COLD COMFORT FARM (35)

Directed by: John Schlesinger

Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Ian McKellen, Eileen Atkins

The Pitch: Flora Poste, a young orphan seeking relatives to live off, comes to stay at Cold Comfort Farm - where "the seeds wither, the cows are barren, all is turned to sourness and ruin" - with her cousins, the Starkadder family.

Theo Sez: Smug, feelgood reduction of terrific material : the Starkadders, a hilariously saturnine bunch of comic grotesques (grimmer, more bad-tempered country cousins to the Addams Family) are viewed mostly as ignorant bumpkins, mired in archaic customs and meaningless traditions, easily tamed and "modernised" by our scheming busybody of a heroine (who doesn't like Nature very much because it's "untidy"). It's perhaps a metaphor for recent British history, the feudalisms of "knowing your place" and being defined by who your father was giving way to the "new" classless Britain, where everyone can get what they want in life by acting brash, thinking positive, doing their own thing and cocking a snook at tradition - all of which would be fair enough, if not for the film's infuriating smugness about what a good thing it is. Early hints that the heroine's snobbish fastidiousness and Bertie Woosterish friends are going to be lampooned as sharply as the Cold Comfort Farmers prove sadly unfounded : by the end she's a proper Pollyanna, bringing happiness to these benighted rurals without a trace of irony. Not unpleasant, but highly irritating ; thank goodness for the inimitable Stephen Fry, in a small role as a "liberated" acolyte of D. H. Lawrence, blissfully unaware of his own ridiculousness as he thrusts his passionate advances upon our heroine : "Let me warn you : I'm a queer moody brute - but there's rich soil here if you care to dig for it!"