I really feel like I should have liked Tony Richardson's Tom Jones more than I did. It's a rather free-spirited picaresque film about a bastard born into nobility who goes out into the world to seek his fortune. But...here's the thing...a good chunk of Tom Jones isn't actually about...Tom Jones. The eponymous rogue isn't even banished until the second half of the film. The first half follows his idyllic life as a noble. That's all well and good, but it shoves its titular character to the side in order to focus on the political machinations of his family members. By the time the film properly starts to be about Tom Jones, he is still almost a stranger to the audience. Tom Jones is a film at war with itself. It contains some brilliant sequences (the greatest among them a shockingly kinetic hunting scene in the first quarter of the film that brutally exposes the innate cruelties of the upper classes as they blithely trample and kill the livestock of innocent peasants), but the film never truly comes into its own as a narrative. Too unfocused to be a proper character study, too bland to be a proper comedy, the film collapses in on itself.
5/10
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