PERFORMANCE 1970

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

For as long as I can remember, I've been drawn to movies about the fluidity of identity. From the great grandmother of all identity crisis movies, Ingmar Berman’s Persona (1966), to mind-melding favorites that have intrigued and captured my imagination over the years: Secret Ceremony (1968), The Servant (1963), Images (1972), Obsession (1976), Single White Female (1992), 3 Women (1977), Vertigo (1958), Fedora (1978), Black Swan (2010)—the cinema of self-exploration has always held a weird fascination for me.

Perhaps it has to do with my childhood. After all, I did grow up during television's Golden Age of the polar-opposite-twin. That '60s pop-culture window when The Patty Duke Show (identical cousins!) spearheaded the trend for every sitcom coming down the pike to feature characters who are identical twins with yin/yang personalities: Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, That Girl, Gilligan’s Island, etc. Prolonged exposure to that kinda stuff can't help but mess with a kid's head.

Alas, the less fun but more persuasive theory is that I'm drawn to movies about fragmented personality because the most impressionable years of my adolescence hit at precisely the same time America was in the deep throes of an ideological identity crisis. Responding to the Vietnam War, social injustice, and a veritable laundry list of grievances leveled at standard cultural norms, the nation trained a mirror on itself and began the process of deconstructing years of conformist conditioning.
With consciousness-expansion and self-exploration the rallying cries of the counterculture, young people challenged society's demand for individuals to always be in performance; constantly donning masks and role-playing in support of hollow, outdated concepts of so-called normalcy. Few films have captured the generational ethos of the "put-ons" (traditionalists adopting false personas to conform) vs. the "drop-outs" (bohemians withdrawing from society and rejecting convention) with as much assurance and visual distinction as Performance.   

James Fox as Chas Devlin

Mick Jagger as Turner

Anita Pallenberg as Pherber

Michele Breton as Lucy

The hallucinatory brainchild of screenwriter Donald Cammell (Demon Seed) making his collaborative directing debut with cinematographer/co-director Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now), Performance is set in the waning days of the Swinging London era, circa 1968. Albeit, a shadowy, considerably seamier Londontown than one might associate with Twiggy or Austin Powers. (Performance was completed in 1968, but distributing studio Warner Bros. was so appalled by the results, they shelved it until 1970).

Dandyish Chas Devlin (James Fox) is an enforcer for genial protection racketeer Mr. Flowers (Johnny Shannon). Chas' inherently sadistic nature makes him a man happy in his work, but when his equally-inherent arrogance and temper lead to the death of a rival partner, he winds up running afoul of both his gangland employer and the police. Assuming the unwittingly self-aware persona of a professional juggler named Johnny Dean, Chas takes refuge as a roomer in a dilapidated Notting Hill townhouse owned and occupied by a retired, reclusive rock star named Turner (Mick Jagger), and his two bisexual bedmates: longtime paramour Pherber (a Delphic Anita Pallenberg) and boyish hanger-on Lucy (16-year-old Michele Breton).

Predating Father Merrin's portentous arrival in The Exorcist (1973), Chas'  appearance at 81 Powis Square signals his entrance into another world. In fact, when he enters Turner's house, we never see him go through the door. One minute he's outside the door speaking through the intercom, the next he's standing in the entryway; as though passed through another dimension or beamed aboard an alien spacecraft.

Two (dis)similar men, tenant and landlord, both in hiding of sorts, under the same roof. One violent and aggressive, ever looking into mirrors and (too) quick to assert that he knows exactly who he is. The other, a nowhere man, an erudite “male, female man” creatively adrift after being abandoned by what he calls his inner demon. The uncurious Chas, certain he has landed in a madhouse ("It's a right pisshole. Longhairs, beatniks, fee-love, foreigners...you name it!"), simply wants to lay low while awaiting a fake passport and passage to America (Turner: "Place to go, isn't it, for gangsters?").

But for Turner, Chas holds a strange fascination. Recognizing a brethren showman and fellow mask-wearer behind the fastidious swagger (Chas is the Joan Crawford of mobsters), Turner endeavors to get into the gangster's head to find out why the turn-on of violence has always been life's crowd-pleasing, repeat engagement headliner compared to the turn-on of drugs, sex, and rock & roll.

Convergence

A psychedelic head-trip whose themes of fragmented identity and malleable reality illuminate every frame, Performance gives the appearance of being a hallucinogenic enigma, but it's a film that knows precisely what it wants to say, its path and vision clear as crystal. From its dizzying opening montage, Performance establishes itself as a bombardment to the senses and an assault on reality.
Hitting the ground running, it volunteers nothing in the way of explanation or exposition as it sets about dismantling linear notions of personality and identity in a startling tapestry of images and ideas. And it does so at breakneck speed, fairly daring you to keep up.

