Best Picture:#36
Original Release Date: June 26, 1963
Rating: Not Rated
Runtime: 2 hours, 9 minutes
Director: Tony Richardson
Quick Impressions:
I saw this film when I was about twelve and despised it, but I think all the shaky cam and night-time sequences were a bit hard to follow on an old school, standard definition 90s television set. The reason I sought out the film in the first place is that when I was in elementary school, I saw Tom Jones on the stage and loved it. (I mean I saw a local theater group perform a stage adaptation of Henry Fielding’s novel, not that I was fortunate enough to catch the famed Welsh singer in performance.)
For the life of me, I can’t remember what on earth I was doing at a stage production of Tom Jones. My guess is, it was either part of the Backstage with the Arts program I was in at school, or it was a work function for my father, and I got asked along. At any rate, in the past, the plot and teeming comic energy of Tom Jones delighted me, but the film decidedly did not (strange since I was a bigger Albert Finney fan than most people my age thanks to our family’s love of Scrooge, Murder on the Orient Express, and Annie).
I was actually dreading watching this one with my daughter because I worried she would hate it as I had, but tried to play that close to the chest. We watched it in three parts, and the first, while not as awful as I’d remembered, was pretty weak and strange. But then the second part improved substantially and became, at moments, hilarious. The third part, unfortunately, lost momentum, though the ending was good (sort of). My daughter now insists that Tom Jones is the strangest Best Picture winner we’ve seen, though I say that honor still belongs to Around the World in 80 Days.
The Plot:
In the West of England in the 1700s, Squire Allworthy returns from a trip to London and discovers a mysterious baby in his bed. Everyone assumes this foundling must be the bastard son of servant girl Jenny Jones, who is promptly turned out of the house. Squire Allworthy decides to raise the child as his own ward and names him Tom. Soon Tom grows into a robust young man, full of lust for life (and any woman he encounters).
Tom is a good-hearted guy, but he sleeps with everyone and his mother, which sometimes gets him into trouble. Things get serious when the beautiful young lady Sophie Western movies to the area, and Tom falls madly in love with her. Sophie’s father and aunt don’t want her to throw herself away on a foundling bastard. They want her to marry Tom’s cousin Blifil for some reason. (Well the reason is he’s rich. He’s Squire Allgood’s nephew and heir, but he’s also conspicuously charmless.)
Thanks to Blifil’s machinations (and his own inability to keep his pants on) Tom is thrown out of Squire Allworthy’s home and ends up having a series of misadventures. This doesn’t do Blifil much good, though, since Sophie Western sneaks away in the night and goes chasing after Tom, narrowly missing him in scene after scene. Will Sophie catch up with Tom before his free-loving antics do? And what will happen to Blifil once Squire Allworthy inevitably discovers the contents of the note Blifil has hidden from him?
The Good:
If you see this film, watch on the biggest screen possible in the highest definition available. I say this because when I first saw it on VHS on a relatively small, square CRT TV, I could barely figure out what was going on in the night scenes, so frequent early in the film. This made me dislike the movie more than it deserves. This time around, I found Tom Jones pretty watchable, though undoubtedly strange.
The movie goes for a tone of antic comedy and sometimes succeeds. In these gleaming moments of success, Tom Jones can be quite funny. Though Albert Finney (for some reason nominated for Best Actor here) makes an engaging lead and is, in general, a gifted actor, the MVPs of this film are without doubt Hugh Griffith and Edith Evans as Squire Western and his sister, the father and aunt of Tom’s beloved Sophie. These two (both Oscar nominated for their supporting performances) manage to be more consistently humorous than the rest of the cast and so, steal the entire middle of the movie.
I’ve heard that Griffith was actually drunk while filming most of his scenes. I don’t know how true that is, but it’s easy to believe. The character certainly appears intoxicated as he blusters forth and charges around (sometimes even falling off his horse!), so why shouldn’t the actor be? The sheer intensity of Griffith’s over-the-top bluster makes the character impossible not to love (or at least to want to watch).
He and Evans drive the middle section of the film, and that’s when the pacing seems best, and the action and humor work together to create a fairly consistent tone (not to mention an engaging story). She also forces us to love her on screen through sheer persistence. (How can you not love a woman who simply refuses to acknowledge that she is being robbed by a highwayman? Her powers of denial rival my mother’s. I can imagine my mom in such a scene. “Yield!” “Mm…no.”)
