[In the following review of John Schlesinger's 1967 film version of Far from the Madding Crowd, Welsh points out the limitations of a compressed form of the novel.]

The director adapting a novel for a mass audience works from one of two possible assumptions: 1) that the viewer probably will not know the original work and therefore needs to be guided carefully through the narrative, or 2) that the viewer probably has read the original work and that key motifs and mutually understood distinctions and nuances of character can therefore be telegraphed to the audience without a great deal of preparation and cinematic development. Perhaps the adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd scripted by Frederic Raphael and directed by John Schlesinger in 1967 succeeds when evaluated by the second assumption, but only to a point, for the novel, which is not, I suspect, widely read these days, is greatly compressed and much diluted.

Far from the Madding Crowd may also achieve a degree of popular success under the first assumption because Julie Christie appears to be visually and temperamentally perfect for the role of Bathsheba Everdene, even though much of the contradictory ambiguity of Hardy's character is lost. The character is broadly defined by her pride and vanity, and this Schlesinger seeks to convey by visual means. After her night encounter and entanglement with Sergeant Troy in “the fir plantation,” for example, when the soldier flatters her by remarking on her beauty, Schlesinger cuts immediately to Bathsheba back at home studying the perfection of her face in a mirror. As the shot is held on that mirror image, it suggests vanity as well as girlish infatuation. Miss Christie's acting, moreover, captures the essence of her character's flirtatiousness and recklessness and suggests something of her impetuousness.

No doubt the film succeeds in capturing Bathsheba's superficial beauty and reckless manner. But the novelist is at pains to show that Bathsheba is more than merely a bold coquette; Hardy gives her a complexity of mind that in its own way is equally as interesting as her vivaciousness. The viewer who has read the novel may bring this understanding with him to the film. The viewer who has not read the novel can only be charmed by the considerable charisma of the actress and will be responding as much to personality as to character—to star acting, in other words.

The other single most interesting character in the novel is Gabriel Oak, and though Alan Bates has the authentic look of Hardy's devoted shepherd and protagonist, the Schlesinger treatment whittles Oak down in stature and makes of him a rather wooden piece of background furniture. At the end of the novel, Oak finally wins Bathsheba because of his apparent stoic disinterest in her, for his experience with and observation of her proves that the man who is direct and frank in confessing his romantic interest in her, such a man as Boldwood, who wears his heart on his sleeve, cannot succeed in winning her. Hardy's Oak will therefore admit to his love as well as his obvious enduring devotion only on his own terms, and after his own earlier rejection, he waits wisely for her to come to him. That he apparently shuns her is exactly what finally renews her interest in him. Being unable to reflect this understanding, Alan Bates is not so interesting. He is merely there.

Likewise, Terrence Stamp makes a visually appropriate Sergeant Troy, all dash and brass, but the change in Troy after his marriage in the film is not convincingly motivated, nor is the disintegration of their marriage readily explained. The film version of Troy is laundered, for he does not share all of the faults of his prototype in the novel who is a wastrel and a gambler. Hardy's Troy plays the horses with abandon, and his spendthrift habits put the future prosperity of the farm into question. When he demands of Bathsheba the £20 he secretly intends to give to Fanny Robin, Bathsheba must provide it out of her household expense budget. The situation in the film is far less complicated. Just as Farmer Boldwood is ordinarily all “Business” in the novel—when he attempts to bribe Troy, for example, or when he reminds Bathsheba of her “debt” to him as though it were a business arrangement—Frank Troy is no business at all.

In filming the wedding-harvest festivities that reduce all the farm hands—save Gabriel—to a drunken stupor, Schlesinger reduced the counterpointing characters of Oak and Troy to the symbolic stereotype of the grasshopper and the ant. Though Hardy may have had some of this in mind, the treatment seems extraordinarily reductive in the film, a sop, one suspects, to the popular audience for whom the film was made.

