La Renarde

Among the strangest, and loveliest, of the Archers films. As with so many of their films, its real subject is the profound, almost mystical, connection of people to their physical environment, most notably the British countryside. The much under-rated Jennifer Jones gives an utterly fearless performance, throwing herself into a role that sounds unplayable on paper. The Christopher Challis three-strip Technicolor photography is bold and gorgeous, underlining the central importance of the landscape. Strange in the best possible sense, in that it takes us somewhere we've never really been. Even the Bronte sisters couldn't capture rustic England as well. But they never had the benefit of Technicolor.

Somehow this film was made without the incessant tinkering for which David O. Selznick was notoriously famous, presumably because he had allowed his wife, Jennifer Jones, to travel to Great Britain and work her magic untrammelled by his day-to-day presence on the set and in the screening room as rushes were viewed. By all reports, however, he was so horrified by what Powell and Pressburger had wrought that what we on this side of the Atlantic were allowed to view bears only a faint resemblance to the intentions of those English artists,

It has been years since I saw, on a television broadcast, a no doubt truncated and heavily reedited version under its U.S. title, "The Wild Heart" but, as I had before, I was amazed at the "Archers" beautiful, almost florid, use of Technicolor and their apparently reckless disregard for the expectations of an audience weaned on American pablum and the more refined output of their English peers of the cinema.

Miss Jones is vibrantly beautiful and endlessly fascinating as she plays Hazel Woodus and it goes without saying that her support from a memorable cast of carefully chosen players, professional and, I would guess, amateur is of an order that one can always confidently expect from the British both on stage and on screen. It's wishful thinking, at this late date, I suppose but a VHS or DVD version, available to us here in the U.S., would be a remarkable addition to a movie-lover's library.

An unlikely co-production between the British Archers production company, comprising Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and dictatorial Hollywood mogul David O Selznick, unsurprisingly starring the latter's wife Jennifer Jones, "Gone To Earth" is a visually remarkable and emotionally turbulent feature. Set in the rugged Shropshire countryside, the action centres around Jones' child of nature Hazel Woodus, only daughter of a semi-idiotic harpist father. Uneducated and wilful, Hazel is a dark haired beauty of wild, gypsy appearance and along with her unusual, instinctive relationship with animals, in particular, a stray fox she has adopted, is obviously set quite apart from the rest of the God-fearing village community where she and father eke out an existence.

Unwittingly causing havoc in the hearts and I dare say loins of almost every young man she meets, the womenfolk in the neighbourhood have Hazel marked down as a man-baiting temptress. Cast out into the street late at night by the Bible-punching mother of another potential suitor, she falls into the path of the brutish and headstrong local squire, David Farrar, who puts her up at his estate for the night, much to the morally-offended chagrin of his attitudinal man-servant Hugh Griffiths.

Later, at a local fair where Hazel sings accompaniment to her father's playing, she comes into the orbit of the new young pastor, Cyril Cusack, who almost immediately falls for her and proposes marriage, which she's bound to accept. However, Hazel has got into the blood of the caddish squire and a tug-of-love ensues over her which in the end, nobody wins.

I sometimes think these wonderful Archers films should come with a warning, "Abandon reality, all who enter here" as the viewer is transported into a stylised version of the everyday world peopled with highly individual, almost preternatural characters. The Thomas Hardy-esque story abounds with hunting and biblical allegories with Hazel identified both as the elusive fox no huntsman can capture let alone tame and also as an unwitting Eve-like stirrer of passions.

Of course it ends in tragedy but not before the Archers customary blend of sweeping narrative, atmospheric music and stunning colour cinematography has created another notable film almost impossible to categorise. Jones speaks a kind of pidgin-English as she immerses herself in her character, although she's probably most effective when not speaking. She doesn't have to, her dark sexuality and wild strangeness bring the menfolk to their knees anyway. Cusack and Farrar make excellent rivals for her in their different ways, the twin benevolent and malevolent influences on either shoulder of Hazel, speaking in her ear.

I'm no fan of hunting and am fully in favour of the fox-hunting ban in this country but I must admit I was carried along in the chase for Hazel's hand in another brilliant Archers production. As a postscript, singer Kate Bush, who in her youth bore a striking resemblance to Jones' appearance in this film, took inspiration from it for her "Hounds of Love" song.

I believe I saw this movie perhaps 50 plus years ago, as a young man. It must have been in the mid 1950s or around then. I found Jennifer Jones to be a marvelous actress in this movie and found that to be true in other movies she starred in. But I was overwhelmingly struck with the beauty of the Shrophire countryside which to some extent was almost as much of an attraction to me as Jennifer Jones. I have searched for a long time for this movie...but all I could truly remember of it , with the obvious exception of Miss Jones, was the scream or shout at the end of it ----Gone to Earth. I only know have found out what the meaning of that call was. I will be wanting to purchase this movie soon. Don Berghuis

This was a hard film to see for a very long time, at least in any form that would do it justice. But the small snippets of it I'd caught made me steadfastly wait for the day I could view it, and having done so, I can say it's considerably better than its fairly middling reputation.

Maybe the easiest way to describe it is as Powell & Pressburger's "Wuthering Heights" - it's set in that gothic period drama genre, anyway - but at root it's a grown-up, thoughtful and adult romance-of-sorts set on windswept fairy-tale moors.

The two films it fits closest to in their body of work would be "I Know Where I'm Going" (for the elemental setting) and especially Black Narcissus, for the matchless colour photography and mood of suppressed eroticism bubbling savagely beneath the surface. You can feel the invisible forces of superstition and desire affecting events, the tiny figures swamped by a greater Nature beyond their understanding or powers.

As I've already said, this is a grown-up film, a good 15 years or more before its time in its depiction of adultery and complexity of emotion in a potboiler setting. The sexuality in it is not explicit, but it's firmly engraved in stone between the lines of the script and in small moments of quiet force - flickers of understanding, judgement or confusion passing over every face throughout, speaking volumes.

There's a lurid, hyperreal, almost cartoonishly painterly look to the colour films of the 40s and 50s, which was never seen again afterwards, and is now impossible to recreate. This one has the texture of Singin' In The Rain but is, unusually, set largely outdoors, in the real world, in wide open spaces. Because of this, the nature scenes look, gorgeously, straight out of Bambi.

Gone To Earth is not P&P's greatest film, but it's a real treasure nonetheless. A wild, dark, pagan beauty.