John Schlesinger (1967)
I must have seen John Schlesinger’s film for the first time in the early 1970s, not long after reading Far from the Madding Crowd as an O-level set book. I’d seen it at least once since then before going to this BFI screening a few days ago. I watched it realising that part of its emotional pull was nostalgic but I’ve always liked the film and always had the idea I was in a minority in thinking well of it. The current 72% ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes is thanks largely to the positive appraisals by reviewers that have appeared in recent weeks to coincide with the release of Thomas Vinterberg’s remake of the Hardy novel. The negative judgments on Rotten Tomatoes are mostly in reprints of 1960s reviews. Was Schlesinger’s film underrated on its original release? Is distance in time now lending enchantment to the view? Is it the Vinterberg version that’s making Schlesinger look good in retrospect? Probably a bit of all three – probably more than a bit of the first.
The received wisdom has always been that Julie Christie’s Bathsheba Everdene is incongruous in place and time. Penelope Houston (The Spectator, 26 October 1967) says that she ‘belongs ineluctably to the wrong century and the wrong context. Miss Everdene, one feels, is a weekender in Wessex’. In contrast, among the 2015 re-reviewers, Peter Bradshaw thinks ‘Christie carries the film with her own insouciant vulnerability’ and Stephanie Zacharek praises the Schlesinger version for having ‘a star, Christie, whose mere presence is a kind of cliffside poetry’. Zacharek’s review is looking for a stick with which to beat Thomas Vinterberg’s film, and Carey Mulligan’s Bathsheba in particular, but her words point up an essential difference between Mulligan and Julie Christie. The former is the more accomplished actress, the latter a more effulgent screen presence. Compared with Mulligan, Christie is not emotionally precise – she sometimes seems to be surfing the character – but she is consistent in presenting Bathsheba as wilful, flirtatious and selfish, to an extent that makes her unsympathetic. The theatrical release poster in North America alerted audiences to the first two traits (the strapline was ‘A willful [sic] passionate girl and … the three men who want her!’) but not the third. One of Julie Christie’s gifts is emotional transparency and Bathsheba’s consequently transparent selfishness may well have contributed to the commercial failure of Schlesinger’s film in the US (although it did well enough at the British box office). Whereas the resolve of Carey Mulligan’s Bathsheba is rooted in the desire to be a fully liberated woman, Christie’s determination is born of an impulsive self-centredness: when this Bathsheba is troubled, it’s because the dilemma she’s in is making things difficult for her. It’s arguable that the Bathsheba of 2015, a gender-conscious and proudly capable manager, is more substantially incongruous in nineteenth-century Wessex than Schlesinger’s heroine. The anachronistic elements of Christie’s Bathsheba seem, at this distance in time, to have less to do with her interpretation of the character than with her physical appearance (hairstyle, make-up and complexion).
Terence Stamp’s Sergeant Troy is occasionally hampered in a similar way: when Troy is in civvies after resigning his military commission, the tight cut of his suit trousers looks to me (though I’m no expert) mid-1960s rather than mid-Victorian. Penelope Houston was right to describe his performance as ‘all bits and pieces’; when Troy is showing that he’s a nasty piece of work, Stamp is uncomfortable, verging on wooden. But the good ‘bits’ are very good: he conveys effortlessly the combination of sexual allure and humour that captures Bathsheba’s heart. He also makes you believe in Troy’s shallow popularity among the farm workers, in the early days of his marriage to Bathsheba: when he sings a song at the harvest dance, Terence Stamp expresses a sense of Troy’s genuine enjoyment of being part of (and a man of power within) the Weatherbury farm community. There’s a similarly euphoric quality in Troy’s showing off to Bathsheba in the deservedly famous swordplay sequence and a genuine uncertainty and inconstancy in his feelings for Fanny Robin, who is touchingly played by Prunella Ransome. Both Stamp and Julie Christie, although they express the weak or displeasing aspects of their characters, also get across their confounding charm.
Peter Finch received the best reviews of the four main actors in 1967 and, though he looks too dashing, he is very fine as Boldwood. He describes the corroding obsession of a man hitherto secure in routine and public esteem (and Boldwood’s plight is made more powerful by the extent to which it remains largely unnoticed). Finch is especially moving in expressing Boldwood’s vast relief at receiving Bathsheba’s only modestly encouraging responses to his overtures. Alan Bates’s Gabriel Oak is a noticeably well-spoken shepherd but this is an expertly judged performance and the longer running time of Schlesinger’s film allows Gabriel to recede into the background more than he does in Thomas Vinterberg’s. Bates’s Gabriel is ever-present and watchful but his feelings are under wraps. (I don’t agree with Penelope Houston that Bates wears the ‘confident, understated smile of the character who knows – and knows that we know – he will still be there at the end to claim the heroine’.)
