Far From the Madding Crowd

I can remember 1967 all too well, at least I can remember various intense portions of it. It was confusing because so much novelty was surrounded by so many apparently unchanging and unyielding things.  

 

The film accompanying this recording of Bob Dylan singing ���Don���t Think Twice, It���s All Right��� gives an excellent and (to me) rather moving idea of the slow birth of the modern world in the midst of what was still more or less the 1930s. I can remember this chilly London, the smell and feel of it.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Y3KfJs6T0

 

Brown tea, made from leaves,  was still being drunk in the sadly-furnished parlours of old-fashioned houses in stolid brick towns.  Smoke still drifted from factory chimneys over murky canals and tank engines still shunted long lines of clanking coal trucks in urban sidings. Drizzle was the normal state of affairs.  There was something on the radio called ���The Light Programme���.   Factory hooters and church bells still marked the passing of the hours, and people rode bicycles not because it was cool but because that was what they could afford.  Right on the edge of this unchanging if exhausted landscape (supposedly that of a great power recently victorious in world war) ,  the yelling of Mick Jagger could just be heard, and in parts of London the sexual revolution and the drugs culture were, briefly, more open and radical about what they really wanted than they have ever dared to be since. They had not learned the Blairite lesson that a man in a suit, who minds his manners,  can be far more revolutionary than a shouting youth in a donkey jacket.

 

 The cultural revolution was gestating in the still-living body it was going to destroy. It wasn���t like a natural birth, more like the dreadful scene in ���Alien��� where the creature bursts out of the chest of its unwitting host, killing him in the process. 

 

I was looking through some old Youtube films of 1960s pop songs a few months ago, and found film of (I think) Manfred Mann, singing a curious, furtive little ditty in 1965 called ���If you got to go, go now������. The next line ran ���Or else you got to to stay all night���. (Paul Jones, by the way,  definitely did not sing ���gotta��� , but ���got to���. American still didn���t come naturally.  ).

 

It���s perfectly clear what he���s talking about and on the record the words are clear too. I think, but can���t now be sure, that it was broadcast uninterrupted on the radio - though in those days there was no BBC Radio 1, and Radios London and Caroline wouldn���t have banned any record for sexual innuendo.   But in the filmed version (presumably shown on TV) the bit about staying  all night, and another clear reference to sexual intent is drowned  by the screams of girls in the audience, presumably dubbed to obscure the suggestion of fornication, since it repeatedly happens at the same point. I���ve wonder if this is why Fairport Convention recorded the same song in French in 1969.

 

This last gasp of public puritanism reminds me of the response of America���s Ed Sullivan show to the Rolling Stones��� 1967 song ���Let���s Spend the Night Together��� , which had to be bowdlerised to ���Let���s spend some time together��� before Sullivan would allow them to sing it on air.

 

Talking so directly about sex in public, especially where the older generation might be present, was still taboo in most places, though far more so in North America.  No doubt there was plenty of sex going on, though I think we were still well short of the relaxation of morals so well symbolised by the activity known as ���the Line-up���, described by Allison Pearson in her Daily Telegraph column yesterday, 2nd September 2015.  Inhibition was still strong.  Nice girls were quite easily shocked by things that would nowadays pass unnoticed. And contraception for the unmarried was not straightforward at all, or reliable.

 

Into this neither-one-thing-nor-the-other world came John Schlesinger���s film version of Thomas Hardy���s ���Far From the Madding Crowd��� which, by the normal standards of the Dorset Merchant of Gloom, has a sort of happy ending, so making it more suitable for filming than (for instance) the relentlessly miserable ���Jude the Obscure��� .