To my shock, three performers in Tom Jones were nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and each of them takes her turn to stand out in a different portion of the film. I was first captivated by the performance of Diane Cilento as Molly Seagrim, the exact sort of cheeky mischief maker who always appeals to me. Too bad Cilento doesn’t have a bigger role. Her performance is a huge highlight of the early part of the film. Had Molly been in the film longer, Cilento might have won the Oscar. (The winner that year was Margaret Rutherford for The V.I.P.s, a performance I’ve seen and a win that delighted me. I grew up watching Rutherford’s wonderful take on Miss Marple, and after discovering that she was bipolar, I developed an even greater affinity for her.)
I’ve already mentioned that Edith Evans was also nominated. The third Best Supporting Actress nominee in the film is Joyce Redman who benefits tremendously from being in some of the scenes of the movie that work the best. (Perhaps they work best, in part, because of her performance as Mrs. Waters.)
The supporting cast of the movie features all sorts of famous faces, but I was most surprised to see David Warner as Blifil, Julian Glover as Northernton, and David Tomlinson (without his mustache) as Lord Fellamar. Tomlinson really looks different without that mustache. (If you don’t know him…you probably do and just don’t realize it. He’s the dad in Mary Poppins and also appears in tons of other Disney movies.) David Warner is also in a Mary Poppins feature. He’s Admiral Boom in the recent Mary Poppins Returns. And Julian Glover is best known to me as the man who chooses poorly at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (I’m quite familiar with all three of these actors, as older men. They’re so young here! They’re almost unrecognizable!) Though not nominated for Best Supporting Actress, Joan Greenwood is quite engaging as Lady Bellaston late in the film.
Tom Jones also won Best Director and Best Screenplay (which I find somewhat surprising) and Best Score (which I do not. The music is consistently excellent.)
Best Scene:
Why in the world is this scene so entertaining? After rescuing Mrs. Waters from a fate worse than death, Tom takes her to an inn where they enjoy a lengthy, obnoxiously consumed feast, a mix of traditional aphrodisiacs and greasy game fowl. Sometimes highly suggestive, sometimes merely disgusting, always absurd, this ridiculous dinner of seduction nearly killed my daughter.
“Why is there just weird ASMR?” she demanded amidst all their lubricated lip smacking and suggestive licking. “This makes me highly uncomfortable!”
At the point when Finney starts eating pears, stem and all, I had to admit, “Okay, this is my favorite scene of the movie!” Suddenly my son (who was supposed to be asleep) appeared on the stairs and announced through giggles, “Um…this is my favorite scene of any movie!”
The raunchy suggestiveness drove my daughter crazy, which was fine because the scene is played for laughs. Her five-year-old brother didn’t get the innuendo, but he enjoyed the general ludicrousness of the moment. All three of our kids love joking about ASMR. Our almost eighteen-year-old is convinced that most dedicated ASMR streamers on YouTube make their channels ridiculous on purpose, so his adoring younger brother and sister are always delighted to laugh at people eating things in conspicuously noisy ways. Only if Tom and Mrs. Waters had concluded their over-the-top feast by popping bubble wrap while crunching on ice could my children have been more overjoyed!
For me, this scene is the most genuinely funny of the film. The relentlessness of its commitment to ludicrousness finally won me over. Finney and scene partner Joyce Redman genuinely crack me up here as they push the ridiculousness further, further, further. It’s a bit like Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes. At first, it’s mildly funny. Then quickly, it veers into strange territory. But it’s able to maintain this strangeness for so long that eventually it becomes out and out hilarious. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I would have watched a whole movie of Tom Jones and Mrs. Waters eating dinner. The tone of this scene very much conveys the vibe of the entire movie. Director Tony Richardson (whom I always unfairly think of as the father of Vanessa Redgrave’s daughters rather than remembering him for his own fine body of work) is clearly trying to create a carnally-oriented period comedy. Instead of implying (as films often do) that the past was all dour, drab, and formal, Richardson gives us off-kilter hilarity, blood-sport, brawling, bewilderment, dining, drinking, ineffectual highway robbery, and lots and lots of (arguably) no-strings-attached sex. This scene gives us a perfect example (in miniature) of what the film should be when it is working.
Best Action Sequence:
What goes on at the Upton Inn is a wild (goose chase) of hilarity. I gleefully (and descriptively) cried out, “High speed harpsichord chase with no pants!” The kids died laughing. This scene comes not long after that fantastically bizarre dinner for two I just described. The general zaniness these two scenes capture is what I remember loving about the stage play, but the movie doesn’t maintain this energy as successfully.
