Researcher in Focus: Tim Dolin

John Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) is now recognised as a significant achievement, but for a long time it was considered the one failure of the director's golden period-the decade beginning with A Kind of Loving (1962) and ending with Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971). Schlesinger himself was adamant he hadn't wanted to make it. Prompted by the runaway success of Darling (1965), MGM urged him to direct a big-budget roadshow picture with Julie Christie, instead of the more intimate adaptation he had in mind, with Vanessa Redgrave as Thomas Hardy's headstrong heroine, Bathsheba Everdene. Christie was then playing Lara in Doctor Zhivago (1966), so audiences were used to seeing the face of Swinging London in a sumptuous costume drama. But the glaring similarities between Crowd and Darling dogged the film's reception. Christie's Bathsheba seemed to be only a period recreation of the restless, empty, ambitious Diana Scott of the earlier film; and Terence Stamp's Sergeant Troy a wooden clothes-horse for a Sergeant Pepper-ish military jacket.

At the same time, Schlesinger was condemned for adhering slavishly to Hardy's novel and producing a film that was too literary to work effectively as cinema (despite Nicolas Roeg's luminous, expansive cinematography), and too much of a hotchpotch of genres and registers to find an audience. It was at once too austere and sombre, yet too bountifully pastoral; too melodramatic and implausible, yet too undramatic and slow-moving, with its unhurried exposition, lingering, symbolically rich visual style, and social-realist obsession with historical authenticity. Hardy's was a famously cinematic imagination, drawn to images, scenes, and visual drama, but his fiction has never adapted well to film. As arcadian as his landscapes appear, his characters and communities struggle against the devastating social and psychological effects of industrial modernity, as the old social order is overturned, and once permanent ways of life yield to itinerancy, dislocation, and migration. These social changes were also registered forcefully in the unstable forms of Hardy's fiction, which were criticised (just as Schlesinger's film was) for flat characters, sensationalism, preposterous coincidences, and an awkward style. Realism, unable to represent what was happening in society, seeks tragedy but slips in and out of farce; and poetic lyricism vies with rustic charm and satirical comedy. Most of all, the momentum of his fiction is constantly stalled by what critics have described "rivetingly irrelevant" visual details.

Of all the Hardy films, only Far from the Madding Crowd (the first adaptation of the sound era) manages to capture this distinctive clashing of genres and intensification of visual effects. So did Schlesinger intend to replicate this aspect of Hardy's writing, or was it an accidental effect of the dynamics and pressures of commercial film-making? The Schlesinger papers at the BFI National Library contain some fascinating clues: in Frederic Raphael's script, Schlesinger's detailed instructions to his editor, and minutes and letters between Schlesinger, Raphael, and Joseph Janni, the film's producer. These documents evidence the struggles between creative individuals and restrictive industrial conditions of production: struggles that Hardy, too, faced in writing Far from the Madding Crowd in 1873-4. Schlesinger tellingly concluded his comments for the final cut with the declaration: "Made on location in Dorset with blood sweat and a great many tears." Over-long and over-budget, Janni's insistence on cutting or rewriting entire scenes to appease MGM presented extraordinary challenges to his director's storytelling skills and artistic vision. As the editing script makes clear, Schlesinger knew the novel intimately and understood well its shifts in register. Late in the film, for example, there is a highly melodramatic night-time scene in which Troy cruelly spurns Bathsheba over the open coffin of Fanny Robin and her baby, and she runs away. The ensuing scene shows her waking in an overgrown thicket and, in a long point-of-view pan, following a schoolboy trying to learn a psalm off by heart on his way to school. It is a turning point for her. Janni wanted this scene removed - it's "certainly extremely moving", he wrote, but it's "only a red herring" - but Schlesinger held firm: "At all costs to be preserved. My favourite scene and the truest in many ways to the spirit of the book ... Important to stress the matter of factness of every day life against the tension and drama within it". Here, truly, is one of Hardy's "moments of vision".