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f i l m Spotlight June 1998 Far From the Madding Crowd British Film Institute Top 100 list: No. 79: "Beautifully shot film version of Thomas Hardy's much-loved (and much-studied) novel about Bathsheba Everdene (the excellent Julie Christie) and her three suitors - wonderfully played by Peter Finch (as the wealthy landowner), Alan Bates (as the lowly but honest farmer) and Terence Stamp (as the dashing officer). This is thoroughly enjoyable, classic cinema, packed full of incident, intelligently directed by Schlesinger, who displays his ability to get the best out of his actors." An overview I'm not going to attempt to compare the 1967 Far from the Madding Crowd with the 1998 version aired on PBS, but rather to remind you of the splendid and classic film made 20 years ago. Those of us lucky enough to be able to see Schlesinger and Roeg's film on laser disk as it was shot, in wide screen, know that it is beautifully framed, supported by an evocative score by Richard Rodney Bennett, and peopled with a cast of local extras who provide a real feeling for the Dorset faces and voices that were Hardy's milieu. The key scenes are compelling and fresh. The story unrolls with what seems to me just the right pace: you settle in to enjoy it, and unlike many later Hardy stories, you are rewarded with a happy ending. John Leonard on the film "You may not remember the last attempt to turn Thomas Hardy's novel Far from the Madding Crowd into a movie. In 1967, John Schlesinger [at right, dressed as an extra for the wedding scene] directed Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp in an adaptation by Frederic Raphael. The cinematographer was Nicolas Roeg, than whom Christie has no more passionate admirer except maybe me. That such a cast and crew could make a film nobody wanted to see is still a mystery to Leonard Maltin. The problem, as Pauline Kael among several others would point out, was that Hardy took a long while, including a marriage and a murder, to get to the final clinch. And John Schlesinger was far too sophisticated to resort to the usual Hollywood shorthand of dissolves and/or montages to signal the passing of collapsed time. So the melodramatic passions, the obsessions and the compulsions, seemed to arrive by ambush, like a sucker punch. Besides which, some of us found it impossible to imagine Julie Christie farming sheep. -- New York, 11.v.98. Alan Bates on his role "...What's good about the film -- tremendous, in fact -- is the atmosphere, the period, the whole sense of that farm at work, and the distance and the elements of nature -- all these things. I think perhaps that, at some point, something went away from the four central characters in terms of their relationship with each other. They seemed to stand in four corners too much, and the pressure of them upon each other wasn't strong enough or full enough. Because that's really what it's about -- the very deep-seated passions between those four people. ... "By the way, I didn't want to play my part in Far From the Madding Crowd, simply because I felt it would come as no surprise to anybody that I could do it, you know. It called on certain qualities that I'd used before. And I think it's necessary to surprise people -- and to surprise myself. Perhaps I'm trying to prove something to myself. I suppose I am. Why not? I would much rather have played Troy. Anyway, I didn't. But I mean, Gabriel Oak is a great part, and he's quite difficult because he's so good. Wise and patient people are very difficult to act." -- interviewed by Gordon Gow for Films and Filming, June 1971. Here is an interview with Alan just as the filming was ending. The Novel and the Film Thomas Hardy spent almost all of his life (1840-1928) in Dorset, one of the remotest and most rustic parts of England. Throughout his formative years it was a region untouched by modernity, so that the England he knew intimately was closer in custom and tradition to the 17th and 18th centuries than to his own era. The pervasive influence of this earlier age, in a place where time had stood still, imbued Hardy with a deep sense of the continuity of life as part of nature. This profound awareness enabled him to observe the world with a quiet detachment unequaled in any other contemporary English writer. Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) was the first of Hardy's great novels. It has more of the splendor and freshness of life than its more somber successors. Despair had not yet overwhelmed him. the title is drawn from Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learned to stray; Along the cool sequestered vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. It is a narrow world. Each village is an entity and the market town, ten miles away, was visited only on special occasions, while a city like Bath, fifty miles away, was as remote as Baghdad. The social order was static. Farmers had always been farmers and expected always to remain farmers. The novel and the film point out the virtue in the old social order. These humble lives had a security unknown to us today. Here in Wessex, as Hardy called this section of England. we see Western man for the last time as an integral part of nature. There are some wonderful scenes in the film -- the lambing, the fire, the struggle to save the barley ricks, the sheep washing and shearing -- all bathed and glorified in the light of poetic recollection. The shearing supper, with Bathsheba, the heroine, singing to the accompaniment of Gabriel's flute, is a pastoral moment never to be forgotten, a moment full of sunny mirth and quiet beauty touched with melancholy. Perhaps the happiest piece of casting in the movie is that of the main character -- nature. And since her role cannot be "played" but can only be, the director took his human cast to the great unhuman protagonist and shot his scenes on the very spot in which Hardy had conceived of them as taking place. It would be difficult to find a more beautiful place than these great hills rising above the sea and enfolding in their lower slopes and valleys the old graystone villages. The landscape is lovely, but it is also brooding and slightly sinister. Gabriel's sheep are killed because they act like sheep. The young dog that drives them to their death does so because he acts like a young dog. And Gabriel endures his loss because he must, as a tree endures a stroke of lightning. Hardy's search for the meaning of life is portrayed on the screen with skill and understanding. The course of each life is determined either by chance or an irrational impulse. In Gabriel's case it was the loss of his sheep and his arrival at Bathsheba's farm just in time to help put out the fire. In Bathsheba's, it was the encounter with Troy in the dark and, later, Joseph Poorgrass's dawdling at the inn so that Fanny Robin's coffin had to be kept at the farmhouse overnight. In Boldwood's, it was Bathsheba's reckless sending of the valentine. In Troy's, it was Fanny's misunderstanding of where they were to meet for the wedding. Neither as a novel nor as a film is this a routine boy-meets-girl love story. Love, indeed, shapes the plot, but here it works with a destructive fury that leaves tragedy in its wake. The story is a vivid confirmation of Hardy's belief that some force of which we know nothing is using us for some end which we cannot understand. Oak, the gentle shepherd who is forced by a trick of fate to be a servant to the woman he loves, is almost the only one of Hardy's heroes who successfully dominates one of his emotional, capricious, dangerous heroines. -- Excerpts from an essay by Bergen Evans, from the MGM book written for the film's premiere. Of Course! It's ... The poster for the Polish release of Far from the Madding Crowd. Those arms are Julie Christie; from the red coat, one assumes that she's embracing Terence Stamp.

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