Far from the Madding Crowd (1967 film) unselfish devotion, Bathsheba consents to be his wife and persuades Gabriel to remain in Weatherbury. The film keeps close to the book. The budget was $3 million, 80% of which was provided by MGM, 20% by Anglo-Amalgamated. The film was shot largely on location in Dorset and Wiltshire. The film is memorable for the subtly erotic scene between Sgt. Troy and Bathsheba in which he flaunts his expert skills as a swordsman in a private fencing display in a prehistoric earthwork (actually Maiden Castle). An enthralled Bathsheba stands immobile before him. Roger Ebert found the scenes of the rural area
Far from the Madding Crowd an extreme plot ... he is out to subvert his readers' complacency". "Far from the Madding Crowd" offers in ample measure the details of English rural life that Hardy so relished. Hardy first employed the term "Wessex" in "Far from the Madding Crowd" to describe the "partly real, partly dream-country" that unifies his novels of South West England. He found the word in the pages of early English history as a designation for an extinct, pre-Norman conquest kingdom, the Wessex from which Alfred the Great established England. In the first edition, the word "Wessex" is used only once, in chapter