mazo de la Roche's family chronicle, which traced the Whiteoaks over a century to the early 1950s.
Both series used sources that trod the line between quality literature and potboilers, and both television series veered between serious drama and soap opera.
Thirteen hour-long episodes, at a cost of two million dollars, made this the CBC's most expensive production to that date. A risky venture, it also represented the network's desire to profit from international sales. (And, in fact, the series was sold to Thames Television in the U.K., to French television and to other foreign markets.) At home, however, Jalna was praised for the production values in which the CBC invested, but heavily criticized for its flatness and predictability. The scripts, by Grahame Woods, Claude Harz, and chief writer Timothy Findley, brought the story up to date rather than keeping them at the distance of the midcentury and before, and employed a flashback structure that switched between present and past to outline the saga of Renny Whiteoak, played by Paul Harding, and the two Adelines, the family matriarch and the grandmother after whom she was named, both characters played by Kate Reid.
The cast included Amelia Hall as Meg, Blair Brown as Pheasan Vaughan, John Friesen as Piers Whiteoak, James Hardle as Eden, Antoinette Bower as Roma Fitzsturgis, Sean Mulcahy as Maitland Fitzsturgis, Paul Bradley as Wright, Linda Goranson as Victoria, Paul Craig as Philip II, Toby Tarnow as Ruth, Gary McKeehan as Christian, Kenneth Dight as Charlesworth, Charles Palmer as Lomax, David Hughes as Maurice Vaughan, David Schurman as Philip I, Maureen O'Brien as Alayne, Don Scardino as Ernest, Don McGill as Uncle Nicholas, Josephine Barrington as Aunt Augusta, Vincent Dale as Young Finch, and Tom Lewis as Young Eden.