The most astonishing simplification, however, is Schlesinger's treatment of Farmer Boldwood, whose obsessive yearning for Bathsheba, Hardy is very careful to suggest, gradually deranges the man. The film, by contrast, makes him out to be a hopelessly romantic, lovestruck, middle-aged fool. The script does more to rob him of his dignity and strength than does Bathsheba, turning him into a mere cartoon of his prototype. There is no doubt, of course, that Peter Finch looks the part, but here, as elsewhere, the success is a superficial one—Boldwood as inferior timber to solid Oak.

Time is, of course, of the essence in cinema, and Schlesinger's film as it stands runs over two hours and twenty minutes. Hardy takes the time carefully to explain Boldwood's psychological deterioration, his neglect of the farm, his dependence upon Gabriel, first as bailiff, later as partner, finally as go-between. (No mention is made of this business arrangement in the film, and it should be, since Gabriel must achieve material success before Bathsheba can accept him as her social peer—else the final union could not come about.) At novel's end, moreover, Hardy sustains tension over the issue of whether the courts will sentence Boldwood to be executed or whether he will be spared for reasons of insanity. All of this Schlesinger telegraphs by means of a single pull-back zoom, as the camera withdraws from an image of the incarcerated Boldwood—whose very name suggests he is mad in his boldness, and whose attitude in this final shot suggests confinement in a straitjacket.

Schlesinger's telegraphic style succeeds brilliantly in the first fifteen minutes of Far from the Madding Crowd; but even there Gabriel's first encounter with Bathsheba, when she awakens him and presumably saves his life (an incident which humanizes Gabriel, by the way, by making him appear fallible, as well as foreshadowing his later loss of his livestock) is entirely excised. The film begins somewhat later. Gabriel already knows Bathsheba well enough to tender his proposal of marriage to her aunt.

A bit later Schlesinger does excellently well in the way he visualizes Gabriel's sheep being run over the cliff by the inexperienced and overenthusiastic sheepdog. The filming of this disaster involves only one line of dialogue, taken directly from the novel: “Thank God I am not married” (though Hardy goes on to add “what would she have done in the poverty now coming upon me!).

The first fifteen minutes of the film compresses the first 90 pages of the novel. Much material is obviously deleted, while establishing shots are added with the intention of introducing characters, presumably for the benefit of those who do not know the novel. In the novel, for example, Fanny Robin is first seen as a mysterious figure Gabriel passes in the night on his way to Weatherbury. In the film, she is still employed at Bathsheba's farm when Gabriel arrives there. We see her encountering Sergeant Troy on the highway in daylight during the introductory fifteen minutes so that the romantic link between them can be established succinctly and with visual economy. And though dialogue needs to be invented to serve this purpose, there is nothing wrong in that.

Since Bathsheba obviously knows Fanny Robin by sight in the film, however, the encounter with Troy when she reappears at the far end of the novel needs to be reinvented. Instead of the novel's later encounter on the highway as Fanny makes her fateful trek to Casterbridge, the film places her in Bathsheba's barn where she meets Frank, observed, presumably, by Bathsheba from a distant window in the house. The lock of Fanny's hair that Frank Troy carries in the novel (the knowledge of which gives Bathsheba a motive for opening the poor girl's coffin) is not mentioned at all in the film.

Far from the Madding Crowd is a novel of character and environment, and the opening shot of the film, with the camera drifting down out of the heavens and revealing the countryside, is highly effective, as is the physical setting for Sergeant Troy's sword demonstration, which becomes in the film a patently symbolic rape of Bathsheba. Schlesinger's cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg, was later to evoke a remarkable affinity between man and teeming Nature in his film Walkabout. One doubts that any cameraman would be better suited to undertake the filming of Hardy's “Wessex.” Unfortunately, Roeg does not consistently meet the challenge of capturing the awesomeness of Nature evoked by Hardy's novel. The scene where Oak almost single-handedly rescues Bathsheba's harvested crops from the ravages of a storm comes near the mark, but Schlesinger does not provide the same proportionate time to showing the power of the storm that Hardy gives to describing it. The force and the fury are short-circuited.

