I bid you good luck, young Thomas Vinterberg, if you think your forthcoming remake of Far From The Madding Crowd will outstrip John Schlesinger’s version from 1967, now extensively reupholstered and rereleased for our delectation.
Schlesinger’s Hardy was derided back then for its casting of Julie Christie and Terence Stamp, mere months after they’d been name-checked in the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset, and who then seemed more Swinging London than Wailing Wessex. Time and distance have eradicated that feeling, however, and I delighted in the credits as they unfolded: not just Terry and Julie, but Peter Finch and eternal peasant-pagan Alan Bates, all perfectly cast; Stamp in particular, as the vile Sergeant Troy, whose name should really be “destroy”.
But behind the camera too, there is joy to be had. Frederic Raphael’s screenplay, tied to Hardy as it must be, keeps the screenwriter’s more irritating locutions and “sparkling dialogue” tendencies in check, and serves Hardy admirably in terms of scale and pacing, while making hay of double entendres such as Troy’s leering “I’ll unfasten you in no time”. But perhaps the heart of the movie is the relationship between production designer Richard Macdonald – the man responsible for Joseph Losey’s eye-popping “mise-insane” films during the 60s – and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, at the height of what I think of as his Red Period as a cameraman. Best of all is to see a large-scale British period movie in which millions and millions of MGM’s dollars are clearly and effectively visible on the screen.
Having grown up largely in parts of the real Wessex myself, this has always seemed the Hardy adaptation that really captured the scale, beauty and menace of the landscape, and all its colours and moods. Schlesinger and his team keep their palette rural early on, with greens, browns and earth tones predominating, until the arrival of Troy, which unleashes a cancer of red upon this hitherto painterly colour scheme, convulsing and finally destroying all those who come in contact with it and with him. In one particularly sulphurous moment, Troy is seen riding in a blood-coloured cart that looks as if it’s arrived straight from Roeg’s 1964 project The Masque Of The Red Death. Cut straight to Bathsheba at home, stitching scarlet cloth for curtains; now she’s infected, too.
Elsewhere are the usually vigorous Finch as the dried-up, semi-impotent suitor Boldwood and Bates’s decent sheep farmer Gabriel Oak. This is also the movie where Christie really found herself as an actor. Then there is the story itself, of Bathsheba and the tragedies she unwittingly sets in train. Hardy remains a shocking writer (Dead babies! Suicide! He sold his WIFE??!! ). His people are fallen, his world is broken, his scale is Mahler-ish in its hysteria and violence; in all these areas, Schlesinger, Macdonald and Roeg served him immensely well.
