Far from the Madding Crowd (1967 film) and rural life to be "splendid". His strongest criticism is that the film missed the point of the small society of rural life: Thomas Hardy's novel told of a 19th century rural England in which class distinctions and unyielding social codes surrounded his characters. They were far from the madding crowd whether they liked it or not, and got tangled in each other's problems because there was nowhere else to turn. It's not simply that Bathsheba (Julie Christie) was courted by the three men in her life, but that she was courted by ALL three men in her life. The
Far from the Madding Crowd ask once again for her hand in marriage. She accepts, and the two are quietly married. Hardy took the title from Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife"<br> "Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray";<br> "Along the cool sequester'd vale of life"<br> "They kept the noiseless tenor of their way". "Madding" here means "frenzied". Lucasta Miller points out that the title is an ironic literary joke as Gray is idealising the noiselessness and sequestered calm whereas Hardy "disrupts the idyll, and not just by introducing the sound and fury of