Cinema: John Bull in His Barnyard

Tom Jones. "I have endeavoured in the following History," wrote Henry Fielding in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, "to laugh Mankind out of their favourite Follies and Vices." Two centuries have passed: Mankind still has its favourite Vices: and Novelist Fielding's sprawling, brawling masterpiece still stands as the greatest comic novel in the language. Now Britain's Tony Richardson (The Entertainer, A Taste of Honey) has made the novel into an absolutely magnificent movie. The film is a way-out, walleyed, wonderful exercise in cinema. It is also a social satire written in blood with a broadaxe. It is bawdy as...

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