Tom Jones : Entre l'alcôve et la potence

While my mother claims this is a "guy movie," I'm not a guy and find it one of the funniest, most charming movies ever made. The narration, music and just plain spunky tone of this movie makes it a unique piece -- you really DO have to see it to understand what it's all about! I highly recommend this movie -- as well as the book, which was published in 1749 but is just as funny today and highly readable, not "quaint" at all!

In 1963 two of the most important productions in the history of movie making were released. The first was: "Cleopatra" with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, a cast as long as the Manhattan telephone directory and a budget bigger than the combined egos of the stars. "Cleopatra" was a total disaster. It has no redeeming quality that I know of. It is therefore important for embodying in one film, nearly everything that you can do wrong in making a movie. It is a movie that you must see if you are ever to understand what a truly good film really is. The second was: "Tom Jones" with Albert Finney and Susannah York, shot with rented equipment and costumes on the streets of London with a supporting cast of brilliant British ensemble players and extras who stood-in just to get in a film. Tom Jones is simply one of the best motion pictures of all time, for my money, The Best from Literature.

John Osborne who wrote the screen play produced a marvelous vehicle, but the genius of "Tom Jones" is Tony Richardson. He moves the actors and the story about the screen with a bawdy grace and earthy gentility that paints action and raucous laughter and beauty across one another with an even hand. It is a glimpse of antiquity so close and real that we can nearly touch it, and it makes us want to. (Though to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure we'd care for the smell of it.)

"Tom Jones" is a low budget, low tech, high quality film that must win the award for the "Most with the Least." The photography is beautiful, not because it used a dozen half million dollar cameras, it is beautiful because it is good photography. The acting wins out, and casts of thousands would only serve to clutter the stage. See this film whenever, wherever and as often as you possibly can.

I find it almost impossible to believe that there are people out there that did not find movie hilarious. There are so many memorable scenes, so many wonderful lines and such great acting! This is easily one of the most entertaining movies I've ever seen, and definitely the most entertaining British film. It gets a perfect 10.

Tome Jones came out of the wonderful 60's when all the stuffy conventions of British theater, film and music were turned upside down. I first saw this film while stationed in Wiltshire in the Royal Air Force, and having grown up in the industrial West Riding of Yorkshire, my eyes had only recently been opened to the staggering beauty of the English countryside.

Tom Jones represented that unspoiled English countryside to me. I could smell the hay, the wildflowers and the livestock. Never mind that unless you were rich it was serf labor, I saw England through a wonderful fantasy of a film. The action never stopped. This movie was just hilarious from beginning to end. No glossing over the crude realities of country life - this was a period when the poor folk shared their hovels with the chickens and other small animals, when sex was raw, albeit punished on Sundays, and when the local gentry had their way with the wenches.

Rarely has there been such a belly laugh of a movie. Laugh until the tears roll down your face.

Just two hundred years after Henry Fielding's novel appeared, the theatre-actor-turned-cinema-director Sir Tony Richardson rounded up a few Shakespearean-trained prodigees, got John Addison to compose hectic clavichord accompaniment a little in the style of Handel operas and set all this against lush photography to produce one of the most hilarious films of the last five hundred years. Fielding's novel – which is a most definite recommendation – rather cynically but good-humouredly exposed mid-eighteenth century British hypocrisy at its best and the landed gentry's obsession for fox-hunting at its worst. Richardson directed all this a bit like an elderly Sir Thomas Beecham ('the important thing is we all start and stop together; nobody notices what happens in between') raising his baton in front of the London Symphony Orchestra: the result in both cases is astounding. Richardson conducts his piece at a tremendous pace, Addison's clavichord tripping along gaily so as to keep up the illusion, and visual sequences such as a young trouserless Albert Finney escaping out of a window, shinning down a tree and running off into the nocturnal depths of a beech forest, all combine to keep you breathlessly awaiting the next scene. Susannah York is just delicious, with that innocent facial beauty that raises heartbeats, especially in the latter parts; and Angela Baddely as Mrs. Wilkins and Diane Cilento as Molly play some great scenes. And some of the great scenes are worth telling...... Tom and Mrs. Wilkins enjoy a good roast with fruit, eating lusciously and lascivously, eating each other up with their sparkling eyes: this scene is hugely delightful. The other great scene is the fox-hunt: this alone puts the whole film into a special category: brilliant film-making, almost comparable to the famous chariot race in Ben Hur........ I loved this film 37 years ago, and recently had the luck to see it again: having doubled my years, I was just as enthralled and enraptured as the first time. A splendid piece of art.