Anthony Valentine as Joey Maddocks
Early drafts allude to a past sexual relationship as being the source of the
ambiguous acrimony between Chas the enforcer and Joey the bookie

Contrary to its reputation for being impenetrable and opaque, Performance's plot is really pretty straightforward in and of itself (slim, even); it's in the telling where things take a headlong turn into crazy. With duality as its defining thematic and visual motif, everything about the look and feel of Performance—from its fluid representation of time (past, present, and future intersect kaleidoscopically) to its recurring patterns of mirrors and twinning—is linked to the concept that everyone and everything has its shadow and light, yin and yang.

Peace & Love / Hate & Violence
The paradox of the '60s "All You Need Is Love" flower power hippie movement is that the '60s was also an extremely violent and socially turbulent decade. Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated three months before filming began on Performance. Here, a newspaper clipping referencing King's 1964 trip to Oslo, Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize has been posted on a headboard by one of Turner's previous tenants.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Performance is the Doublemint Gum of head movies. A double your pleasure, double your fun mind-fuck expedition to the axis points of male/female, sex/violence, queer/straight. Virtually everything in this film is the mirror image of something else; a reflection viewed through a fractured prism that turns in upon itself and back around again.
Performance’s most ingenious application of dualism is in having the film itself—paralleling the arc of its two lead characters—structured as two separate movies that ultimately converge into one.

The first film is a brutal gangster movie about a preening East End hoodlum. The second is something like a stoner’s homage to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd.; the recluse in this instance, a past-his-prime rock star (“He had three number ones, two number twos, and a number four!”) numbing himself with drugs and decadence. Their eventual convergence—a dive into the deep end of the magic realism pool—leads to the dreamscape collision of two separate worlds and the hallucinatory merging of two disparate men.

Memo from Turner

Making good on his desire to get into the head of his houseguest, the vampiric Turner assumes the dual role of mobster and rocker in Chas’ drug-fueled musical hallucination. A taunting ode to brutality, dominance, macho posturing, and their role in repressed queer desire. 

SHOOT

Chas and Ferber take aim. He with a gun, she with a movie camera.

"Who am I? Do you know who you are?"

Identity and image. The watcher and the watched. Throughout the film, characters suddenly appear to be looking directly at us, addressing us and challenging our presumptive certainty that we have the slightest idea who's who, what's what, or can discern reality from fantasy.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Though Performance was not successful in its initial release, it has since gained the reputation of being the film that defined an era. And in many ways, that’s true. While Hollywood depictions of the '60s and hippie culture invariably leaned towards the absurd (Skidoo -1968) or exploitative (Angel, Angel, Down We Go – 1969), Performance distinguishes itself through its matter-of-fact depiction of bohemian drop-out culture, casual drug use, and libertine sex. Further anchoring it to the era is its visual style, which is reflective of the underground and experimental films of the day.

The gender-fluidity that's now practically a prerequisite for pop music stardom was far from common back in the '60s. Even with the proliferation of long hair, gender representation in rock has always been assertively male and hetero. Jagger was among the first to mine the hip marketability of androgyny and bisexuality.

The life that Turner lives defines the epitome of the hippie ideal: no work; an independent income; a sprawling house overflowing with pillows, posters, and Moroccan accents; and nothing to do but spend the day screwing, getting high, listening to music, and reading Jorge Luis Borges.
But where Performance truly excels is in capturing the era's fascination with psychedelics and inner-exploration. The 1950s, with its emphasis on conformity and rigidly-defined gender roles, was the decade that professed to know all the answers. In direct contrast, the late-1960s was all about questions.

Dressed in a caricature costume of a gangster, Chas' self-identification with his work asserts brutality, aggression, and power as the provinces of maleness. Turner shakes up Chas' already wobbly self-certainty by proposing that when you change your drag, you change your perceptions. Identity-based labels like masculine, feminine, male, female, are but another form of discardable, reusable performance.    

PERFORMANCES

Actor James Fox is no stranger to identity crisis dramas. He first gained notoriety for The Servant (1963), which was another film about mind games and power plays carried out in a sexually cryptic arena. From the first time I ever saw him (1967’s Thoroughly Modern Millie), I’ve felt Fox radiated an appealingly ambiguous “Is he gay or just British” vibe that is put to good use in Performance. His finishing school take on an East End Cockney thug is as frightening as it is canny.

