Movie Review: Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)

An adaptation of the classic Thomas Hardy romance, Far From The Madding Crowd is visually pleasing but overlong and overinvested in folk culture.

Rural England in the 1860s. Spirited farmgirl Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie) rejects a marriage proposal from her neighbour, humble shepherd Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates). Instead she moves to the larger farm of her uncle, who soon dies and leaves her in charge. Gabriel loses his flock and is forced to seek employment, and is eventually hired by Bathsheba. He continues to love her from afar.

Meanwhile, rich landowner William Boldwood (Peter Finch) is infatuated with Bathsheba and proposes repeatedly, but she cannot commit to him. Instead she falls in love with soldier Frank Troy (Terence Stamp), a scoundrel who jilted his true love Fanny (Prunella Ransome) because she was late to their wedding ceremony. Bathsheba and Troy get married, but he soon reveals his true colours.

Hardy's novel is a celebration of rural farming culture, and director John Schlesinger, working from Frederic Raphael's script, is respectful of the story's cultural grounding. The film is immersed in the mud and soil of farm grounds and the people who toil the land. The secondary characters stay in the background but add salt-of-the-earth colours, and the sights and (almost) smells of hay, corn, markets, sheep, chickens, geese, and pigs pleasantly emanate from the screen.

Unfortunately, the salute to rural England extends to plenty of scenes featuring folk songs and harvest hymns being belted out, and Far From The Madding Crowd starts to strain and sag as characters with bad teeth and bad breath warble away under the influence of bad alcohol. The film extends to a numbing 169 minutes, and rarely does Schlesinger build any momentum, the chapters coming and going with natural beauty but little emotional resonance. As a further example of indisciplined editing and the pursuit of padding, a circus skit is included in its entirety.

The source material's narrative weaknesses further contribute to the fatigue. Bathsheba possess the courage to run a farm and order rough men around, but she is unfortunately inept in her assessment and treatment of suitors. She melts in front of Troy's uniform and juvenile sword play, disregarding the stench of his reputation and obvious social climbing agenda. She strings along the long-suffering Boldwood with a series of non-answers, and worst of all, she routinely mistreats Gabriel, oblivious to their natural compatibility.

In the central role Julie Christie is adequate but errs on the side of 1960s good-natured chic rather than authentic 1860s caked-on toil. Alan Bates, Peter Finch and Terence Stamp stick to single notes as the three men in her life, Stamp registering the best impression by emphasizing Troy's smarminess.

Far From The Madding Crowd is a slow walk in the beautiful countryside, with plenty of potholes on the muddy trail.



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Movie Review: The Flight Of The Phoenix (1965)

A survival adventure, The Flight Of The Phoenix explores tense dynamics among a group of men stranded in the unforgiving desert.

In North Africa, jaded veteran pilot Frank Towns (James Stewart) and his hard drinking navigator Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) are in command of a cargo flight to Benghazi, flying an aging twin-engine Fairchild C-82 Packet airplane. A disparate group of men from various backgrounds are hitching a ride, including British military men Captain Harris (Peter Finch) and Sergeant Watson (Ronald Fraser); French Doctor Renaud (Christian Marquand); German scientist Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Krüger); and several oil field workers including the dimwitted Cobb (Ernest Borgnine).

During the flight Towns encounters a severe sandstorm, first knocking the plane off course then stalling both engines and forcing a hard landing in the desert. The men have plenty of dried dates for food but only enough water for about 10 to 15 days. With no signs of a forthcoming rescue Harris and one other survivor embark on a perilous march through the desert, while Heinrich reveals he is an airplane designer and develops an audacious plan to build a flying plane out of the wreckage.

An adaptation of the 1964 Elleston Trevor novel written for the screen by Lukas Heller and directed by Robert Aldrich, The Flight Of The Phoenix is an epic story of stress, hope and interpersonal dependencies under desperate circumstances. In the classic tradition of survival stories, the film is most interested in exploring emergent conduct and mental pressure when strangers with contrasting perspectives are trapped together for a prolonged period.

Themes of discipline, leadership and the transference of behavioral expectations from routine to emergency contexts permeate through the film. Heller's script delves into the complexities of authority under stress through the hierarchical relationship between Captain Harris and Sergeant Watson. Here codes of discipline and obedience built for war buckle under the strain of bleak prospects unrelated to hostile action. Suddenly deception and cowardice are in play, all in the name of eking out a survival advantage.

