pp312
Funny, I never could get into Tom Jones. That it won Best Picture is a wonder to me. I just found it messy, badly filmed and edited and mostly incomprehensible. Joseph Andrews, however, is a different matter; I laughed heartily and found the whole thing to be what Tom Jones failed to be: a genuinely entertaining bawdy riot. How this film is so lowly rated mystifies me. Everything seems right, especially Ann Margaret who acts her skirt off (literally), and Peter Firth at least looks young and desirable, unlike Albert Finny who always looked too old to be romping around in the woods making a goose of himself. Such a shame this film isn't better known and more often shown.
mark.waltz
So asks the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and the gang return with the witches' broomstick. Well, I'm asking that here for this farce of a period comedy of sexual deviance in the era of "Tom Jones". I actually thought more of something that Voltaire might have written, or maybe even a Benny Hill TV show sketch, and a touch of "Sweeney Todd" and the Thenardiers of "Les Miserables" thrown in while watching this non-sensical costume piece where everybody looks like clowns who had spent hours having flour fights.Blonde and beautiful Peter Firth, the horse-loving boy of "Equus", is the title character who spends more time romping around either in the nude or in the hay with various women than even Albert Finney's Tom Jones did. Poor Ann-Margret looks ridiculous in a tomato colored wig while a group of singing nuns chant as Firth is sexually attacked by a hideous looking peasant woman. I couldn't make heads or tails out of what was supposed to be going on. "Tom Jones" was too far in the distant past to warrant an imitator, especially one put together in an era past the mod films of the late 60's and early '70's.Veteran British character actors Michael Hordern and the always dependable Beryl Reid suffer only slight indignities, while smaller roles are essayed by future Oscar winners John Gielgud (only briefly) and Peggy Ashcroft. Veteran actor Jim Dale provides a musical number regarding his tryst with a hot- blooded gypsy. The costumes seem like something worn by the hideous guests at the Baron's birthday party in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in which you were supposed to realize how awful they were. Ann-Margret, whose make-up makes her cheekbones look like giant pimples, can't really be taking this all seriously.The man behind the camera was none other than Tony Richardson, who directed the 1963 Oscar Winning Best Picture "Tom Jones", one I feel hasn't stood up to the test of time. Try not to laugh at the sped-up sexual sequence that looks like something out of the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner hour. In retrospect, this is the type of film that appears to get even worse as every minute of it goes by.
bkoganbing
Another reviewer described Peter Firth in this film as "ludicrously pretty." It's not only true, but for a future film I'm going to reference that comment in describing Leif Garrett. But as for Joseph Andrews, Peter Firth's looks and innocence keep drawing women to him like flies to flypaper.Peter Firth's been brought up by pious pastor Michael Hordern who is a throwback to the Puritans of the last century. He's definitely out of place in mid 18th century Great Britain, the age of Walpole and the first two Hanoverian Georges were ones in which they believed in let the good times roll. Peter's spotted by Ann-Margret wife of fat nobleman Peter Bull who thinks he'd make an excellent footman and of course she has other things in mind. Especially after Bull expires in an old Roman bath that the gentry of Hanoverian Great Britain have revived the custom of.Firth's got every woman in the cast chasing him, but he wants to stay virtuous and save himself for his true love Natalie Ogle. That proves close to impossible, in the meantime everyone is envying his good luck with the ladies.Tony Richardson who directed Tom Jones fourteen years earlier to an Academy Award for Best Picture brings the same eye for detail to the sets and costuming and atmosphere of the same era that Henry Fielding was writing about. The two in the cast I love are Beryl Reid with that wonderful Dickensian name of Mrs. Slipslop and Ann-Margret as Lady Booby who does more than hold her own with the British cast. Bridging the two Fielding/Richardson collaborations is Hugh Griffith who returns briefly in this film in his role as Squire Western from Tom Jones.Joseph Andrews for reasons I can't explain is unjustly overlooked and critics seem to say Richardson was just trying to recreate Tom Jones again. Considering it's the same source that gave us Tom Jones that charge is ridiculous. Joseph Andrews has enough merit to stand on its own and should be seen and recognized for the fine film it is.
trimmerb1234
This sumptuous 18th Century romp is both bawdy and beautiful (sometimes simultaneously). From powdered wigs and fluttered fans to farmyard frolics there is fast paced farce. But it is Ann Margaret who commands attention - the white-faced period make-up accentuates her expression whether of predatory interest in a fresh faced youth or flashes of anger and frustration when her designs and desires are thwarted. I'm not sure any of her actress contemporaries could summon up that amount of power in a single look.Richardson once again brings humour to history (the traffic jam of horse-drawn carriages is neat and funny). Even the demise of Ann-Margaret's elderly gouty husband ("taking the waters" at Bath in England) combines beauty with dark humour.One curious inexplicable failing are the opening titles - firstly in the dreadfully monotonous and repetitive song sung in thoroughly undistinguished fashion by Jim Dale and the flat, lifeless and pointless visuals appearing behind the titles. Those who have seen the dazzling title sequence to his "Charge of the Light Brigade" will be especially struck by difference. In this latter case the titles had been farmed out to an animator who regarded it as his best - and hardest - work. What a shame Richardson did not do the same here.Overall a classic even if flawed.
AD