Johnny Shannon as gay crime boss Harry Flowers. Anthony Morton as gang member Dennis 

Making his film debut, Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger may have frustrated Warner Bros. stockholders by making his official entrance into the film at roughly the 45-minute mark, but it’s the kind of delayed unveiling that bestows gravitas and narrative heft on a character before they utter a sound. Playing a man of mystery, Jagger gets to let his rock star mystique do most of the talking, bringing both erotic danger and a sort of touching melancholy to his role. I’m not sure if he’s very good or very well-used, but his Turner is perfection.

As the Black Queen/The Great Tyrant in Barbarella, Anita Pallenberg almost stole that film from Jane Fonda. And she nearly does the same with Performance. Hers is a captivating, devilish performance.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Being that I was 12-years-old in 1970, Performance’s scandalous reputation and gender-bending ad campaign were sufficient reasons for my parents to forbid me to see it during its original release. I was in my 20s when I saw it for the first time in a Los Angeles revival house.

What impressed me about Performance then is what I contend to this day; it is one of the rare examples of a genuinely startling film. Not shocking in terms of explicitness, but audacious in the uniqueness of its personal vision and so very unlike anything I’ve ever seen. And I gotta say, seeing it now on Blu-ray with the much-needed assist of subtitles is like discovering the film anew.

Truth and illusion. Masculinity redefined. Identity reassigned.

BONUS MATERIAL

When Chas arrives at Turner's home, he notices on the stoop several bottles of milk, a box of mushrooms, and four Mars candy bars. This is a jokey reference to the notorious 1967 drug bust at the Redlands country estate of Rolling Stones' Keith Richards. The arrest made headlines (and later refuted) because, along with finding drugs, reports claim that when the police broke in, Jagger was seen eating a Mars bar out of the vagina of then-girlfriend Marianne Faithful.

Documenting Decadence and Debauchery

In the short film from 2016, actor James Fox and Performance producer Sandy Lieberson discuss photographer Cecil Beaton and his visit to the set in 1968. Watch it HERE.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2020

FAHRENHEIT 451 1966

Looking over my sizable collection of DVDs...amongst the dramas, comedies, musicals, thrillers, adventures, horror films, and even documentaries; I note there to be a conspicuous paucity of four distinct genres of film: war movies, sports films, westerns, and science fiction. I’ve really not a single war film (Doctor Zhivago coming closest); only one western - the original True Grit, unless you count Doris Day’s Calamity Jane; and sports weigh in exclusively with Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. My sole concession to the field of science fiction is François Truffaut’s flawed, but nonetheless splendid adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. One of the very few science fiction films I really enjoy, perhaps due to the fact that it was made by a man who had gone on record as not being particularly fond of science fiction films himself.

Julie Christie as Linda Montag

Oskar Werner as Guy Montag

Julie Christie as Clarisse McClellan

Cyril Cusack as The Captain

Anton Diffring as Fabian

Ray Bradbury’s ingenious novel about a future society where reading is forbidden, books are banned, and marauding herds of fascist “firemen” canvas the countryside in search of books to burn, is sci-fi light. Its setting is futuristic but technology plays into it in the most mundane, everyday ways. What speaks to me most vividly is the story's overall concept and vision of a word distrustful of thought. There are just some ideas that, to me, are simply irresistible in their cleverness. Ira Levin achieved this twice: once with the idea of a thriving Satanic Coven in modern Manhattan overseen by a bunch of little old ladies and gentlemen (Rosemary’s Baby); a second time with a suburban community populated by ideal wives, all of whom, in actuality, are robots (The Stepford Wives). The concept of a world in which firemen are paid and trained to start fires strikes me as pure genius. It’s a sharp and concise idea that lends itself to all manner of dramatic possibilities and opportunities for social commentary.

The Fireman of Fahrenheit 451, on their way to a book burning

Fahrenheit 451 is a standout work of literature, but as much as I love the book and as fond as I am of the film, I find I enjoy both most when I leave off on trying to compare the two. It’s best not to look to Truffaut’s adaptation for faithfulness to the original text, nor is it worthwhile to ruminate on the possible improvements to Bradbury’s prose introduced by Truffaut’s articulate mastery of the language of cinema. Both are enormously entertaining and thoughtful works capable of being enjoyed as free-standing, independent narratives with slightly differing objectives.
Bradbury’s book is a political allegory, more sociological in bent, commenting on the dangers of censorship and threats to independent thought. Truffaut’s film is more personal in scope. Something akin to being the literary companion to both his 1973 valentine to the movies: Day for Night, and his 1980 paean to theater: The Last Metro; Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 speaks to the filmmaker’s love of books and reading. It's not so much a sci-fi film as a Grimm fairy tale about a nowhere man who finds himself by getting lost in the written word.

