Far from the Madding Crowd **** (1967, Julie Christie, Peter Finch, Alan Bates, Terence Stamp) – Classic Movie Review 1762

Director John Schlesinger’s beautifully produced 1967 film of the Thomas Hardy novel Far from the Madding Crowd is a gorgeous-looking and emotion packed intimate epic. Christie, Finch, Bates, Stamp, Schlesinger, Roeg and Raphael – British cinema truly had giants in the Sixties! It is supposed to be an icon of the Sixties British New Wave cinema, but this is the very kind of lumbering, backward looking epic that spelt the end of it.

It is bland and characterless heritage cinema that could be made in any era, not what you’d hope for from the director of Billy Liar, Midnight Cowboy and Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Not that it is a bad film, it is just that there is no personal stamp here on Schlesinger’s direction. Anyone could have made it.

It centres on the beautiful, wayward, willful, flirty Wessex countryside sheep farm girl Bathsheba Everdine (Julie Christie), who unexpectedly inherits a large farm. Looking for a suitor among three very different men, the solipsistic Bathsheba causes profound chaos when she becomes romantically involved in the lives of poor, devoted sheep farmer Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates), rich, 40something squire William Boldwood (Peter Finch) and the caddish, violent swordsman Sergeant Frank Troy (Terence Stamp).

Luckily Hardy provides plenty of interesting characters and incidents for screenwriter Frederic Raphael to fill out the nearly three-hour running time, in a film that stays faithful to the novel while tweaking it to keep up the high level of entertainment value. Though it is an excellent, handsome, romantic cast, only Finch really gets under the skin of his character and into the piece, and provides a truly special, haunting performance. Nevertheless, a perfectly cast Bates plays his role extremely well and iconic 60s beautiful people Christie and Stamp are ideal actors working at the top of their games.

Schlesinger’s direction is painstaking and careful, lacking urgency and dynamism, though that’s the nature of the piece and he does still manage to hold the attention throughout. Above all, however, Far from the Madding Crowd is a triumph for Nicolas Roeg’s dazzlingly imaginative 35mm blown up for 70mm widescreen cinematography on Dorset and Wiltshire locations, smeared with mud and sheep dung in a grimly realistic recreation of the early 19th-century Westcountry.

It is the kind of film you expect to have won Oscars, at the very least for Roeg’s cinematography, but did not win any, though Richard Rodney Bennett was nominated for his haunting Best Original Score.

It performed fairly well in the UK but was a commercial failure in the US. Poor reviews, especially in the US, translated overall into underwhelming box office. Stamp says: ‘I was rather shocked by the reaction. I thought it had everything.’ Stamp didn’t respect or like Schlesinger: ‘He didn’t strike me as a guy who was particularly interested in film. Plus I wasn’t his first choice: he really wanted Jon Voight. He wasn’t exactly hostile, but he really didn’t help me. I was working on my own, really.’

Stamp bonded with Roeg, in a friendship that led to them secretly filming extra footage, including the famous scene where Stamp waggles his sword to Christie’s squealing delight. “I’ll say this for Schlesinger, when he got in the cutting room and realised he had all this extra footage, he used it. He understood it then. But I didn’t have a lot of time for him.’

The cinema release runs 170 minutes and the cut home viewing version only 157 minutes. Spruced-up and spring-cleaned, it is re-released in UK cinemas on March 13 2015.

Shot on 35mm film, it was blown up for 70mm giant screen exhibition at London’s Odeon, Marble Arch, where Princess Margaret attended its premiere, before transferring to the Metropole Cinema in Victoria for a five-month run.

There is also a 1998 TV movie version with Paloma Baeza, Nigel Terry and Nathaniel Parker, and 2015 brings a new cinema movie of Far from the Madding Crowd with Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba, Tom Sturridge, Michael Sheen, Matthias Schoenaerts and Juno Temple.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1762

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