Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) - film review

Rural England, in the early 1800s.  Gabriel Oak, a humble sheep farmer in the county of Wessex, is in love with Bathsheba Everdene, a proud, independently minded young woman who lives with her aunt.  After Bathsheba rejects his offer of marriage, Gabriel suffers a second blow when one of his sheepdogs drives his flock of sheep over the edge of a cliff.  Ruined, he must now seek employment as a farm worker.  Fate brings him back to Bathsheba, who has inherited her uncle’s farm and intends to manage it single-handedly.  Gabriel gladly accepts Bathsheba’s offer of work, still believing that one day she will want him as a husband.  But he has a rival, in William Boldwood, a prosperous farmer who, despite being twenty years her senior, is passionately in love with Bathsheba.  Boldwood’s attempts to win Bathsheba’s hand in marriage are thwarted by the arrival of Sergeant Frank Troy, a handsome military man with a reputation as a gambler and womaniser.  As soon as Bathsheba sees Troy, she realises that he is the only man she can love.  She doesn’t know that Troy has recently rejected his fiancée, Fanny Robin, on their wedding day.  Realising the kind of man Troy is, Boldwood attempts to drive him away, but he is too late.  Troy and Bathsheba are already married...

Film adaptations of Thomas Hardy’s novels broadly fall into two categories.  There are those which are faithful to the original novel but fail to come to grips with what lies beneath the surface and so inevitably feel hollow and contrived.  Then there are those which make a determined attempt to embrace the rich complexity of Hardy’s work and which, if successful, make a powerful study of human frailty.  John Schlesinger’s masterful adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd most assuredly falls into the second category.  An inspired piece of filmmaking, this evokes the source novel so perfectly that you could almost convince yourself that Hardy was himself involved in its production.

First there is the landscape, the cold and brooding Dorset countryside which had such a profound impact on Hardy throughout his life and which featured in all of his great novels.  Nicolas Roeg’s stunning cinematography makes this austere setting as much a part of the story as the human protagonists, the limited palate of soft browns and muddy greens suggesting both man’s proximity to nature (and the mystical forces that lie within), and the austerity of rural life in England prior to the Industrial Revolution.

Then there are the characters, richly drawn and convincingly portrayed by some of the finest British actors of the period.  The decision to cast Julie Christie as Bathsheba was controversial at the time, but just as Christie represented the emancipated woman of the 1960s, so was she ideally suited to play the free-spirited Bathsheba, the woman who defied convention by daring to choose her own destiny (the central irony of the story being that she has no such choice). 

With his aura of slightly camp demonic narcissism, Terence Stamp is well-suited to play the rakish Sergeant Troy, but he also brings a subtle pathos to his portrayal of a character who, in characteristic Hardy fashion, has more than one side to him.  The film’s most memorable sequence is of course the one in which Stamp charges repeatedly at Christie with his sword, a bizarre mating ritual with such overt Freudian overtones that you almost wonder how it ever got past the censor.    Although their characters are somewhat less interesting than the two principals, Peter Finch and Alan Bates portray them with great depth and poignancy, pumping rich life-blood into the veins of humanity and dramatic intensity that make up Frederic Raphael’s superlative screenplay.

Far from the Madding Crowd is a spellbinding piece of cinema.  Beautifully photographed and with performances that can hardly fail to captivate an audience, it possesses the same dark lyricism and cruel irony of Hardy’s great novel.  Yet it also stands as a work of art in its own right, illuminated by its own stylish allure and stark visual poetry.  Prior to this film, John Schlesinger had been content to limit himself to contemporary dramas in a familiar urban setting.  Here, in the comparatively artificial world of Hardy’s rural Wessex, he is shown to be just as incisive and compassionate in his exploration of the human condition, and so proves his credentials as a world class filmmaker.

© James Travers 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?