Far from the Madding Crowd

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) is John Schlesinger's sweeping Thomas Hardy adaptation, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Nearly three hours of 1870s rural England — heath, sheep, harvest barns, and one young woman with three very different men circling her.

Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie) inherits a farm and decides to run it herself, no husband and no guardian, against everything her age expected of a woman. Three suitors orbit her. Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates), a steady shepherd she once turned down, keeps loving her quietly. Her landowning neighbour Boldwood (Peter Finch) loses his reason over her. And the dazzling Sergeant Troy (Terence Stamp) is the choice that feels like passion and turns into ruin.

Nicolas Roeg, soon to direct on his own, shot it — his camera makes the Dorset fields a character in their own right, and Richard Rodney Bennett's score went to an Oscar nomination. It moves slowly, made for anyone who loves unhurried classic cinema, but it gives you Christie at her peak and landscapes worth a big screen. Stream Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) online on iFILM.