Having made three urban-set contemporary feature films, director John Schlesinger tried his hand at something rather different for his fourth, with an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's much-loved novel Far from the Madding Crowd. A period drama that closely follows the source text, the resulting film is beautiful to look at and superbly acted, but it does rather drag at times.
Set in Victorian "Wessex" (like all of Hardy's novels), Far from the Madding Crowd follows the life of Julie Christie's Bathsheba Everdene, an independent young woman who inherits a farm and decides to run it herself. She is the object of desire of three men: Alan Bates' Gabriel Oak; Peter Finch's William Boldwood; and Terence Stamp's Frank Troy. Oak is a simple farmer who declares his desire to marry Bathsheba at the start of the film; he's honest, steadfast and hard-working and Bathsheba employs him when she decides to run her own farm and after he has lost his. Boldwood by contrast is a wealthy gentleman farmer, but lonely and reserved, whilst Troy is a charismatic, if occasionally brooding, army Sergeant. It doesn't take familiarity with the novel to guess quite early on which of these men Bathsheba will ultimately end up with, but the plot revolves around how she gets to that point and how two of them ultimately meet a tragic end.
Christie, famed for her beauty at the time, was well chosen to play Bathesheba, a woman with whom every man she meets falls in love. Hardy often wrote strong female characters - relatively unusually for a male writer at the time - and Bathsheba is arguably his best known example; she translates well to the screen, as do her three would-be suitors. Bates plays the honest, working class Oak entirely convincingly, whilst Finch is equally good as the emotional restraint Boldwood and conveys his growing obsession with Bathsheba - and desperate desire to be noble - effortlessly. Stamp brings charm, charisma and arrogance to the role of Troy, but also displays the man's bitterness at having lost his true love, Prunella Ransome's endearing but doomed servant Fanny Robin.
This study in fine acting is a key element of the success of Far from the Madding Crowd, but is far from the only one. Schlesinger proves adept at handling rural costume drama and the film is extremely pretty to look at it. Shot on location in Dorset and Wiltshire (including Devizes), it looks gorgeous, in no small part thanks to the cinematography of Nicholas Roeg, who makes much use of panoramic, aerial, long and wide-angle shots to show off the countryside to maximum effect and demonstrates that it is often beautiful and bleak at the same time. Whether or not rural farm life in Victorian England was quite like it is depicted in the film, Schlesinger nevertheless manages to make it look wholly convincing, and his typical gift for visuals is evident: the famous scene of Troy showing Bathsheba his swordplay is superbly shot and intercut with images of Troy on horseback riding into battle, whilst the death of Oak's sheep - followed by his shooting of the sheepdog that caused it - is shot with all the stark unpleasantness of a folk horror film. Sir Richard Rodney Bennett's elegant incidental score - nominated for an Academy Award - completes the visuals nicely.
As beautiful as the film is however, writer Frederic Raphael's desire to adhere closely to the plot of the novel means that at one hundred and sixty minutes it is rather long and painfully slow at times. The circus scene to cite but one example is impressively staged but goes on for far longer than is necessary for the narrative. Often in cinema less is more and the film could have had half-an-hour trimmed, improving the pace without compromising the story. But that aside, Far from the Madding Crowd remains a enjoyable and well-made film that demonstrated early on the versatility that Schlesinger was capable of.
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