Word: richardson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...JONES. Director Tony Richardson has made the greatest comic novel in the language into a gaudy, bawdy, bloody, beautiful and side-shatteringly funny farce, the best British movie since Olivier's Henry V. Albert Finney plays the hero as a marvelously likable lout, and Hugh Griffith hilariously demonstrates that in the good old days an Englishman whose passion was the chase could usually run down a pretty little dear...
...Upon my word," said Coleridge, "I think Tom Jones one of the three most perfect plots ever planned." It is also one of the most intricate; a film of the full book might take six hours to show. Director Richardson and Scenarist John Osborne decided to tell the whole story -well, almost-but tell it so fast that six hours of hilarity are squeezed into two. And let the gasping customers fall where they...
Courage, Dear Reader! Lo and Behold are Fielding's favorite characters, and Richardson makes frequent and gloriously funny use of them. His actors catch the spirit of the thing from the first scene, and they have a picnic. The characters are rumbustious caricatures. Joyce Redman is a soggy old piece of cake. Finney is Tom clean through-a fine strapping country boy whose heart is in the right place even when his foremost interest isn't. But Hugh Griffith is the man to watch. A tankard in one hand, a buttock in the other, Squire Western superbly defines...
...portrait amuses but it also macerates. Richardson is angrier than Fielding was, and he sharpens the author's satire to a cruel point. His scenes in the London slums are brief but harrowingly Hogarthian: and Squire Western's hunt explains more powerfully than words could possibly explain the senselessness and horror of blood sport. Mile after mile the chase goes on: the running deer all terror and loveliness, the men and the dogs all grinning the same blank, murderous, animal grin. Then all at once the deer collapses. Blood in their eyes, the men and the dogs fall...
Satire has seldom shown a more horrifying face. Nevertheless, in Richardson as in Fielding, satire is not the essence of what is said. The animal ferocity of Tom Jones is essentially an excess of animal spirits, of roaring ungovernable physical vitality. Vitality is what Tom Jones is really all about: the terrible vitality of Fielding's England, the primitive illimitable will to live the whole of life. You are a pack of dirty dogs. Fielding told his fellow men, but then every dog will have his day. The great novelist saw all the slavering horror of life...