By the light of his big screen TV, Montag reads his first book - Dickens' David Copperfield.
An unexpected perk of seeing this film today is in noticing how many of Ray Bradbury's predictions for the future (Reality television, wall-sized TVs, earbuds, anti-intellectualism, a disdain for literature) have come to pass.

I derive a great deal of pleasure from both artists' approach to the material, and find that looking to the many ways in which the film deviates from Bradbury’s themes or corrupt the author’s intentions is a perfect way to both court frustration and blind oneself to the unique pleasures of Truffaut’s film.

The Book Lady
Montag finds his beliefs shattered and the course of his life altered when he encounters an old woman  (Bee Duffell), a lifetime book hoarder, who would rather die than have to live without books.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Perhaps my favorite thing about Fahrenheit 451 is Truffaut’s dogged resistance to meeting and satisfying the genre expectations of science fiction. In a 1970 interview with film critic Charles Thomas Samuels, Truffaut expressed his disinterest in science fiction and claimed to have felt no affinity for the novel’s political metaphor. Truffaut chose instead to construct an allegory about a closed-off, dissatisfied man who comes to fall in love with life, mankind, and himself, when he embarks on an epiphanic discovery of books and reading. For me, this is a brilliant tact on Truffaut's part, one which may have disappointed many fans of the novel, but saves Fahrenheit 451 from being just another sci-fi film with socio-political subtext. Truffaut's disinterest in politics increases the human interest levels in Bradbury's story in much the same way Roman Polanski's agnosticism helped bring a stronger emotional/psychological emphasis to Rosemary Baby.

In the visual, hyper-literal language of film, I think it would have been unwise to emphasize those political elements of Fahrenheit 451 which are so obviously stated, underlined, and emphasized in the plot itself. Truffaut avoids overstatement and didacticism by letting the film’s agenda regarding fascism, repression, and censorship play out in the background…reserving his foreground focus for the characters and the human drama.

Family

State

Self

PERFORMANCES

Fahrenheit 451 marks my 6^th post for a Julie Christie film, so by now, most visitors to this blog know the drill: a brief introduction to the character followed by a paragraph or two of gushing, fawning, thoroughly over-the-top (yet not-unwarranted) admiration for the iconic sixties actress. All unencumbered by neutral, objective appraisal. And as Christie assays a dual role in Fahrenheit 451 (Time Magazine- “…it strongly supports the widely held suspicion that [Julie Christie] cannot actually act. Though she plays two women of diametrically divergent dispositions, they seem in her portrayal to differ only in their hairdos"), it affords twice the opportunity for unbridled fandom.

I'll make it brief. Cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, working with Christie for the first time (they would collaborate several times more in the future) makes her look positively stunning no matter which character she plays. Lastly, she's a major asset to the film and its lifeblood despite never really getting as strong a grasp on the Clarisse role as that of Linda...a character who has more than a few things in common with Darling's Diana Scott. 

Cyril Cusack is charming, paternal, and ultimately
terrifying as the doctrine-spouting Chief of firemen.

Christie plays both Linda Montag, the superficial, self-absorbed wife of fireman Guy Montag, and Clarisse, the inquisitive, rebellious schoolteacher who inspires Guy to examine his life. Of course, I think Christie is fabulous in both roles chiefly because she doesn't engage in over-broad, showy acting devices delineating the two characters - something audiences at the time faulted her for, but which seems to me to be an authentic realizing of Truffaut's overall concept. I saw Fahrenheit 451 many years before reading the book, and I must say that the impression I got from Julie Christie appearing in dual roles was one of Truffaut offering to audiences the visual similarity between Clarisse/Linda as an external manifestation of Montag’s inner perspective.

Linda and her mirror double (Clarisse?) confront  Montag about reading books when it is forbidden. Tellingly, the challenging Linda remains physically estranged from her husband, while her double seems to stand in solidarity with Montag in his defense of thinking and feeling. The very things Clarisse believes in and fights for.

