At the end of the 18th century, Caleb Williams (Mick Ford) – a poor, stubborn, and honest young man – rises through the social ranks, but the powerful and shady rulers watch and raise a thousand persecutions against him, so his life is transformed into an erratic chase for the truth.
This four-part adaptation by Robin Chapman of a late eighteenth-century novel by William Godwin, which challenged the process of law and order, was made by Tyne Tees Television with international collaboration (which explains why British, German and French actors travelled to Italy to make a film about England).
Internationalism reached its peak in a scene in which Günther Halmer, a German actor playing English nobleman Ferdinand Falkland, taught an Italian girl to speak English.
The Italian girl was, of course, played by a French actress. Filming, as director Herbert Wise explained, was “an exercise in patience.”
Fourteen weeks of shooting in Italy was followed by ten weeks in Hertfordshire.
Caleb Williams
Mick Ford Ferdinand Falkland
Günther Maria Halmer Jane Alcott
Chrissie Cotterill Valentine Forester
Jacques Maury Grimes
Arthur Brauss Dyer
Colin Jeavons Jesse
Paul Kember Sir Charles Thornton
Stanley Lloyd Harris
Bill Stewart Cox
Edward Peel Tyrell
Stephen Rea George Williams
Franz Rudnick Jenkins
Tony Haygarth Caleb’s Mother
Polly Hemingway
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This four-part adaptation by Robin Chapman of a late eighteenth-century novel by William Godwin, which challenged the process of law and order, was made by Tyne Tees Television with international collaboration (which explains why British, German and French actors travelled to Italy to make a film about England).
