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Critics Consensus: A frantic, irreverent adaptation of the novel, bolstered by Albert Finney's courageous performance and arresting visuals.
Critic Consensus: A frantic, irreverent adaptation of the novel, bolstered by Albert Finney's courageous performance and arresting visuals.
All Critics (32) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (27) | Rotten (5)
A fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek movie about an engaging foundling.
While Tom remains a lot of fun, he's just not the irreverent Young Turk he seemed three decades ago.
It's a free-wheeling, fast-moving relic from a time when "bawdy" wasn't bad and sex comedies still celebrated sex.
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 the British were bawdy when a wench had to wear five petticoats to barricade her virtue.
It has sex, Eastmancolor, some prime performers and plenty of action.
Despite the fitful energy and the beauty of the settings, the ugliness of the mise en scene and the crudity of the editing tend to triumph.
Decades of art-house imitators and Benny Hill reruns may have removed some of the luster, but there's still plenty to admire and enjoy in this bawdy British effort.
Tony Richardson's Tom Jones took Henry Fielding's bawdy picaresque and updated it for a new generation.
It was always arch, overlong and uncertain of tone, but nevertheless very funny and extraordinarily bawdy.
A classic not just of literary adaptation, but of the last truly adventurous era in British and European filmmaking.
A lusty historical romp with a cheeky sense of humor and a rollicking energy...
Irreverent comedy.
The wanderings of the wittiest eighteen century bastard-gentleman. An enormous Albert Finney and an equally great supporting cast give life to Tony Richardon's vivacious, rhythmic and cunning storytelling. Full of charm.
Super Reviewer
Including a famous seduction scene involving the rapturous eating of a meal, the best hunt ever filmed bar none, and a handful of zesty performances of outsized characters, this playful romp is hard to ignore and as much a testament to its time as 2001: A Space Odyssey, however much this testifies to a courser if truer side of human events.
A voracious bastard pursues his love - among others - in a satirical exploration of British class structure and sexual politics. Henry Fielding is sometimes credited with inventing the modern novel, and his works read like an experiment in a new form; in Joseph Andrews the narrator actually tells the reader to skip the boring parts. And in Tom Jones it is clear that this is a faithful adaptation if only because the spirit of experimentation pervades. It is a romp, full of baudy humor and high-energy ballyhoo. The characters even break the fourth wall a few times. But when I read Fielding, I often feel like I'm looking at a child's creation out of Play-Doh and other people expect me to see Rodin. I felt the same way about this film. Yes, I like the satire - the blood spewing from the horses, whipped too a frenzy by fanatical hunters, and the so-called "ladies of quality" acting more whorish than a Kardashian - but director Tony Richardson crosses the line between mad-cap romp with a purpose and mad-cap romp for romp's sake. The ending is too convenient, the behavior too extreme to be taken seriously, Tom Jones is a film made out of Play-Doh. Overall, even though its heart is the right place, I think the film strays too far into unreality to have any real effect.
a messy disappointment - maybe cuz the washed out mgm dvd transfer blows
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