By this, I mean that I've never taken it to be a literal fact that two complete strangers in Montag's life are perfectly identical women. Rather, I've always held the belief that it is only Montag who sees them as identical. Montag responds to the similarities between Clarisse and Linda (“She’s rather like you, except her hair is long”) and sees them as twin halves of the same person. The intellectual and spiritual/the unimpassioned and superficial. This is not, however, consistent with Bradbury’s vision. In the book, Clarisse is a teenager and different from Linda in every way...but the duality fits Truffaut's more personality-based interpretation of Fahrenheit 451. I like to think that the Clarisse and Montag we see at the end of the film are a vision of what Linda and Guy were before their senses and passions were dulled by suppression and conformity.

Fueling my theory that much of Fahrenheit 451 deals in intentional ambiguity  and concepts of duality is the brief scene where a spying schoolmistress looks like (is?) Montag's nemesis, Fabian (Anton Diffring). 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Fahrenheit 451 is marvelously devoid of the usual futuristic hardware fetish I find so stultifying in most science fiction movies. The film presents futuristic progress as boring, workaday and banal; which is somehow always what seems to happen with technology. The fact that the internet—the most revolutionary invention for the gathering of sharing of information—is chiefly used as a tool for bullying, bickering, and pornography, is proof enough that technology always surrenders to the inalienable fact that people obstinately remain no more than human in the face of the most incredible technological advances.

The Narcissists 
I don't recall if it was in the book, but Truffaut suggests sensual narcissism as a kind of side-effect of a technological society wherein people are discouraged from interacting and thinking. Throughout the film, people are glimpsed absent-mindedly stroking, kissing, or caressing themselves. Certainly, the current mania for self-involved social media, selfies, and online over-sharing can be seen as the ultimate real-life actualization of Truffaut's hinted-at phenomenon of self-absorption.

This is Truffaut's first color film, and he makes great use of the gloomy countryside locations and contrasts them strikingly with eye-popping, Kubrick-red interiors and crimson fire imagery. On a side note, what would this film be without the music of Bernard Herrmann? Beautiful, sweeping themes that remind me very much of Vertigo.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

At the start of this essay, I stated that I think Fahrenheit 451 is a splendid but flawed Truffaut effort. Its chief flaw, as I see it, being that a film about people benumbed and rendered passionless due to the oppressiveness of a totalitarian society, risks being the very thing it hopes to dramatize. In reference to the 1996 film Fargo, a critic (Pauline Kael, perhaps) made the very good point that even an excellent movie about moronic people is still ultimately a film about moronic people, and therefore one not easily endured, no matter its proficiency.

Francois Truffaut envisions a future in which hyper-technology lives quaintly aside the old-fashioned (antique telephones, oil lamps). Here, Montag is gifted with a straight razor by his wife ("It's the very latest thing!") and encouraged to ditch his old-fashioned cordless electric.

François Truffaut (who didn't speak English and whose first and only English language film this is) does a great job of finding photogenically bland, cold landscapes in which to play out his drama, and he takes some real chances in intentionally asking for stilted, sometimes robotic performances from his actors. While all of this is consistent with the theme of the story, it is deadly to entertainment. If Fahrenheit 451 suffers at all, it is from a lack of blood coursing through its veins. In focusing so effectively on the aspects of the plot demonstrating the spiritually deadening effects of an oppressive society, Truffaut fails to arrive at a satisfactory way of conveying what is at stake and what stands to be lost when people are deprived of the freedom to think. Without some sense of life's vitality expressed somewhere on the screen, there just seems to be something elemental lacking in the depiction of the life-changing effect books and reading can have on the human spirit.

But I’m a sucker for movies about emotional and spiritual transformations (virtually ANY version A Christmas Carol can easily reduce me to tears by the end), so I find myself moved—perhaps unaccountably so, given the film’s cool presentation—by the awakening of Guy Montag to the miracle of books. Oskar Werner's scenes discovering the written word, specifically the sequence in which he tries to make sense of a woman who'd rather die than be separated from her books, are sensitively rendered and unexpectedly moving. 

Montag finds his bliss

As a teen, I retreated into books as a means of coping with my crippling shyness. As an adult, I'm happy that my onetime escapist immersion into the written word has blossomed into an appreciation of the way books actually serve to expand one’s world. I love libraries, old bookstores, and the heft, weight, and texture of books. So much so, in fact, that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able surrender to the practicality of e-books and electronic readers. While on that topic: there is something very Ray Bradbury-ish in naming an electronic device (one poised to replace books and paper-printed literature), a Kindle and Kindle Fire. I understand the name is intentional, but, boy!...in these anti-intellectual times, talk about Bradbury’s book-burning future coming to pass!

 Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2013

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