Series Review: Noble House
Pierce Brosnan in NBC’s adaptation of James Clavell’s Hong Kong novel
Author James Clavell’s novel about Asian business melodrama, Noble House, which takes place in Hong Kong before the impending 1997 Communist China takeover, dramatizes the power of mergers and acquisitions. NBC adapted the book for television in a limited series which aired for a few days in February 1988. It’s one story in Clavell’s series of historical fiction (i.e., Shogun, Tai-Pan) about the intersection of European and Asian cultures.
Recently, I watched for the leading performance by Pierce Brosnan—an underrated actor who’s played everyone from Ian Fleming’s James Bond to Sally Field’s suitor in Mrs. Doubtfire—seeing skyscrapers on the Southeast Asian peninsula and getting a glimpse of pre-Communist Hong Kong in its glory. Brosnan’s super serious with his blue eyes as Tai-Pan.
Immersing in Hong Kong’s unique culture, including feng shui and various British, Oriental and other influences, Noble House unfolds as an interesting if predictable story of a titanic businessman trying to protect his nobility, legacy and ability to create and make money.
Besides a romantic love affair and schemes, natural disasters and American, European and Asian conflicts, the plot revolves around free trade. Specifically, this four-part series depicts the story of a single deal to fundamentally alter the course of Hong Kong’s greatest and most revered business. Though Noble House is not an example of serious, high or great drama, it entertains if you like Brosnan, cities and capitalism.
Interestingly, if incidentally, it reflects the world when Americans and people in the West were on the brink of seriously contemplating—and overromanticizing—the convergence of East and West. This telefilm aired as China asserted its influence in a new, supposedly (and, admittedly, demonstrably) softened Communist system.
The theme, to the degree there’s meaning in Noble House, may be a kind of wishful thinking—or optimism if you prefer—about trading on the interests of China, Japan and America. As Pierce Brosnan’s capitalist Ian Dunross says in the fourth and final episode: “Perhaps it’ll be the other way around and Hong Kong will absorb China.”
