The gorgeous location photography among the rolling hills of Wessex in Victorian England and all of the bucolic farmland scenes of peasants at work are vividly on display in FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. Not on display are the vivid characters Hardy wrote about in his famous novel.
Bathsheba Everdene is a complex female character, who treats the three men who love her with a rather perverse temperament, and we never get to understand why she behaves as she does. JULIE Christie is merely sullen in the role, affecting a number of poses but never really doing anything more than giving us a surface portrait of the woman around whom the whole tale spins.
The same flaws inhabit the dull male characters, about whom we have a hard time being even interested in, as played by TERENCE STAMP, ALAN BATES and PETER FINCH.
Furthermore, the whole tale takes almost three hours to tell, during which time we get a wonderful feel of the climate and texture of life in those times but rarely get a glimpse of what makes the characters tick. This is the film's fatal flaw. No film of this length can keep the viewer interested unless the characters come to life, and here they clearly do not.
Like all of Hardy's novel, the story depends heavily on coincidence and how it plays a part in the fate of its leading players. Here the plot seems like no more than a series of contrivances that can stir only a modest amount of interest.
Bathsheba Everdene is a complex female character, who treats the three men who love her with a rather perverse temperament, and we never get to understand why she behaves as she does. JULIE Christie is merely sullen in the role, affecting a number of poses but never really doing anything more than giving us a surface portrait of the woman around whom the whole tale spins.
The same flaws inhabit the dull male characters, about whom we have a hard time being even interested in, as played by TERENCE STAMP, ALAN BATES and PETER FINCH.
Furthermore, the whole tale takes almost three hours to tell, during which time we get a wonderful feel of the climate and texture of life in those times but rarely get a glimpse of what makes the characters tick. This is the film's fatal flaw. No film of this length can keep the viewer interested unless the characters come to life, and here they clearly do not.
Like all of Hardy's novel, the story depends heavily on coincidence and how it plays a part in the fate of its leading players. Here the plot seems like no more than a series of contrivances that can stir only a modest amount of interest.