No real sex, no violence, no action and no slapstick comedy. In the absence of such investor-friendly levers, it is - as director Bierman (the man behind Vampire's Kiss) freely admits - no small wonder that having finally prised the rights to George's third novel from the guarded Orwell estate, it took a further decade to get the film off the ground. A painful insight, perhaps, into the author's own personal despair and professional frustration, reflected in this semi-autobiographical tale.
Trimmed from the novel's ranging, heavily-populated scope, Bierman's film focuses simply on his central romantic duet - and the strain exerted by Comstock's artistic pretensions - and becomes a sprightly and sweet-natured comedy, with warmth, wit and characters worth caring about. In Grant's highly-skilled hands, Comstock is a literate, pseudo-philosophy-spouting dervish, with a pragmatic Bonham Carter making the ideal foil.