DVD OF THE WEEK: Far From the Madding Crowd

Adapted by Frederick Raphael from Thomas Hardy's fourth yet first commercially successful novel (1874), Schlesinger's lavishly sweeping epic arrives on DVD for the first time, extended by three minutes to include the film's Overture, Entr'Acte, and a PETA-unfriendly cockfighting scene that was cut from the original American release. In her third outing with Schlesinger after Billy Liar and Darling, a perhaps never-lovelier Julie Christie headlines as Bathsheba Everdene, a strong-willed country heiress who coyly underestimates her power over men after becoming the sunny nexus of an orbiting love-quadrangle. Over the course of three hours, the seasons seamlessly change under the spectacular (and impeccably lit) Panavision lensing of director-to-be Nicolas Roeg, Malcolm Cooke's poppy editing, Richard Macdonald's classy production design, and Richard Rodney Bennett's folksy score, all evoking the rural feel and pace of 19th century Dorset without the typically modernized tranquility of most Hollywood period epics.

As if representative of Victorian England's various classes or ways of life, Bathsheba's pursuers include scruffy, impoverished sheep farmer and "everyday sort of man" Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates), honorable but snobbish and downright obsessive landowner William Boldwood (Peter Finch, in a Best Actor-winning role as awarded by the National Board of Review), and shallow scalawag Sgt. Frank Troy (Terence Stamp), a rapacious but strangely charismatic soldier whose shining on-screen moment is a hillside demonstration of swordplay/foreplay in Bathsheba's gasping presence. Each of the Hardy boys (couldn't resist!) bend over backwards to profess their love, but our feisty heroine has them all under her thumb. She calls the shots while running her inherited farm by herself, and unlike Hardy's novel, the casually misogynistic remarks have been wiped from the screen adaptation. If the technical resplendence and fine acting aren't reason enough to seek out this classic, how about its progressive feminist perspective?

"There are two problems with John Schlesinger's Far From the Madding Crowd, and they flaw what might have been an excellent film. The first is the decision to expand the characters into stereotyped romantic lovers, instead of showing them as complex people trapped in an isolated society. The second is the decision to avoid the real significance of Bathsheba's behavior in order to produce a homogenized, vitamin-enriched product to lure busloads of eighth-grade classes."

So begins Roger Ebert's 1968 review of the film, which I'd heartily dispute, and though you've had four decades to see the film and 135 years to read the novel: SPOILERS ALERT! True, Hardy's novel had the benefit of third-person narration, and even a replaying of scenes from other character's viewpoints, but while Raphael's script must be tidier based on the medium's needs, it's unfair to call the three lovers oversimplified. They are indeed complex, which is why the humble farmer who proves truest to Bathsheba is shown to be a world-weary fatalist when it comes to always getting the short end of the stick. (After Gabriel's early marriage proposition is rebuked, then his dog sends all of his sheep over a cliff to leave him destitute, he sighs: "Thank god I'm not married.") Farmer Boldwood's neuroses are, in part, related to his place in society; his pompous nature comes only from his professional success, but it's overcompensation for deep insecurity and loneliness. As for the soldier Troy, who tries to obtain this woman just because it's in his predatory nature to take on new challenges, there's bona fide love there for Bathsheba, but only after he elopes with her.

Addressing Ebert's second point, there is actually deep and heartfelt consequence to Bathsheba's behavior. Her reckless ambivalence gets her husband killed, her worthy rebound imprisoned, and it's only then that she marries and makes wealthy the poor farmer with whom she's not actually in love. Some may read the film as having a happy ending (as if Hardy was capable of such!), but to my mind, the give-and-take dynamics are heartbreakingly complicated.

Posted by ahillis at January 27, 2009 6:35 PM