Cinema
Happy nature
Clancy Sigal
Joseph Andrews (London Pavilion) Joseph Andrews (AA certificate) is Tony Richardson's best picture in years. It's a bit of a mess, but so is Henry Fielding's novel—his exasperated, amused response to (and satire on) the astonishing success of Samuel Richardson's Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded which Fielding rightly regarded as the potboiling Love Story of its day. In .1741 Fielding brilliantly parodied his rival in Shamela, and a year later offered his alternative and tougher-minded vision of Christian morality in The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, And of his Frtend Mr Abraham Adams. It's important we remember the full title, because in his film Tony Richardson lays almost equal stress on Parson Adams, Joseph's spiritual mentor, who gets our hero out of more jams than Starsky does Hutch. For reasons plain and obscure, Tony Richardson has taken more than his share Of knocking by critics. .Lord knows he's made plenty of clinkers—Sanctuary and The Loved One immediately come to mind— and has screwed up even his good pictures w,lth mind-boggling lapses. (Such as aoruptly cutting away from Olivier's great s,°Illoquy in The Entertainer to some backstage business.) But he has also given 11s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner The Charge of the Light Brigade and tlte neglected Ned Kelly. Admittedly, iichardson is a cold if intelligent director. He can be pretentious, tasteless, 'uncinematic' and crudely fashionable. And he should never direct romantic heroines—he Zas wasted the talents of Moreau, Claire ,.1°°rn, Lee Remick and others. But like the tittle girl in the nursery rhyme, when he is guod he is very very good. And he is in great form in Joseph Andrews, a film which Proves yet again that a firm, confident script makes all the difference. Purists may object that the scriptwriters, Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, have shaved the narrative down to a galloping series of Carry On pranks, But Fielding's novel, 'Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes' (the title page says), is picaresque and choppy. It also has a strong, earthy, coincidence-packed atmosphere which Tony Richardson's direction and David Watkin's photography ably capture. You can almost smell the stale sweat under the layers of powder and rouge affected by Ann-Margret as Lady Booby, Joseph's leering employer, and Beryl Reid as her maid Mrs Slipslop who also has designs on the virgin hero. I suppose we should expect no less from the director of Torn Jones, but felt a steadier, cooler hand here in the marvellously casual, convincingly natural way Richardson finds visual equivalents for Fielding's prose. Above all, there is Fielding's sense of balance, a measured, unhysterical landscape in which rapes and rescues seem as in-place as the lovely pastoral interludes. Cruelty and beauty coexist in what seems to be natural harmony. The horse-turd on the stoop of the magnificent terrace house in Bath is filmed matterof-factly, yet the effect is both realistic and lyrical. I came away feeling that yes, Georgian England probably was like this. Or at least ought to have been.
There is tremendous goodwill laced all through Fielding's story and Tony Richardson's actors get it right. A pure, even if errant heart, can always count on divine . intervention in the practical guise of agood i gypsy or a long-lost cousin to arrive n the nick of time. Michael Hordern's muscular,
bumbling Parson Adams is the very essence of Fielding's 'Man of good Sense, good Parts, and good Nature.' When he angrily piles into the ruffian who is attacking Joseph's sweetheart Fanny, he epitomises virtue in action, and I believed every . righteous inch of his performance.
True, Peter Firth as Joseph and Natalie Ogle as Fanny
are almost empty vessels, pretty and expressionless. But in context that is felicitous. A certain amount of unworldly stupidity, Fielding implies, is like garlic to a vampire, a shield against evil. Tony Richardson's celebration of eighteenth-century innocence patronises neither Fielding nor us. See it.
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