More fundamental to the group's prospects is the tension between Captain Towns and Heinrich Dorfmann. The normative leadership of the only man who can fly a plane is challenged once his aircraft is a crumpled wreck in the desert. Heinrich's well-calculated idea to build a new plane may sound insane, but it's the only available plan, and only he can lead it. Towns has already managed to steer his career in a downward spiral towards flying for a fifth-rate cargo operation in the desert with a drunk as his navigator, and yielding authority to a German nerd is not something he can readily accept. The essential role of the moderator, fulfilled by the now forcibly sober Moran, is accentuated.

The performances from James Stewart, Richard Attenborough and particularly Hardy Krüger are sturdy and appropriately layered, helping the film overcome its mammoth 142 minutes of running time. Some episodes serve to unnecessarily prolong the action while thinning the herd, but Aldrich overall keeps his focus on the characters. The resultant drama is engrossing despite most events being confined to a single location in and right around the plane's wreckage.

All men eventually wilt but a few also rise to the challenge. The Flight Of The Phoenix salutes the human ability to adapt and survive against overwhelming adversity.

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Movie Review: The Nun's Story (1959)

A drama about the struggle to adhere to higher ideals, The Nun's Story is a sincere exploration of the conflict between two competing aspirations, both admirable.

In Belgium of the late 1920s, Gabrielle "Gaby" Van Der Mal (Audrey Hepburn) enters a convent to start the process of becoming a nursing nun. Her father Hubert (Dean Jagger) is a famous surgeon, and Gaby's ambition is to provide medical services as a nun in Congo. Gaby commits herself to learning the proper habits of a nun, including long periods of silence, letting go of her past, frequent prayers, and public confession of every transgression in front of all the other nuns. Gaby makes good progress, takes her vows, and is granted the title Sister Luke. But she continues to struggle with the concept of absolute obedience and complete humility. Her background as the daughter of a recognized surgeon is a point of pride, and her love of medicine competes with her dedication to religious ceremony.

Sister Luke serves a stint in a Belgian mental hospital, and is finally assigned to the Congo, where she is disappointed to find herself stationed at a hospital for white people rather than helping the locals. But gradually she proves her value, and is assigned to help the abrasive Dr. Fortunati (Peter Finch) as his head surgical nurse. An unconventional emergency surgery, an unexpected illness, and a shocking incident bring Sister Luke and Fortunati close together, but she is called back to Belgium. When World War Two erupts, Sister Luke is forced to assess the discord between religious duty and the longing to pursue medical and political involvement.

Directed by Fred Zinnemann from a Robert Anderson adaptation of Kathryn Hulme's book (based on the life of her friend Marie Louise Habets), The Nun's Story is involving without necessarily touching the emotional heights that it aims for. The evolution of Gabrielle Van Der Mal into Sister Luke is a ponderous journey filled with introspection, self-evaluation, self-doubt and struggle to conform to an impossible ideal. This is a story about the search for personal fulfillment through individual endeavour, and for long stretches there is not much of interest going on outside of Gabrielle's discovery process and internal thoughts.

The film unfolds like a documentary, an earnest depiction of the sacrifices and ceremony involved in dedicating a life to the service of others. The lack of a narrative thrust makes for a slow but educational first two thirds of the protracted 149 minutes of running time. Hepburn as Gaby is almost silently swept along by the higher calling and fully immersed in unlearning any personal desires while striving for the appropriate inward and outward behaviours of a nun.

The final third of the movie picks up the pace, as Dr. Fortunati proves to be a turning point in Sister Luke's life, then World War Two interferes and pushes for a conclusion about her aspirations and beliefs. The film finally offers a sharply defined dilemma for the main character to grapple with, and the dramatic quotient positively benefits.

Zinnemann directs with his usual courtly approach, giving every scene stately time to breathe, impress and register. The initial transformation of Gaby into Sister Luke, which occupies the first hour, is filled with imposing ceremonies in the Mother House, allowing Zinnemann and his cinematographer Franz Planer to find impressive angles and capture lofty assembly halls filled with solemn extras, while the Franz Waxman music score adds to the ambiance. It's a visual and auditory feast, the dividend achieved from the leisurely pace.

