FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD 1967

Beyond the obvious need to lure the American public away from their TV sets with size and spectacle impossible to match on the small screen, I’m not sure I've ever been totally clear on the thought process behind the '60s epic. I can understand when the subject’s a heroic historical figure (Lawrence of Arabia), or the backdrop is something as broad in scope as the Russian Revolution (Doctor Zhivago); but when the roadshow treatment (widescreen, two-plus-hours running time, reserved seats, intermission) is imposed upon relatively intimate stories of love, relationships, and the flaws of character that lead to tragedy (Ryan’s Daughter), I can’t help but feel that the outsized visual scale of the epic can sometimes work to undermine the effectiveness of the human drama. Such is what I find to be the case with John Schlesinger’s otherwise superior adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd.

Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdine

Alan Bates as Gabriel Oak 

Terence Stamp as Sergeant Frank Troy

Peter Finch as William Boldwood

In earlier posts, I've expressed my weakness for visual ostentation and how readily I’m able to overlook a film’s shortcomings when its deficiencies are mitigated by a certain stylistic panache. However, the impressive cast John Schlesinger assembled for Far From the Madding Crowd is so fascinating in their own right (Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp) that all the pomp and spectacle of the production values surrounding them makes a perfect case against the need to gild the lily.

Far from the Madding Crowd is an outsized film of subtle emotions that might have benefited greatly from the kind of intimate style employed by Ken Russell for his adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's  Women in Love.

MGM’s handing over the reins of a $4 million adaptation of a Thomas Hardy classic to the creative team behind the modestly-funded, ultra-mod, youth-culture hit, Darling (1965), was either an inspired stroke of genius or a simple act of crass commercialism. Inspired, certainly, in conjecturing that the very contemporary talents of producer Joseph Janni, director John Schlesinger, screenwriter Frederic Raphael, and actress Julie Christie (with the added assist of her Fahrenheit 451 cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg) could bring to this Victorian-era period piece the same verve and freshness they brought to their cynical evisceration of swinging London. Crassly commercial, undeniably, in a studio attempting to hit boxoffice paydirt merely by reassembling the hot-property talents of a current success, heedless of their suitability to the material at hand.

While I tend to think MGM was thinking with their pocketbooks more than their heads (Hollywood at the time was literally throwing open its doors to any and everyone who displayed the slightest trace of knowing what young audiences were looking for), I have to also admit that in many ways, Thomas Hardy’s take on Wessex countryside life in 1874 and Schlesinger’s view of 1965 London are a better fit than first glance would reveal.

Bathsheba finds herself the focus of the amorous attentions of three men

As embodied by Julie Christie, Far From the Madding Crowd’s Bathsheba Everdine is easily the spiritual cousin of Darling’s Diana Scott. While lacking Diana’s heartlessness, Bathsheba, like Diana, is of an individualistic, determined, and headstrong nature, tempered by the foibles of pride, vanity, and a kind of reckless self-enchantment with her own powers of allure. Nowhere near as passive as Hardy’s most popular heroine, the unfortunate Tess of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Bathsheba is a non-heroic heroine of unfailingly human-sized passions and idiosyncrasies. Conflictingly led by her heart, her indomitability, and a barely-masked need to have her beauty regarded by others—for no reason beyond the immature, yet very human desire to be reassured of their worth from time to time—Bathsheba is less the traditional romantic heroine ruled by her passions than a kind of rural Circe, bewitching and dooming the hapless men who cross her path.

Self Enchanted
A landowner, a businesswoman, and an independent spirit 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’m not one to demand that a film adaptation of a book hew slavishly to the written word. Of course, I love it when a film made from a favorite novel is translated to the screen in terms compliant to the way I envisioned it (Goodbye, Columbus), but I’m just as happy if a filmmaker deviates from the text if they are able to unearth something new, something wholly cinematic that captures the book’s essence, if not its exact plot (Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining). I only got around to reading Far From the Madding Crowd last year, some 34 years after I saw the film version, and beyond the then-controversial casting of the blond Christie in the role of the fiery brunette Bathsheba, I found Schlesinger’s film to be surprisingly faithful to the book.

A highlight of both the book and the film is the "swordplay" seduction scene

Perhaps too faithful, as the self-deprecating director indicated to biographer William J. Mann in the biographical memoir, The Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger. In addressing claims that the film was far too long and atypically slow in pacing, Schlesinger lamented: “We didn't take enough liberty with the film because we were too worried about taking liberties with a classic.”  And indeed the film displays the kind of reverence to text that makes Far From the Madding Crowd the kind of film perfect for high-school literature classes, but for me, the movie is more atmospherically leisurely than slow. I love the time Schlesinger gives over to giving us colorful views of country farm life and the romantic quadrangle at the heart of the film (pentagonal if one includes the tragic Fanny Robin, the farm girl with just about as much luck as the traditional heroine of Victorian literature).

