The Belle of Amherst
The brilliant Julie Harris repeats her Tony Award winning role as the eccentric nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson.  Against a handsome set depicting Dickinson's Amherst, Massachusetts home, Harris is in constant motion recollecting the poet's past form her work, her diaries and letters and encountering the significant people in her life - friends, relative and acquaintances.  The play, here for the first time on DVD, shrewdly balances the agony of the secluded poet as she tells about her family and the bright moments when Dickinson can see the joy in life. Julie Harris' Emily Dickinson is "so perfect here that the film assumes an authenticity and poignancy unmatched in similar films and the poetry emerges as fresh and contemporary" (LIBRARY JOURNAL).  THE BELLE OF AMHERST has been mastered from the only source material available, drawn from the primitive analog video in which it was originally photographed. As a result, this DVD does show artifacts from the digitization process which are most prominent through the film's final 30 minutes.