Cold Comfort Farm (1995, Kate Beckinsale, Ian McKellen, Joanna Lumley) – Classic Film Review 1156

Director John Schlesinger’s film stars the 22-year-old Kate Beckinsale, who gives a brisk, no-nonsense, confident turn as Flora Poste, the 1920s aspiring novelist heroine whose father has died leaving her virtually penniless. So she seeks out some relations to stay with.

The best offer comes from the Starkadder family, the wacky country folk down at Cold Comfort Farm, where there is a crazy grannie in the attic, a daffy old duffer called Adam Lambsbreath (Freddie Jones) looking after the cattle, a dotty preacher (Ian McKellen) as the patriarch, a loopy matriarch (Eileen Atkins), a randy son (Rufus Sewell), and something nasty in the woodshed – you know the usual country types. Eventually Beckinsale’s Flora liberates them all from their demons.

This 1995 retro-movie, with an efficient, workable script by Malcolm Bradbury based on Stella Gibbons’s famed 20th-century humorous literary classic, gives the British theatricals spadefuls of the very opportunity they all seem so to crave – to show off extravagantly as English eccentrics.

The film remains a lot of very mild if slightly pointless fun, since it’s professionally done by the game cast and proficiently (though rather anonymously) made by a director who used to do more serious work but is clearly enjoying indulging his actors and all the idiosyncrasies on show. There’s little sign of Gibbons’s fierce intelligence and sharp satirical motives (attacking literature’s finest Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence for instance) amid all the cheery self-indulgence.

It was made for British TV, but it scored a hit in US cinemas, so it later gained a UK film release in 1997. Joanna Lumley (as Mrs Mary Smiling), Stephen Fry (as Mybug), Miriam Margolyes (as Mrs Beetle), Sheila Burrell, Ivan Kaye and Angela Thorn also star.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1156

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