Great Britain

To pull as fine-looking a film out of as densely textured a novel as Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd is an achievement to be grateful for. Director John Schlesinger, scenarist Frederic Raphael and lighting cameraman Nicholas Roeg certainly succeeded. Images couldn't better convey Hardy's themes of man's isolation in Nature or the brute force of destiny and one constantly marvels at Roeg's photography. You remember the rider in a gigantic fold of Dorset downland like an ant on a brown blanket. Or the moment Hardy's heroine, Bathsheba Everdene, is blown like a white snowflake over the heath to where her soldier lover stands waiting in a fiery uniform - and we watch fire melt snow. This is a love story about a wilful woman who makes the wrong choice and lives to repent of it. Julie Christie plays Bathsheba, a landed lady, whose hand (and fortune) is courted by three men. One is a swashbuckling Army womaniser (Terence Stamp), another a devoted herdsman (Alan Bates) and the third a confirmed bachelor (Peter Finch), who is said to 'lack passionate parts', until Bathsheba starts his sap rising. The emotions Bathsheba stirs in her three lovers are shown to us in a manner entirely consistent with the novelist's intuitive feel for the way Nature moves in all the growing things of his fictitious Wessex. One bravura passage has Stamp laying siege to his beloved in a cut-and-come-again series of mock charges and lunges with his cavalry sword, pressing home his wild, wind-blown seduction till the sabre stands planted in the turf winking out its owner's victory. But it is generally with a more leisurely and impeccable sense of period that the film takes in the diurnal round of country matters - the downland circuses, grand balls, harvest festivals, rustic sing-songs and violent storms which seem like visitations on the follies of the men and women they enfold. This film was made in 1967. Even in a decade of impressive photography few British films had more visual richness. ALEXANDER WALKER