Tom Jones (1963)
Directed by Tony Richardson
Tom loves Sophie and Sophie loves Tom. But Tom and Sophie are of differering classes. Can they find a way through the mayhem to be true to love?
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What critics compared Tom Jones to
"Casanova" is pure fluff -- it's "Dangerous Liaisons" or "Tom Jones" with nearly every trace of seriousness scrubbed away -- and director Lasse Hallstrom doesn't try to build it up into anything of significance.
Hallström, in fact, seems to have gone even farther back for his inspiration: Tony Richardson�s 1963 Tom Jones.
A whiff of "Tom Jones" attends this script, and there is an echo of "A Place in the Sun" (based on "An American Tragedy").
Wasn’t that already a stale trope by 1963, when Albert Finney and Joyce Redman slithered through their gastronomic duel in “Tom Jones”?
But remember another costume piece, Tony Richardson’s “Tom Jones,” which was deemed equally lusty and risky when it came out, in 1963, yet grew forced and tarnished with the years.
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A twice-divorced mother of three, desperate for work, she scams her way into a filing job at the law office of Ed Masry (Albert Finney: Simpatico, Tom Jones ), a hard-working single practitioner -- in other words, just a guy trying to do a job, without partners, without a fancy high-rise office, and without rich clients.
Though this is clearly Roberts' film, strong performances abound, including her cynical boss, played by Albert Finney ("Tom Jones," "Simpatico").
In the presence of death, the old man has a hearty appetite; he hosts a Christmas party, which turns into the drollest chicken-eating scene since Tom Jones.
They’ll surely cringe at the way Moggach’s script is cross-pollinated with Tom Jones and Wuthering Heights, and they may take exception to Keira Knightley, with her alarmingly toothy smile, turning Elizabeth Bennet into Jo March from Little Women (Matthew MacFadyen’s mopey take on Darcy won’t win many fans either).
The framework plays like the “Let me tell you a dirty story” of the earliest bawdy novels, like “Tom Jones” or “Tristran Shandy,” but rendered humorless and bland thanks to Gainsbourgh’s flat delivery and the poker-faced performance of Stacy Martin as the young Joe.