The Library Geek

DVD art cover

Master of the Game

Summary

Master of the Game was originally aired in 1984 as a mini-series based on the novel of Sidney Sheldon. It is a story spanning four generations of the McGregor (later on Blackwell) family’s rise to great wealth and power and the price they paid to get there.

The DVD divides the mini-series into four parts.

The series opens with the family and friends of Kate Blackwell celebrating her birthday and Kate becoming nostalgic and recollecting how her family and the company it is famous for a got started.  The first part is about young Jamie McGregor arriving in South Africa prospecting for diamonds in the hopes of striking it rich and how his naivete and eagerness was exploited by Salomon Van der Merwe. Jamie was swindled of his find, ambushed, and left for dead by Van der Merwe’s goons. However, Banda, one of the goons would nurse him back to health so he can exact revenge on Van der Merwe for both of them. Jamie and Banda would then steal diamonds and the former would use it to build a multinational corporation called Kruger-Brent. The second part continues  the story with Kate Blackwell, the daughter of Jamie, becoming the head of Kruger-Brent and becoming the consummate manipulator and negotiator focusing her life and energies on the company to the detriment of her relationships with the people around her. The third part features Kate’s son, Tony, and how his life and dreams were shattered by Kate’s scheming and the last part will be on the twin daughters of Tony, Alexandra and Eve, and how one of them, occupied by jealousy and hatred and the same lust for power and scheming mind as their great grandfather and grandmother, tries to engineer her twin sister’s death to be the ultimate (ugh) “master of the game.” The series ends the morning after the celebration with Kate plotting to get her great grandson to takeover the family company.

Review

I remember seeing this series during its original run and liking it a lot. I also read the novel by Sidney Sheldon where this series was based on and the adaptation was spot on in terms of how they presented the story and its characters. It was not altered like what they did with Rage of Angels when they changed the character from being the President of the US to being the Vice President. Of course, don’t expect a scenes by scene reproduction of the book. That rarely happens anyway when a novel is adapted into film. What you will get though is a series that faithfully captured the essence of Sidney Sheldon’s novel about family, greed, ambition, power, and money. It took some time for CBS to issue this on DVD, but it was worth watching it again. Master of the Game is great storytelling, the acting good to great. The series , except for a few scenes on Part 1 that are overly long are paced well,  and does not come off as dated, or looking like an 80′s TV show. Dyan Cannon played both the young and old Kate Blackwell and I think I liked her more in her role as the old Kate. She was convincing as Kate, disarming people around her with her charm as she schemes to get them follow her wishes without them knowing it. But the revelation in terms of acting was Liane Langland who played the twins Alexandra and Eve as she was able to give both characters a personality different from the other.

With regards to the DVD itself, there are no extras or special features, and the quality is what you will expect if you were watching a standard television broadcast. The first 10 to 20 minutes of Part 2 comes off as poorly edited with scenes and even dialogue jumping from one to the other. The scenes were on Kate as a little girl, her childhood crush on David Blackwell, being sent to a boarding school, and her first meeting with Banda. At first, I thought that I was watching a trailer of what the next episode is about, but when I checked the chapter play I realized that was how it was edited. I do not remember it that way during its original broadcast, but that was a long time ago. My guess is that parts of the original were damaged that they have to edit the scenes out and salvage what they can. But even with that, you will be able to pick up the gist of those scenes . Aside from that some scenes also displayed some graininess,  but not to the point that it will turn you off into watching or enjoying the series.  Overall, I recommend this series to those who watched the original run and fans of Sidney Sheldon’s works, or folks who want some good drama solid drama.