Far from the Madding Crowd

A beautiful, provocative, and bull-headed country girl (Julie Christie) inherits her uncle's farm and insists on running it herself, while inviting the affections of three suitors, a noble shepherd (Alan Bates) , a bottled up landowner (Peter Finch), and a roguish British soldier (Terence Stamp), and falling in love with the most inappropriate one. John Schlesinger's "Far from the Madding Crowd" is a sumptuous screen adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel, that features splendid cinematography from Nicolas Roeg. The film is supposedly faithful to the book, and successfully captures notions of independence, repression, unrequited love. Its superb cast is uniformly excellent, with Christie running a gamut of emotions amidst her three powerful male supporters. "Far from the Madding Crowd" is not only well-realized and brilliantly acted literary treatment, but also a modern and relatable cinematic fare.