Cold Comfort Farm poster, 1995

This is the BBC/Thames TV production of Stella Gibbons' 1932 classic comic novel. It was directed by John Schlesinger, screenplay was by Malcolm Bradbury, and its stars included Kate Beckinsale as Flora Poste, Joanna Lumley as Mrs Smiling, Ian McLellen as Amos Starkadder, Rufus Sewell as Seth Starkadder and Stephen Fry as Mybug. The main location for filming was Brightling in East Sussex, with Brickwall House in Northiam standing in as 'Howchiker' Hall.

Stella Gibbons (1902-1989) was born in London and trained as a journalist. Cold Comfort Farm was her first novel and overshadows everything else that she wrote. Through the magnified stereotyping of its characters, it parodies the whole rural novel genre from Mary Webb to D.H.Lawrence and from Thomas Hardy to the Bronte sisters. The story of the visiting urban relative, Flora Poste, solving all the personal issues of the rural, dysfunctional Starkadders has stayed fresh and in print continuously through the intervening decades. It was also adapted for the stage by Paul Doust and was first performed at the The Watermill Theatre, Newbury in June 1991.

Here are some book covers from the 1930s to the 1990s:

Straw Dogs, 1971

Coming only a year after The Go-Between, this is a very different film that paints a very different picture of the countryside. A mild-mannered American mathematician retreats from the urban jungle and seeks solace with his English wife in a quiet Cornish farmhouse. But he finds an even greater primordial menace within this sleepy village which ultimately brings out terrifying violence in himself. Dustin Hoffman and Susan George star along with a full line-up of sinister yokels. Directed by Sam Peckinpah and shot in the St Buryan area of Cornwall, it has been described as a West Country horror western. It attracted notoriety both at the time and since for its scenes of sexual and physical violence. Few films can have featured a man trap - that staple of the rural museum collection - quite so dramatically.

The Go-Between, 1970

Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of L.P.Hartley's 1953 novel The Go-Between with the classic opening line: 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'. The film was directed by Joseph Losey and starred Julie Christie and Alan Bates amongst others. It won the Grand Prix at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival and in 1999 was included in the British Film Institute's list of 100 best British films.

The poster artist was Arnaldo Putzu, one of a number of young Italians brought over by Eric Pulford and the Downton film publicity agency from the later 1950s. Get Carter was another of Putzu's well known film posters.

In addition to the poster, we also have a set of front of house cards - photographic stills from the film that would be displayed behind glass at the cinema entrance or in the foyer to attract custom.


Set in a hot languid summer of the early 1900s, the beguiling scenery and mannered behaviour masks a harsher reality of emotional turmoil beneath. The countryside is used here both as a metaphor for lost youth and innocence and as the physical embodiment of a stifling class system. It was shot in and around the empty and semi-derelict seventeenth century Melton Constable Hall in North Norfolk, former home of Lord Hastings and an appropriate setting for this story of the grandeur of a past age.

Far From the Madding Crowd, 1967

This is an original poster for the film of Hardy's first successful novel, published in 1874, and set in his own 'partly real, partly dream country' of Wessex. The strip taped along the top referring to Thursday June 20th connects it with a 1968 showing.

At the time this was the most authentic big screen adaptation of a Hardy work. It was directed by John Schlesinger, scripted by Frederic Raphael, photography was by Nicolas Roeg and the folk-based musical score was by Richard Rodney Bennett. Julie Christie starred as Bathsheba Everdene, Alan Bates as Gabriel Oak, Peter Finch as William Boldwood and Terence Stamp as Sergeant Troy. Cinematically, Schlesinger subsequently regretted following the novel too closely, making for an over-long film and pedestrian plotline with lots of epsiodes (the story was originally written in serialised form). Doubts were expressed at the time about Julie Christie in the main role and the implied addition of a 1960s style feminist agenda.

Shot on location at more than 20 sites around Dorset and Wiltshire, one of the film's strong points is its powerful portrayal of Hardy's Wessex through Roeg's cinematography. David Shipman in his two volume 'The Story Of Cinema' (1982) declared that there had never been a better film about the British countryside.

Withnail and I, 1986

An earlier comment to this blog suggested that the way that the countryside is depicted in films, TV programmes etc is an important area for this project to address. Film posters are a way of representing that so here’s one that was picked up at a recent Christie’s sale. This is an original poster dating from the first release of the film in 1986 and with artwork by Ralph Steadman.

Withnail and I was written and directed by Bruce Robinson, starred Richard E.Grant and Paul McGann and was financed by Handmade Films – George Harrison is in the credits as a producer. It has achieved the status of a cult classic in spite of being only moderately successful initially at the box office. There are websites devoted to the film and numerous clips are to be found on Youtube. Sleddale Hall near Shap in Cumbria, the farmhouse where much of the shooting was done, became a pilgrimage site for fans and was sold in its derelict state in early 2009 amid huge publicity.

The film is set in the 1960s and follows two out of work and heavy drinking actors who seek escape from the squalor of their London flat for a sojourn at uncle Monty’s cottage in the country. Its grim and darkly funny portrait of the countryside features a gallery of sinister rural caricatures. In popular culture we seem to want the countryside to be either pastoral and idyllic or strange and menacing. It is a common theme to set out expecting one, only to find the other.