hi everyone it's Lauren and welcome back to another episode of page to screen in
this series I take a classic book and discuss the different ways that it's
been adapted in film and TV today we're going to be looking at far from the
madding crowd by Thomas Hardy there will be spoilers for the plot of Far for the Madding
Crowd all the way through this video Just to recap the plot for those who
haven't read it and watch the adaptations as recently as I have, this follows a
young woman called Bathsheba Everdeen who inherits her uncle's farm and there are
three men who are in love with her in various different ways there's Gabriel
Oak who is a shepherd who used to be a farmer, suffered a misfortune and is now working
beneath her, there is Mr Boldwood who is a rich farmer in the
neighboring farm and Sergeant Francis Troy who is a more dubious character
perhaps
who is a soldier and Bathsheba runs off with him The first adaptation I watched was the film from
1967 starring Julie Christie as Bathsheba I remember watching this when I
studied Far From the Madding Crowd at school and thinking it was a bit...it wasn't a great
adaptation. Watching it back now I can see why didn't like it originally because it is
it's quite dated as a film, but as an adaptationI was really impressed with it I
don't love julie christie as Bathsheba I think she's ok she does an alright job
but I don't think she brings a lot to the role if I'm honest I think it's very
difficult to portray Bathsheba as a likable character because I don't think
she's written that likable in the book she is described as vain a lot of the time
and really she uses her vanity and she uses the fact that people find her attractive
to get them to do favors for her she relies on Gabriel Oak a lot without
giving him very much in return and she's very impetuous and silly but at
the same time she does have strength and I guess
her more questionable decisions come from her naivety really rather than her being a bad
person but I think there's actually quite a lot there and it's difficult to get
that balance right I think julie christie does portray her as just quite
vain and I don't think she really cares that much about people's feelings that she seems
to hurt and she doesn't really to me seem to get into the subtext of the character I
think it's very much a reading of what thomas hardy wrote which I don't think
is a very favorable persona in my opinion in term of adapting Bsthsheba maybe she's doing ok
but it's not what I would want as a character if you want the audience to
find her appealing likable but something that I think she just do well and so does Alan
Bates who plays Gabriel is their sort of love forr each other or the
unstated love for each other I really believe this relationship throughout the
film which i think is actually very well done I was also really impressed withthe
pacing in this film because you know it's it's a long book and this is just a
film it's not a TV series but it feels like it gets all of the important
information in and we also have time for some really beautiful shots of Dorset or the
fictional county of Wessex where this is set and it also seems to really evoke
the feelings of the country they use a lot of folk songs al the way through, some different
people singing songs which could slow the film down but it doesn't and it
really adds to the atmosphere I also think the Boldwood and the Sergeant Troy are pretty
good in this film
Terrence Stamp is Sergeant Troy and I think I think it's good I think
everyone's done a very sort of basic basic adaptation of these characters I
think Trpy is also a very difficult character to really get right
because he comes across very slimy in this which obviously is that is the way
they've decided to go and that does work I think the difficulty thought with portraying
Sergeant Troy as such
a slimeball, sleazy character is that when he discovers that Fanny Robin has
died and he declares his love for her I don't believe it because I I just don't
believe that he ever loved Fanny really I didn't understand why he wanted to
marry her in the
first place because he just seems like a playboy so it's a little bit
difficult but considering this film's age and the fact that is fairly dated I
think it's still a really good adaptation of the book. The next version that i watched
was from 1998 which is a TV adaptation starring Paloma Baeza as Bathsheba
this is such an interesting adaptaion, it's about three hours long I think so
it's very very much longer than the 1967 film and in some ways it is that makes
it a lot better and in some ways it makes it a bit slow but it it's good
it's an equally good adaptation I think but for really different ways
something that this adaptation does really well is the cast of characters
in Far From the Madding Crowd you have a lot of rustic farmers talking a lot there's a whole
cast of characters in the book which aren't really that important and if
you're doing film you could just cut them out but in the book it kind of adds
depth and adds atmosphere to the piece and these these characters are
