An ongoing story

Following Priestley, we had an outing with Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a book which I had read a long time ago and a film of which we had seen a long time ago.

We started off with rather a good, 4 episode adaptation by the BBC from 2008. Ex Epsom Library, knocked down to me for £1.

Followed up with the Polanski version of 1979 - in which I thought Kinski did very well as Tess. Captured her strange - and as it turned out, fatally flawed - personality rather well. More generally, the film had aged well.

Then started reading the book again on the kindle, in the £1.89 for the collected works version. As always with a film which starts from a real book, I was struck by the amount of stuff which a film version misses out. A film might capture the general tone & times well enough, but an awful lot of what Hardy wrote goes missing. Partly because of the constraints of time, but more because the written word cannot always so easily be turned into pictures. A picture is not always worth a thousand words, whatever they might say in salesman school. The pictures also lose much of the subtlety and most of the often gentle humour.

A 1998 adaptation from US TV is pending.

For the moment, the biggest prat of the story is Angel, the love of Tess's short life. With the antiquarian parson who starts the tale off being the smallest prat. A prat who also reflects Hardy's fascination with posh, being a sucker for an invitation to tea from a posh lady until the very end of his life. I shall report further in due course.

With thanks to google for the image, presumably taken from some early edition.

And see references 1 and 2 for older hardiarna, including the jigsaw.

PS: did the film adaptors borrow the various railway rolling stock they needed from the Poirot Productions Corporation?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/matters-hardy.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/jigsaw-19-series-2.html.