Audrey Hepburn was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award, and her performance is a rewarding study in restraint. Hepburn conveys all her internal conflict from within an ocean of calm and through the briefest of blurted expressions, and only late in the film does she start outwardly expressing clear thoughts that challenge the rules of others. The coarse and refreshingly blunt Peter Finch injects plenty of energy, but is on the screen for a relatively short stretch. The rest of the supporting cast is a large but rather interchangeable sea of faces representing all the nuns that Gaby interacts with over the years.

The Nun's Story is impressive and dignified. What the film lacks in intensity, it more than makes up for in quiet grandeur.

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Movie Review: Network (1976)

A tragi-comic condemnation of the transformation of television news into entertainment, Network is scathing satire at its finest, a talkfest with a lot to say delivered by a cast of performers in peak form.

Veteran news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) of the fictitious UBS network is two weeks away from retirement. Depressed, he has an enraged on-camera meltdown and threatens to kill himself live on the air the following week.

His boss and friend Max Schumacher (William Holden), the head of network news, is horrified, as is Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), the chief representative of CCA, the bottom-line obsessed conglomerate that owns UBS.  Hackett demands that heads should roll, but Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), head of programming, spots an opportunity: Beale can be transformed to an angry modern day messiah, the news broadcast re-imagined as an entertainment spectacle with Beale the centrepiece railing nightly against all the world's injustices.

Walking a fine line between theatrical and genuine madness, Beale delivers another on-air rant with the signature line I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!, galvanizing the viewing public and delivering a huge ratings boost to his new show. Meanwhile, Christensen starts a romantic entanglement with Schumacher, threatening his marriage to wife Louise (Beatrice Straight).

Diane also keeps pushing UBS towards new boundaries of entertainment, insisting on broadcasting a show that celebrates the real-world criminal activities of a far-left group. With Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), the head of CCA, taking a personal interest in Beale's show, events on the air and behind the scenes hurtle out of control, with lives and careers careening towards an unmanageable wreck.

Directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Paddy Chayefsky, Network is a tour de force of smart commentary about the influence of commercialism on television. Built around a series of startling monologues seamlessly intertwined within the story arc of television's descent to the lowest common denominator, Network is a spellbinding experience.

Chayefsky won the Academy Award for original screenplay, and he pinpoints the corporate influence on television as an irresistible force in the wrong direction, the investment of huge dollars demanding a return and driving decisions towards satisfying the basest instincts.

With a new generation of executives exemplified by Faye Dunaway's Diana Christensen much more interested in television news as a money-making show rather than an avenue for the distribution of essential  information, the old school are brushed aside or nonchalantly abused.

Christensen is a most intriguing character, Dunaway winning the Best Actress Academy Award for portraying a charming, driven, passionate, smart, persuasive, impatient and extremely lonely woman. She recognizes her strengths and weaknesses, and matter of factly states that her need to satisfy emotional and physical urges has more in common with men than women. Her relationship with Schumacher is a desperate attempt to bridge generations, both finding in each other everything that they lack and all that they cannot tolerate.

Finch also won the Best Actor Academy Award (posthumously) for the much more showy role of Howard Beale, a man at the centre of the drama but only in the sense of wishing to go out with a bang and being mercilessly used by everyone around him. Schumacher is his only friend, and yet even Max's acquiescence to Howard's requests for continued air-time contribute to Beale's mounting insanity. Certainly Schumacher's liaison with Diana represents sleeping with the ideological enemy.

Robert Duvall and Ned Beatty are extraordinary representations of the new corporate voice dominating programming decisions through ambitious talent like Christensen, and both get to deliver wall-shaking speeches confirming a new world order in which the almighty pursuit of money and ratings trumps all, although when Beatty's Arthur Jensen gets involved, even profit takes a back seat to the on-air glamorizing of the corporate agenda.


The depth of talent and the quality of performances extracted by Lumet extended to Beatrice Straight, who famously won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for the briefest of roles. During her limited screen time she delivers a sharply emotional monologue as Louise Schumacher attempts to decide if her marriage is worth saving.

Network predicted television's demise to a freak-show dominated race to ratings, a condition that continues to paralyse most of the medium. Chayefsky took television's demise to its extreme, forecasting exclamation marks of exploitation and violence that would only come to fruition a couple of generations later.  Network not only shone the spotlight on television's current and future failures, but also brilliantly exposed the human predilection to descend into the soul nullifying pursuit of the wrong objective.

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