done so well in his adaptation you really get all of their conversations
about what's going on, it adds a level of humor and like I said, a level of
atmosphere and I really enjoyed hearing the kind of quips and quibbles and discussions
of the maids and the farmhands I actually think added to it rather than it slowing the
plot down. Paloma Baeza's portrayal of Bathsheba is a really interesting one and i actually quite
like it even though it's not necessarily what I want from Bathsheba I think she takes a
really different turn with it which I really appreciate and she makes her seen
very very young and very very naive I don't get this when I read the book
but when I watch it on screen I just think yeah ok that makes sense that she's
just really young . When you have situations such as Gabriel Oak
proposing to her and her not knowing what to do or Bolwood just pushing
and pushing, saying 'marry me marry me marry me, give me a promise, marry me' and her not
just telling him 'no' you can see that it's almost because she's such a young girl and she just
doesn't know how to handle the situation so she tells him 'oh ok yeah I'll tell
you later'
because she just wants Boldwood to go away and I really get that rather than taking the
angle that she's vain and she's leading these men on, it's more a case of she's
kind of in over her head. She is vain and she is silly but only because she's just
a very young girl and someone like Sergeant Troy can lead her on because she
doesn't really know any better. The only problem with this kind of portrayal is
that on the other hand has taken on a whole farm by herself and dismissed the
bailiff and perhaps that aspect of her personality doesn't marry up with the
naivety that she shows in in her other areas in her social endeavors
so it did mean she lacked a little bit of, I hate this word, but 'feistiness'
she lacked a little bit of strength but nonetheless areally interesting take
on Bathsheba as a character. Something else I absolutely loved about this version
was the sergeant Troy and the Fanny Robin Troy in this isn't sleazy, he's actually so
charming and I really like that because when Fanny goes to his barracks and talks
to him, the little smile that he gives her, I was just thinking if I were Fanny you know I'd be going
weak at the knees right now but he seems less like he's playing around with her
and more that he actually genuinely loves her and the way that he woos Bathsheba as well
even though we know he's not that interested in Bathsheba, he really turns it
on, he turns on the charm and again you can see how she would fall for
someone like that. The next film that I watched is maybe not quite a strict
adaptation of far from the madding crowd but that was Tamara Drewe starring
Gemma Arterton which is an adaptation of a graphic novel which is an adaptation
of far from the madding crowd. This was ok, this is a country village in Dorset andTamara
Drewe grew up there with a big nose then went away had a nose job in has comeback
all successful and then everybody's in love with her, the same thing as with
Bathsheba so we do have the same general premise as far from the madding crowd
the exact plot points and what happens is quite different. Some things I did really
like however, there were some real
specific things that happen in Far From the Madding Crowd which are mirrored in
Tamara Drewe and I thought that was quite nicely for example when you have
Bathsheba sending Boldwood the Valentines card and causing a whole stir, one
of the teenage girls in the village sends emails from her account and it was
all you know 'oh really fancy you' and it's the same thing with that act causes a
ripple a chain of events
there's also a scene where a dog gest on the loose in this dog has been on the loose the whole
time and eventually rounds up a bunch of cattle and get them to stampede which
again mirrors what happens right in the beginning of far from the madding crowd
when Gabriel Oak's dog shoves all his sheep off a cliff and ruins him. So a couple of things
things like that I really liked because I felt like they were a nod, a nod to far
from the madding crowd. However if I'm honest watching this film just made me
want to read the graphic novel I imagine the graphic novel's quite good I did feel
like the plot was put together quite well but I didn't really loved the film
I didn't really warm to any of the characters there's an affair that Tamara
Drewe has with someone which I found I just found really unbelievable and I
didn't really like the way the film focused on the fact that she had a nose
job and now she was pretty and also the kind of the way it was pitting the women
against each other I just wasn't sure about it and elements of it made me
uncomfortable so as a film in itself I didn't think it was that well put
together there are some really good actors in it and also genuinely funny
moments. And finally we have the most recent film adaptation from 2015
starring Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba I went into this thinking I was really
really gonna love it and it was ok it wasn't what I thought, what I was hoping it would be