One very effective touch in the film is the use of music. At a dinner scene early in the story, for example, Bathsheba sings a ballad just as Boldwood arrives and is invited to join the group, displacing Oak at the head of the table. Her lyrics—“Long time I have been waiting for the coming of my dear”—fuel Boldwood's expectations and prompt him to propose marriage. (“If I show to him my boldness,” the song goes on, suggesting her reluctance to be bold, “he'll never love me again.”)

Another effective component of Schlesinger's film is the way in which it pictures the pastoral setting, “far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,” in the words of Thomas Gray's “Elegy.” The pastoral mood and setting of Hardy's novel is far too complex to be addressed in any detail here, but these are central components of the narrative that need to be captured by the film. In an important essay found in the collection Survivals of Pastoral, Edward L. Ruhe makes a number of proposals concerning the pastoral tradition and its “displacements.” He stipulates the modern pastoral as a literature of innocence, of simplicty, and, as would seem to be the case in Hardy's novel, of nostalgia.¹ Discussing the “most significant minima” of the pastoral, he writes:

All is temperate. The shepherds are not so much free as carefree. They enjoy, as “a gift of the natural world,” a system of exemptions from the hardships incident to life where civilization is concentrated, particularly in cities and courts; and these hardships merge with the burdens of maturity experienced in any social order. Shepherds first enjoy freedom from the physical and moral squalor of crowded societies—from grime, noise, congestion, and confusion on one hand, and from intrigue and anxieties centering in money and status on the other.

It is that freedom that sets Gabriel Oak apart from such men as Farmer Boldwood (a captive of “money and status”) and Frank Troy (caught up in intrigue and plagued with anxiety and guilt) throughout most of the novel. Oak is also in harmony with Nature, as Troy is not. That is why Nature conspires against Troy's attempt to pay a natural tribute to his dead “natural” wife in Chapter 46 (“The Gurgoyle: Its Doings”), compressed to three fleeting shots in Schlesinger's film. Oak is a Stoic in the novel, whose strength of character eclipses the obsessions and anxieties of the other men in Bathsheba's life. Troy is brought into the novel to test Oak's Stoicism, and Boldwood's weakness is a measure of Oak's strength. The film effectively visualizes the pastoral life, but it fails to internalize Oak's pastoral virtues. It does not provide the wherewithal for the viewer to understand the character and what he represents.

Gabriel Oak seems to be a paradigm of a man in harmony with his world, one who is able to rise above “the madding crowd's ignoble strife.” Troy seems to represent a veiled criticism of the aristocracy's profligate habits, and, if so, his reckless treatment of Fanny Robin may carry more significance than is first apparent. Boldwood certainly represents the material striving of the Middle Class; his personal quest for Bathsheba reflects the habits of his class, a man of the new industrial age striving for goals that are beyond his reach. These implications from the novel are not effectively translated into the film.

Schlesinger's rendering of Hardy's novel is an enjoyable film, but it is, one fears, primarily intended to work as superficial entertainment that is, as they say, true to the spirit of the novel. The script succeeds in carrying most of the humiliation motif intact from the novel—the humiliation of Oak and Boldwood at Bathsheba's hands, Boldwood's humiliation by Troy that erodes his dignity and begins the process of his disintegration, Troy's humiliation caused by Fanny's confusion about which church is the assigned meeting place, and, finally, Bathsheba's humiliation when Frank Troy rejects her. The film in fact includes most of the story's dynamics; and though it may at times seem superficial and weak on points of character motivation, it provides an interesting basis for the discussion of what may be possible and tolerable in the process of adapting a “classic” novel to the screen.

Note

1. Edward L. Ruhe, “Pastoral Paradigms and Displacements, with some Proposals,” in Survivals of Pastoral, ed. Richard F. Hardin, Humanistic Studies 52 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1979), p. 117. See also p. 133.