England, the 1740s. Squire Allworthy (George Devine) discovers an abandoned baby in his bed one day. It transpires that the baby is born out of wedlock but out of the goodness of his heart, Allworthy adopts it as his own and names him Tom Jones (Albert Finney). Tom grows up to be an adventurous, flirtatious and rebellious individual, in contrast to his virtuous but manipulative cousin, Blifin (David Warner). The community are furious when Tom and a local squire’s daughter, Sophie Western (Susannah York), fall in love, so Tom is forced to run away on a series of absurd and naughty adventures…
Doug says...
I should start by saying that this is one of the first films we have had without options for subtitles, and as I’m hard of hearing this immediately makes it a lot more difficult to sensibly analyse the film - particularly as the sound quality of 1960s films is not particularly high.
But as this ‘comic’ film’s humour is largely visual, I have no doubt in declaring that in my opinion it is awful. It’s got a huge amount of acclaim, and considered one of the funniest films of its time, and yet only one moment managed anything near a laugh from me. There are scenes that according to reviews are ‘iconic’, such as one where Tom Jones and one of his conquests eat food sultrily in front of each other, but to me these scenes were obvious, overlong and unimaginative.
I suspect that at the time it was a film that broke a lot of boundaries - there’s numerous scenes where they show Tom having sex with different women, and everything is a lot looser. But the bawdiness is pushed too far to be comic - at one point a ‘Drunk Farmer’ embraces a woman and they both fall into a haystack. It’s clearly meant to be hilarious but ends up being just weird. It’s Carry On humour - and clearly a piece of its time. A lot of today’s humour is far more witty, with wordplay and comic timing is more ‘in’ than slapstick.
I can’t really comment on the storyline (there’s very few actors who I could actually make out what they’re saying) but the most obvious thing about this film is that they’ve really gone to town in experimenting with scene changes. Some scenes last only a handful of lines, and the whole thing speeds along at a frantic pace - so frantic in fact that a crucial bit of information is delivered at the end direct to camera by an actress. There’s frequent looks-to-camera, constantly shaky camerawork and bizarre choices of angles, which all help with the rushing pace. I imagine the original Henry James novel is huge and they’ve had to condense it into two hours, but the whole thing barely makes any sense.
Good things? Edith Evans is there, thank god. She has a tiny part with a few lines and yet manages to lift the whole thing from mediocrity in every scene she has, and the one laugh I had in the film came from her brutal dismissal of a would-be-highwayman. She’s certainly the only actor who makes themselves noticeable from the whirling maelstrom that is this confusing and hasty film.
It’s also the first film where I’m genuinely at a loss for why it won. With every film you can find some element that must have led to its success, but here we have what feels like a Carry On film with a higher budget and less talent. If it was funny then, it’s certainly dated and I found myself longing for it to end. One to avoid.
Highlight
There’s a lot of dogs running around which is nice. And Edith Evans manages a spark of something in this turgid mess.
Lowlight
The entire film. It was just dreadful. The other films this year must have been dire.
Mark
0.5/10 (it would have been 0 but for Edith)
Paul says...
I will begin by saying that I agree with a majority of what Doug says. But before I go into details, I will first give a History lesson. Yay!
I had the dubious honour of studying Henry Fielding (who wrote the original novel in 1749) at University. Fielding is often credited with being one of the founders of the English novel, along with Daniel “Robinson Crusoe” Defoe, and Samuel Richardson. His exceedingly lengthy and bawdy novels were often categorised as “picaresque”- a genre involving the adventures of a lower-class, good-hearted rogue, often facing off against snobs and religious villains. Fielding combined the sort of philosophical musings one would usually find in poetry with the naughty jokes and sexually-charged plot-lines of Restoration theatre to create an all-new type of writing. Like him or loathe him, Fielding is a turning point in literary history.
The film succeeds in capturing Fielding’s style. It’s fast-paced, with short, snappy scenes and dialogue that gets right to the point. It’s eventful and has a pithy narrator. It’s rambunctious and not afraid to throw some literal and metaphorical winks to the camera and Kenneth Williams-style asides. And the entire cast look like they’re having a whale of a time, which helps to accentuate Fielding’s sense of fun. Hugh Griffith and Edith Evans, who play Sophie Western’s Father and Aunt, steal most of their scenes, with the former being a drunken, clumsy oaf and the latter being his austere and dignified comic foil. You get the sense that everyone was having a laugh behind camera as well as in front of it, which is refreshing to see considering that a majority of Best Picture winners tend to take themselves very seriously.
Where the film fails miserably for me is the fact that they’ve kept to Fielding’s style so faithfully, that they’ve maintained his glaring faults. The story feels like it is all over the place, and moves forward in jumps and starts, sometimes with some lengthy, overdone moments such as a vicious deer hunt emphasising the brutality of these country dwellers, and then some extremely fast scenes in which important plot points are lost amidst shouting and silliness. There are some examples of innovative writing, such as the opening scenes being done in the style of a comic silent film, setting the tone very well, and a climactic scene in which one character turns to the camera and quickly summarises everything that’s going on. But the film doesn’t keep this creative momentum going for its full two hours.
And finally, the biggest issue, for Fielding and for his cinematic adaptation, is that it’s just not very funny. It’s silly, yes. It has the mishaps, misunderstandings and escalations that make Frasier and Fawlty Towers so hilarious, but it’s all so chaotic and overly done that even I, who do not require subtitles, was struggling to understand what was going on. There’s a great bit of storyline when a large number of characters coincidentally convene at a country inn which ends in Tom’s escape through a window, several bed-hops, and a couple of fainting women, but the comedy is drowned out by the frantic camera work and lack of build-up. Other background jokes such as a disobedient horse are also lost by sudden cuts and actors shouting over each other.
Comedy is such a rarity for us on this sojourn through Best Picture winners, but Tom Jones did not prove to be the refreshing alternative treat that I hoped for. It's outdated chaos, and probably won due to the increased sexual permissiveness in the '60s (and because its opponent was Cleopatra, which was over 4 hours).
Highlight
Edith Evans’ escape from an amateur highwayman, in which she simply shouts at him undeterred and drives her carriage onward, elicited the only laugh from me.
Lowlight
See above.
Mark
1/10
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