amicus
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2003
- Posts
- 14,812
Since in the past few years I have inadvertently watched several films featuring the actress Kate Beckinsale, Cold Comfort Farm, often seen on American cable television drew my attention.
I enjoy British Films, this one carried on BBC America just recently, although I suspect that most of the humor, typically British, escapes me. As is the case with the Benny Hill Show and the whole Monty Python era of which I know nothing, much of the dialogue is barely understandable and the humor, fleeting at most.
But for those who appreciate British films and humor, have you not seen this one, it is well worth the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Comfort_Farm
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticized, doom-laden accounts of rural life in some novels. The most immediate model was the work of Mary Webb. Gibbons was working for the Evening Standard in 1928 when they decided to serialise Webb's first novel, The Golden Arrow, and had the job of summarising the plot of earlier installments. More talented novelists in the tradition parodied by Cold Comfort Farm are D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy; and going further back, the Brontë sisters.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The heroine, Flora, stays at Aunt Ada Doom's isolated farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. As is typical in a certain genre of romantic nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature, each of the farm's inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear, and the farm is badly run. Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman, applies modern common sense to their problems and helps them all adapt to the twentieth century.
The speech of the Sussex characters is a parody of rural dialects (in particular the Somerset accent - another parody of Mary Webb, whose characters all tended to speak with a Somerset accent despite the fact they more often than not lived in a completely different county) and is sprinkled with fake but authentic-sounding local vocabulary such as mollocking (Seth's favourite activity, undefined but invariably resulting in the pregnancy of a local maid), sukebind (a weed whose flowering in the Spring symbolises the quickening of sexual urges in man and beast; the word is presumably formed by analogy to 'woodbine' (honeysuckle) and bindweed) and clettering (an impractical method used by Adam for washing dishes, which involves scraping them with a dry twig)
Futurism
An aspect of the novel overlooked by many recent adaptations is that the story was set in the future. Although the book was published in 1932, the setting appears to be the late 1940s or even 1950s and contains developments that Stella Gibbons thought may be around at this time such as TV phones and air taxis. She did seem to have predicted a Second World War as it is alluded to in the experiences of Flora's boyfriend, but she probably did not appreciate the scale of that war.
Adaptations
Cold Comfort Farm has been adapted for television twice. In 1968 a three-episode mini-series was made, starring Sarah Badel as Flora Poste, Brian Blessed as Seth, and Alastair Sim as Amos. In 1995 there was a made for TV movie, starring Kate Beckinsale as Flora. The 1995 made-for-tv movie was released theatrically in the US in 1996.
~~~~~~
Amicus…
I enjoy British Films, this one carried on BBC America just recently, although I suspect that most of the humor, typically British, escapes me. As is the case with the Benny Hill Show and the whole Monty Python era of which I know nothing, much of the dialogue is barely understandable and the humor, fleeting at most.
But for those who appreciate British films and humor, have you not seen this one, it is well worth the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Comfort_Farm
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticized, doom-laden accounts of rural life in some novels. The most immediate model was the work of Mary Webb. Gibbons was working for the Evening Standard in 1928 when they decided to serialise Webb's first novel, The Golden Arrow, and had the job of summarising the plot of earlier installments. More talented novelists in the tradition parodied by Cold Comfort Farm are D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy; and going further back, the Brontë sisters.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The heroine, Flora, stays at Aunt Ada Doom's isolated farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. As is typical in a certain genre of romantic nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature, each of the farm's inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear, and the farm is badly run. Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman, applies modern common sense to their problems and helps them all adapt to the twentieth century.
The speech of the Sussex characters is a parody of rural dialects (in particular the Somerset accent - another parody of Mary Webb, whose characters all tended to speak with a Somerset accent despite the fact they more often than not lived in a completely different county) and is sprinkled with fake but authentic-sounding local vocabulary such as mollocking (Seth's favourite activity, undefined but invariably resulting in the pregnancy of a local maid), sukebind (a weed whose flowering in the Spring symbolises the quickening of sexual urges in man and beast; the word is presumably formed by analogy to 'woodbine' (honeysuckle) and bindweed) and clettering (an impractical method used by Adam for washing dishes, which involves scraping them with a dry twig)
Futurism
An aspect of the novel overlooked by many recent adaptations is that the story was set in the future. Although the book was published in 1932, the setting appears to be the late 1940s or even 1950s and contains developments that Stella Gibbons thought may be around at this time such as TV phones and air taxis. She did seem to have predicted a Second World War as it is alluded to in the experiences of Flora's boyfriend, but she probably did not appreciate the scale of that war.
Adaptations
Cold Comfort Farm has been adapted for television twice. In 1968 a three-episode mini-series was made, starring Sarah Badel as Flora Poste, Brian Blessed as Seth, and Alastair Sim as Amos. In 1995 there was a made for TV movie, starring Kate Beckinsale as Flora. The 1995 made-for-tv movie was released theatrically in the US in 1996.
~~~~~~
Amicus…
