Film Review: "Gone to Earth"

American audiences have rarely been able to see the original cut of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Gone to Earth because American producer David O. Selznick, believing it to be a poor star vehicle for his wife Jennifer Jones (and perhaps also itching to be the main creative force on the picture), recut and even reshot significant portions of the film for the stateside release, retitled The Wild Heart, and by most accounts, an incoherent, condescending mess, marred by explanatory title cards and an obvious toy fox instead of the charismatic animal used during the shooting. Despite the continued affection and admiration for the Powell-Pressburger productions, many of them masterpieces, Gone to Earth is still awaiting a proper release in the US, though one can find it coming and going on streaming sites and all-region DVDs. This is a great pity, as it deserves to be considered among their 'lesser' works, with the caveat that a lesser Powell-Pressburger is a gem and a treasure by the standards of ordinary directors. 

Based on a powerfully expressive, exquisitely modulated novel by Mary Webb, the film follows the wide-eyed, artless Hazel Woodus, for whom the dearest creature in all the world is Foxy, the fox she saved as a cub. Hazel has the fortune, or rather the misfortune, to be not only beautiful, but, raised motherless and with no playmates but foxes, cats, and rabbits, astoundingly innocent. Her two pursuers are Edward Marston, a chaste minister who believes that the purity of his love can protect Hazel from harm and himself from acknowledgment of his own desire, and Jack Reddin, the local squire, a sensual, earthy man whose pleasures up until he meets Hazel are brutally physical, whether bedding women or hunting foxes. Hazel is torn between them, torn between the spiritual calm and domestic neatness of a life with Edward, a life in which she can trust that Foxy remains unharmed, and the, for her, incomprehensible carnal attraction of Reddin, with his broken down, but grand estate and trunks full of magnificent dresses, left by his dead ancestors. But Reddin 'has blood on him,' since his main pursuit in life is fox-hunting. Hazel's innocence, Marston's earnest religiosity, Reddin's selfish, possessive desire, and Foxy's vulnerability swirl together into tragedy. The final scene of this film is utterly extraordinary: even watching on a tiny screen, with a significant interruption in the middle, those last five minutes flattened me and left me sobbing. 

In the film, Hazel is played by Jennifer Jones - but one of the first things an audience has to forgive if they're going to give themselves over to the magic of this film is to accept that Jones's complete inability to sound at all English, let alone speak in the Shropshire dialect, can be passed over as a venial flaw. Jones, though, is a bewitching presence on screen. Her accent may be atrocious, but her smiles, and the way she capers across fields, or cradles Foxy, are more important to her performance. The rather thankless role of Marston is given to Cyril Cusack, exceptionally good given how little of the meat of his character in the book can be transferred to the screen. Marston's struggles are moral, interior, and deeply repressed; Cusack succeeds in exposing the naïve futility of his self-sacrifice without making him look ridiculous. The true star of the production is Powell-Pressburger favorite David Farrar, as Reddin, whose violet eyes shoot lightning bolts of passion, fury, and incredibly sexiness, without softening the cruelty of Reddin's nature. In interviews, Michael Powell said many times that Farrar could have hit the zenith of stardom, if he had wanted to, but Farrar seems to have been utterly deaf to the call of fame. He is, indeed, a magnetic, seductive force in Gone to Earth.

The screenplay was a collaboration between the two directors and is generally quite faithful to the book, like all adaptations cutting a great deal, though usually with a calculated good taste. Only one scene is added, Hazel's baptism, which neatly conflates a number of smaller, though highly significant instances into one, more visually dramatic episode. The cinematography by Christopher Challis is stunningly gorgeous, though I will quibble that it is not as brilliant in its use of color to create mood as Jack Cardiff's work in Black Narcissus or The Red Shoes. The music by Brian Easdale, one of the most important of Powell and Pressburger's regular collaborators, opens up the ferally romantic world of Webb's Shropshire and dramatizes the conflict between sexual desire and fear, God as love and God as terror. With a less evocative score, it's difficult to believe that Gone to Earth would be at all convincing. It is as good an adaptation as possible, but it does not quite measure up to the novel, lacking its piercing, pitiless philosophy, written in such heavily scented, adorned language and yet so fearfully modern in its treatment of God, sex, violence, and innocence. Webb's book is a tragedy of near Biblical proportions; the film does not quite achieve the same grandeur. Even so, it ought to be considered, along with A Canterbury Tale and The Small Back Room, an essential Powell-Pressburger work, another jewel in the crown.