The passage of time is an important feature of Schlesinger’s narrative, as James Price summarised in his Sight and Sound review (Winter 1967/8)[1], and it’s a timepiece that supplies a memorable closing scene. (Just as well because the preceding scene, in which Bathsheba asks Gabriel not to leave and he insists he’ll stay only if they marry, is a botch – it’s too hurried.) Troy buys as a wedding present for Bathsheba a clock in a glass dome, with various moving parts; a miniature, red-clad soldier comes out each time the clock chimes the hour. Immediately after their wedding, Bathsheba and Gabriel are together in the parlour. It’s raining outside. Gabriel smiles at his wife; although she smiles back, she appears more interested in reading newspaper announcements of their marriage than in her new husband. The claustrophobic effect is deepened when, as the hour strikes, the camera moves to the clock on the dresser and the soldier appears. It is the very last shot of the film. A mechanism that records the forward movement of time is also a reminder that the newlyweds are caught up in the past.
‘And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be – and whenever I look up, there will be you.’
These words of Gabriel, spoken when he first proposes marriage to Bathsheba and repeated when she finally accepts him, now ring ominously hollow. Whenever Gabriel hears the clock, there will be Bathsheba’s real love.
The timespan of the film itself enables Schlesinger to give Far From the Madding Crowd something of the novel’s amplitude and to connect the dramatis personae with their physical environment. He is much assisted in this by Frederic Raphael’s screenplay, Richard Rodney Bennett’s music and Nicolas Roeg’s cinematography. The beautiful blend of promise and melancholy in Bennett’s score is never too insistent but always contributes potently to the atmosphere. The visuals bring out the scale and the textures of the landscape, and the vagaries of the Wessex weather. There’s as much murk as there is sunshine, and Roeg gives a vivid impression of muddy, plashing ground and constricted spaces, as well as of the enormity of open ones. The camera sometimes takes a God’s-eye view of the arena – or, at least, a view that suggests the littleness of human beings’ ability to control their fate. At the same time, the film imparts a sense of careless cruelty, on the part of people as well as of nature – the harsher aspects of Christie’s and Stamp’s portraits of Bathsheba and Troy are a significant element of this.
Over the course of nearly three hours, Schlesinger is able to animate the rural community and to present the principals as both belonging to and standing apart from it. There are some first-rate characterisations, comical and true, of the farm workers – especially Denise Coffey’s Soberness Miller, Brian Rawlinson’s Matthew Moon and, best of all, John Barrett’s Joseph Poorgrass. Fiona Walker is excellent as Bathsheba’s maid Liddy. Schlesinger has assembled for the rustics a fine collection of faces: John Garrie, as the malignant bailiff Pennyways, is particularly memorable and the character’s recurrence in the story (turning up like a bad Pennyways) is dramatically effective. There are lovely, fresh moments, such as Bathsheba’s observing a small boy walking across a field, early in the morning, trying to memorise his catechism. Richard Macdonald’s production design and the set decoration were for me almost entirely convincing (although the mugs used at the haymaking supper look a shade too pristine).
There are echoes of Sergeant Troy’s sexualised swordplay in his listless lashing at cliff-side grasses shortly before he disappears into the sea and during his back-from-the-dead reappearance at a travelling fair. Both are, in a lower key, no less incisive than the primary scene that they evoke. The scenes at the fair, where Troy gets a job playing Dick Turpin, call to mind an earlier sequence, invented by Raphael, in which people have gathered on the beach of a coastal resort to listen to a colourfully illustrated account of Captain Cook’s travels. We gradually realise the rich resonances between these two episodes. In the first of them, which takes place before Bathsheba’s marriage to Troy, we see – but don’t hear the words of – her impassioned appeal to him, which takes place in the background to the Captain Cook show. At the travelling fair, Bathsheba and Boldwood are in the audience; Troy knows they are there and makes urgent attempts to disguise his appearance by applying extra highwayman make-up; as she watches the show, Bathsheba, although she doesn’t quite believe she is watching Troy, experiences a wordless shock of recognition. The rustic audience’s delighted and sentimental reactions to, respectively, the slapstick humour of the Dick Turpin routine and the demise of his mare Black Bess turn the sequence into a fine piece of social observation as well as a moment of great suspense. The film was criticised on its original release for excessive length but these various rhymes are all made possible by John Schlesinger’s taking time to tell the story. Largely admiring reviews of his Far from the Madding Crowd have taken their time too but, nearly half a century on, here they now are.
13 May 2015
[1] ‘Gabriel Oak has to labour in silence while Bathsheba first flirts with Farmer Boldwood, then marries Troy, then seems inclined to bow to Boldwood again. Boldwood is told by Bathsheba to wait until harvest, then to wait until Christmas, then to wait for six years.’
