[
Film credits
omitted]
In outline, Gone to Earth is a reasonably faithful adaptation of Mary Webb's
novel, with one or two highlights shaded here and there. Its story is of
Hazel Woodus, a Shropshire primitive at the end of the last century, a wild
girl living with her wild father, harpist and coffin-maker, devoted more
to her pet fox cub than to human society. She is chased, however, by the
lascivious local squire, Jack Reddin of Undern, and though she decides at
the last moment to resist him his image haunts her as the embodiment of
unrealised possible pleasures. She marries an ineffective clergyman, who
loves her for her soul, and makes no demands on her body; their marriage
is consummated by her baptism (immersion in the local pond). She makes
an assignation in the woods with Reddin, who seduces her, and takes her
back to his country mansion, where he dresses her in splendour. When her
husband comes to reclaim her, she goes back to him because Reddin ill-treats
her fox-cub. Married bliss now seems possible, but Hazel, trying to rescue
her fox from a hunt led by Reddin, goes to earth down a disused mineshaft.
It is difficult to know what to make of this film. The original novel is
absurd enough, but Mary Webb had at least a passionate absorption in her
weird rustic world, and attempted no more than a tragic little story of
a pagan child of nature hunted, like her pet fox, to death by human beings.
Powell and Pressburger appear to have inflated it to an allegorical statement
of spiritual and carnal love fighting it out over an innocent being, and
their slow, stilted, portentous method makes the slight story seem even
more ridiculous than perhaps it is. Over-rich, sophisticated experiments
in colour and a cold treatment of the improbable are further incongruities.
The barefoot, bedraggled appearance of Jennifer Jones is negated by her
carefully made-up face and uneasy variations of local accent: David Farrar
gives a brutish but wooden performance as Reddin.
G.L.
[Presumably Gavin Lambert again]