Prunella Ransome portrays Fanny Robin, a young servant girl in love with the dashing Sergeant Troy (Stamp). Were this an epic musical taking place in 19-century France, hers would be the Anne Hathaway role.

I fell in fell in love with Far From the Madding Crowd chiefly because of Julie Christie (surprise!) but also because it is refreshing to see a sweeping epic film of this type with a strong woman at its center. A woman whose agency and choices not only propel the events of the story, but whose destiny is shaped by her desires (what she does and doesn't want), not merely by the vagaries of fate.

As far as I'm concerned, the film has a tough time recovering from a huge loss of credibility when Julie Christie rebuffs the matrimonial advances of that absolutely gorgeous slab of hirsute hunk, Alan Bates. Seriously, what was she thinking?

PERFORMANCES

I’m afraid if I log one more post in which I wax rhapsodic on the wonders of Julie Christie, my partner is going in search of professional help (for either me or himself), so I’ll make this brief. In Bathsheba Everdine, Christie is cast as yet another shallow petulant—a character of the sort she virtually trademarked in the '60s with her roles in Darling, Fahrenheit 451 (the Montag’s wife half of her dual role, anyway), and Petulia. Christie’s artistry and gift in being able to convey the emotional depth behind the superficial has been, I think, the obvious intelligence that has always been an inseverable part of her beauty and appeal. It takes a lot of brains to play thoughtless.

Mad Love

As good as Christie is (and for me, her star quality alone galvanizes this monolithic movie) the top acting honors go to Peter Finch who gives the screen one of the most searing portraits of tortured obsession since James Mason in Lolita. One of my favorite scenes is a silent one where the camera is trained on Finch’s face as Christie’s character rides by in a wagon. In his eyes alone you can see a wellspring of hope rise and fall in a matter of seconds. It really takes something to upstage Julie Christie, and she is very good here. But Peter Finch really won me over by giving the film's most realized and moving performance.

Scenes depicting English country life are beautifully rendered

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The production values of Far From the Madding Crowd are first rate. The time and place is richly evoked in lavish costumes, painstaking period detail, and vivid depictions of rural life. Still, while the large-format Panavision does well when it comes to dramatically capturing the tempestuous forces of nature which underscore the impassioned carryings-on of Hardy’s characters, the sheer size of Far From the Madding Crowd keeps me at a slight emotional remove. Nicolas Roeg’s ofttimes astonishingly beautiful camerawork strives rather valiantly to imbue the picture-postcard compositions with as much humanity and sensitivity as possible. The story is so engaging and the performances so good that one longs to be brought closer, but too often the film leaves us feeling as if we are looking at these lives through the wide-lens end of a pair of binoculars.

Cinematographer, later-turned-director Nicolas Roeg was the unofficial caretaker of the Julie Christie "look" early in her career. He also photographed her to breathtaking effect for Fahrenheit 451, Petulia, and in 1973 he directed her in Don't Look Now

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Far From the Madding Crowd did not do too well at the boxoffice in 1968. Critics complained of everything from the central miscasting of Christie to the pacing, the relative inaction, and a screenplay that fails to bring its central character to life. Another factor, at least in part, is that the film was promoted as a grand romance, when the real love story begins about 60 seconds before this 168-minute movie ends. In between, it's largely a roundelay of unrequited passions and thwarted affections.  To its detriment, in hoping to be the next epic romance in the Doctor Zhivago vein, Far From the Madding Crowd wound up being primarily a drama about people who are either in love with the right people at the wrong time, or the wrong people at the right time.

The Valentine which sets the tragic drama in motion 

Far From the Madding Crowd is a movie I like to revisit because in it I find a poignant meditation on love. The three men seeking the hand of Bathsheba offer her three distinct types of love: passionate and sensual; a near-paternal adoration; and finally, the calm, even-tempered love of respect and friendship. Which is truer? Which is preferable? The film never answers, but there is much to read into the film’s final scene. Look at it carefully, there’s a lot going on. Look at the expressions on the faces, the placement of the characters in a kind of domestic tableau, take note of the weather, the significance of the color red, the recurring clock and timepiece motifs, the framing of the final shot…then draw your own conclusions. Like the ambiguously happy ending of  Mike Nichols' The Graduate, everyone seems to come away from Far From The Madding Crowd with a different impression of what the ending signifies.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013