Carey Mulligan, as expected is absolutely wonderful as Beathsheba I think
she's my absolute favorite betrayal of her to be honest across these adaptations
she's just so good at demonstrating depth of character that she really does play into the
subtext and gives Bathsheba her own personality, she doesn't rely on her being
vain or being
neurotic or naive or whatever she just feels like a fully-fledged human being who is flawed
and I think she does that really really well and similarly Michael Sheen as
Mr Boldwood, oh my god I love Michael Sheen anyway but it is fantastic it's
such such a wonderful wonderful betrayal you could really see the turmoil in his
mind and just how much he's obsessed with Bathsheba and how worried he is about
rejection and also how deluded he is at pushing that rejection down and thinking 'oh no she
doesn't really mean it' and he he's absolutely brilliant and I just wish I
could take both of them two out of this film and put them into maybe
the TV adaptation because I didn't really like the Boldwood in that either and then I
would have my perfect adaptation because they were fantastic
this film however just didn't really have anything it felt very style over
substance I'll be honest and I would say it because it's a film and perhaps they
didn't have enough time to include all of the scenes, but the 1967 adaptation manages to be
short enough that you can have it in the cinema and also include enough of the
plot and I felt like too much was cut out of this and we had a lot of
beautiful swooping scenes of the countryside and also a fair amount of
dialogue which is just not Hardy's and also gives the story bit too much of a
modern bent. There's a lot oabout Bathsheba being the only woman going into
the corn market trying to make people buy he corn and they're not listening to
her, and her saying to lydia 'oh don't worry we're just as important as
they are, we can do anything men can do' and this isn't in Far From the
madding crowd, it's an aspect of it but we're making quite a meal of this and
considering they cut out other scenes which i think would have been really
beneficial there's no need for this whole corn market scene and all this dialogue
which feels a little a bit too anachronistic Something else I was so disappointed about
and I felt fell really flat was the Sergeant Troy and Fanny Robin scenes. Fanny is
played by Juno Temple
which i think is a fantastic choice for fanny and she's just wasted in this
film we only really see her I think twice the beginning before running away from
Weatherbury and you don't get an interaction between her and Sergeant Troy
before their wedding you just see her leaving, you see her going to the wrong
church and then you see her again when she dies and that's it we get nothing more there and again I think it
just gives the wrong impression as to who Sergeant Troy is because in the book
they go to the wrong church when they're supposed to get marrie, Fanny eventually find him and says
I'm so sorry so sorry I went to the wrong church he's like no you've embarrssed me enough I'm not
gonna get marriedto you anytime soon and maybe they would have got married you
know in a month or two but he's just really angry at her but in this version he never finds Fanny
again, she doesn't turn up to the church and then he doesn't see her again until
she's pregnant and you know she's about to die and he's going 'where were you? where were you? I looked for you!'
and I just think that really gives the wrong impression because actually Tory wasn't
head over heels in love with Fanny and she just ran away the situation was more
complicated than that and I didn't really appreciate the way they changed
people's motives and just gave the wrong impression as to what was going on
equally when Boldwod is really in love with Bathsheba he's really aware that
Gabriel Oakis also in love with Batheba and discusses it with him which I just think
we didn't need this I just don'treally like the way that this this film was adapted
I don't really like the way the story was was mangled and mismatched around I
didn't even care at the end when she got Gabriel Oak which is like one of
the best things when theyfinally get together and i felt the Oak was quite wooden
I just didn't really care and it's felt like a wasted opportunity this film and yeah I
think that's what annoys me more than anything if you haven't read far from the
madding crowd you could probably watch it and enjoy it but knowing what to do
about what the plot is supposed to be it was just it was just so frustrating so I
would love to
hear your thoughts on any of these adaptations if you have seen them, my next
page to screen going to be a great expectations in six weeks' time
so I will have a chat with you in the comments and see you in my next video bye!
reading a lot more about feminism and gender theory recently last month I did focus a lot on
feminism and although that's something that really interests me I think as a
women reading about feminism a lot it can get quite exhausting and it can make you
feel quite angry