Tom Jones actually contains quite a bit of memorable action, though. There’s also a surprise brawl in the church graveyard during which people begin clubbing each other with (presumably human!) bones. Near the end of the film, we get a fairly exciting impromptu swordfight, too, and a fantastic rescue on horseback as the big finish.
Best Scene Visually:
The hunt looks absolutely gorgeous–until they start hunting. As I watched, I did find myself wondering how the countryside looked so orderly back before lawn mowers. (I know trimming grass and maintaining fields is not a new thing. I just realized as I watched this that I have no idea how these things were done in the mid-1700s.)
Another winning moment comes when two characters listen at a keyhole. I liked all of the silly, over-the-top editing here, though my daughter found it a tad obnoxious. (I do think it would have looked better in sharper focus.)
The Negatives:
The film has its moments, but it’s tonally uneven (and surely more often and more drastically than it intends to be). Sometimes it hits its so-bizarre-it’s-funny target, but far too often, it just seems vaguely bizarre, not particularly funny.
It’s also worth mentioning that the protagonist’s roguish charm and tendency to fall into bed with any woman he sees probably played better in the 1960s than it did with my daughter. She did not consider Tom’s many ill-considered romps the least bit funny. Well, she did laugh sometimes, but she thought Tom’s thoughtless promiscuity did not make him boyfriend material. (Many of Tom’s misadventures have a comedy of errors feel, and yet Sophie’s impression that he is constantly cheating on her with everyone is not the false result of some misunderstanding. He really does have sex with anyone who asks. Now, to be fair, although the local community shames the female partners involved in Tom’s sexcapades, the movie does not. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose as far as this movie is concerned. As portrayed by the film, all of the women sowing their wild oats along with Tom appear to be perfectly delightful (and happy) people. In that way, the film is very progressive. Maybe that’s part of the reason why it really spoke to audiences in the 1960s. But Sophie herself does not go around sleeping with everyone, and I don’t blame my daughter for having her doubts that her marriage to Tom will turn out to be a happy one long term.
My daughter also hated the film’s showy editing. I’m sure this is all done for comedic effect–ostentatious scene wipes, accelerated frame rate, fading-to-black, use of a spotlight, zooming in on characters as they break the fourth wall! You name it! She raved, “It’s like a child first learning to edit and using all the effects!” These kooky devices didn’t bother me as much, but I also didn’t think they were used to best effect. (I’m always pained when I can see something is meant to be funny yet isn’t all that funny. It gives me a pang of anguish.)
What I didn’t like was all the shaky cam. It’s done to show urgency, to emphasize the repeat chaotic scramblings of all the characters in this story. I get that. But it still makes the film quite unpleasant to watch at times. (On a smaller, square, CRT screen, it was nearly unbearable, disorienting, sickening.) To be honest, I am never a fan of shaky cam. I tolerate it when it’s done well, and I mind it less when I see it is being used for a reason and creating the intended effect. But personally, I just don’t like it.
Also the film’s celebration of carnality was a bit much for my tastes. (I don’t mean Tom’s libido. The story wouldn’t be entertaining at all if he weren’t constantly entangled with a woman.) I mean the way characters always smack greasy meat with their mouths open, belch, fart, engage in blood sport, and attack each other with human bones and random farm animals. I’m particularly not a fan of the blood sport. The viciousness of the hunters in one scene almost turned my stomach. (Perhaps that’s the intended effect, but it’s not much fun to watch.)
Also, while the performances are pretty good across the board, Albert Finney is capable of much more than he’s asked to do here, and Susanna York is pretty flat as the respectable but bland Sophie Western. (Yes, I know. She escapes out the window in the middle of the night and starts chasing after Tom. So Sophie is interesting on paper, but as played by York, she is definitely the least exciting woman in Tom’s orbit. I’m assuming that’s the way York is being told to play the part, of course. And, to be fair, not everyone can charge around madly like her onscreen father and aunt.
Overall:
If you want to watch Tom Jones, I highly recommend the play I saw in elementary school. If that particular production is not still running (and you never know! I mean look at The Mousetrap!) then you might as well check out this Albert Finney led Best Picture winner of 1963. Lawrence of Arabia is a tough act to follow, and this does fall far short of that mark, but the film still has its charms, including a few scenes that did make us laugh out loud.