The Bell Jar

Hardly better than the 80s vhs tape, but if you saw the film on late-night HBO as a hypersensitive young man around 1980, it is burned into your synapses for life, as you Identified with our heroine's trials to an intense degree. Yes, Criterion should resurrect it. I admit it is a rather crude drama, but I "fell in love with the actress / she was playin' a part that I could understand," to quote Neil Young. So if you're like me in any respect, you'll put up with the subpar quality just for the memory of your fragile youth. Devastating. Plus a great Janis Ian theme song at the close.

Buyer beware, this is not a professionally manufactured DVD. It's a bootleg disc of what looks to be a copy made from an old VHS tape or worse, a television broadcast. There are tracking lines across the bottom of the screen (remember those?) and the image quality is so bad, there are whole scenes that are simply a blur of low resolution nothingness.This disc is being sold for $20+ by Amazon. I'm not quite sure from where they are getting their stock but this is not the usual quality of product Amazon sells and I made sure to speak to someone in customer service at Amazon about initiating a quality check on this bootleg-seeming disc. Amazon customer service is excellent, by the way.About the actual movie, this is a remarkable film based on Sylvia Plath's, The Bell Jar, which I believe came out in the early 1970s and gives a fictionalized account of her own experience (as Esther Greenwood) living at the Barbizon Hotel (aka The Amazon Hotel in the book) in New York City while working for "Ladies' Day" Magazine (Mademoiselle). Plath herself had some mental issues at that time in her life but the book is fictionalized for drama. If you're interested to learn more about Sylvia Plath and her time in New York during that fateful summer, read: Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 by Elizabeth Winder which just came out this year. It's excellent and insightful.Back to the DVD. I would really like to see The Bell Jar reissued in a professional, digitally remastered format and offered for sale on Amazon. I can't imagine why this is not already available for purchase.By all means DO NOT BUY this disc.

This is a movie about a woman coming into adulthood and the challenges facing a woman entering into adulthood. She goes through many situations and she ends up in a mental institution because she is not able to live on her own and does not know how to live her life. At the end of the movie she is finally freed from her burdens when she finds a friend hanging from a tree and one of the doctors find her in the field and bring her back to the hospital grounds and she smiles as she goes back.

Marilyn Hassett portrayed Esther with depth & turned out a winning performance as a poetess who gradually descends on the brink of sanity. Julie Harris as her mom & Anne Jackson as her shrink gave magnificent performances as well. Not to mention, Donna Mitchell, as Joan, Esther's best friend. The quality of the DVD may not have been excellent, but it wasn't too grainy at all & very watchable.

The movie has poor picture quality and the dvd has many scratches on it.

The quality of this movie is so poor that I won't be showing it as a companion film to the novel. I am significantly disappointed that I wasted $15 on this DVD. It appears to have been copied from a VHS, and is the most poorly copied version I have ever watched.

This movie is so bad it's completely watchable. Hardly much to compare it to the novel, which is just right in all its parts, but it goes to show how film adaptations of brilliant novels is a bad idea.

Another reviewer has also said it, the video quality is truly bad, and makes the DVD nearly unwatchable. If you have not seen the film before, you will miss a great deal simply because of the poor video, the story will be very hard to follow.

This is one of the worst film adaptations of a novel ever. Sylvia Plath must have been spinning in her grave. At first I was bemused, then amused and finally I became angry that such a piece of rubbish was ever made. Take my advice and don't buy this item. Fingers crossed that the film planned for next year (2012) will do justice to Plath's writing.

Very dark tale