 

A recent remake, perfectly good in its own right, caused me to want to see this version again ��� partly because I find it hard to believe that 1967 is now farther from me in time than the General Strike was when I first saw it. But also partly because it is more or less perfect, as far as any film can be.  Four scenes ��� Sergeant Troy���s swordplay,  the harvest storm,  Fanny Robin���s death and Bathsheba���s ripping-open of her coffin,  and Mr Boldwood���s ghastly, disastrous Christmas ball ���  will stay in my mind for as long as my memory is any good.  And because three of its four central actors ��� Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Terence Stamp ��� so well symbolise and sum up the strange atmosphere of that time - wild, temptingly dangerous and exhilarating as well as rash, destructive and scornful. Peter Finch is just as good, but not part of that moment.  Finch is no longer with us, and the  others are all well on in age, so to see them in their primes is a curious thing. How strange it must be to have such powerful records of your own young years, available to you and to everyone.

 

Julie Christie is a daughter of empire, whose father was an Assam tea planter. She was also an early victim of a broken marriage. Terence Stamp, a grammar school boy,  is the son of a tugboat captain. Alan Bates (later knighted, also gone from s - thanks to those readers who pointed this out to me) was another grammar school boy.

 

There could and would never be another generation quite like that, brought up in one set of ideas (which were not always upheld by their parents��� generation) and then told to despise them,  educated to a standard we would now find startlingly high,  and then released into the magic toyshop of 1960s London.

 

Perhaps this confusing background is one of the reasons why  their portrayal of the fierce and illusion-free earthiness of 19th-century rural England (still thought of as not really in good taste in suburban 1960s England)  is especially good.

 

In Hardy���s world, women do get pregnant out of wedlock.  But they can also die in misery as a result. Women also talk among themselves about the failings of men with surprising freedom (���they do say he has no passionate parts���).   And when the farm labourers sing the old songs, which in this version they do at some length and rather beautifully,  there���s a half-expressed bawdy longing to them, even though the same men will be at church on Sunday, singing psalms and hymns. In this version of the film,  when there are scenes in church, we don���t just get snatches of hymns, but whole verses.

 

A greater variety of English faces was available then than now, I think, and many of them are on display in all their toothy, toothless, gnarled or uneven naturalness. The workhouse master and mistress, grim gargoyles of chilly public charity, could have been drawn by Tenniel.   

 

There���s also a lot of honesty about drink. The man driving Jenny���s coffin back to her home village becomes horribly, shamefully drunk in a way that was quite rare in England after the First World War.  I���ve seldom seen hangovers so well acted as they are by the men (including a shamefaced parson) inveigled and threatened into debauchery by Sergeant Troy while the wind  tears through the hayricks outside. You can almost feel the sore, heavy heads, foul, crusted tongues and nauseous stomachs as they shamble out into the blank, unforgiving morning, in some cases pausing to be quietly sick.

 

They couldn���t have shown these things, the drink or the misery,  ten years before. To this day I���ve seldom seen anything on screen so shocking and distressing as Fanny and her dead baby in the coffin.

 

This incident has a special grimness for me as l learned a few years ago that my own grandfather, then a boy of about 12, unconvinced by a hospital���s explanation of his beloved sister���s death, crept downstairs at dead of night in their narrow Portsmouth house to the room where her coffin rested, and unscrewed the lid to make sure it was her. It is a scene that Hardy could have written , but which in this case actually happened.

 

As for Stamp as Sergeant Troy, how easily you can see why he steals their hearts away, and why they won���t believe how bad he really is, and why they never really cease to love him.  With that astonishing face and that swaggering carriage, he might have been born to play the part of Temptation in a morality play.  And just then, in 1967, Temptation was once again welcome in polite society.  

 

Funnily enough, hanging having just been abolished at the time the film was made, another particularly searing sequence (another coffin is required for this)  suggests that Boldwood is to be hanged, whereas in the book he is reprieved.

 

Oh, it���s full of power and light and memorable things. Films as good as this are seldom made.  See it if you can.  It dares to be three hours long, and I would say that not a minute of that is wasted. A new restored version is available on DVD, and if you are really lucky ( as I was) , there might be an arthouse cinema showing it on a big screen. If you���re still around in 48 years, I can practically promise you that you won���t have forgotten it.