Tess

The next movie that's on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM is Tess. As of this writing, it's going to be on overnight tonight at 2:45 AM, so still late in the evening of October 15 out on the west coast.

Tess is a film version of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles Nastassja Kinski plays Tess, a young woman in England of the 1880s. She's the eldest daughter in a poor rural family named Durbeyfield, with a father who is an alcoholic. Dad is walking along a country road when the local vicar rides by, referring to him as "Sir John". It turns out that the parson has been doing some research, and has determined that the Derbyfields are actually descended from a nobleman who came over as part of the Norman conquest in 1066, the d'Urbervilles. Their particular line, however, fell into poverty due to the death of male heirs and, I'd guess, not being the eldest son in a line.

The parson also knows that there's a family of d'Urbervilles a town or two over, and that this particular line is rather well to do. So Tess' parents get the idea that Tess should introduce herself, and perhaps the d'Urbervilles might be able to help the Durbeyfields in some way. Yeah, is seems rather like a grift to me. But Tess goes along with it, in part probably because it's at least a chance at a better life.

Tess doesn't meet the matriarch of the family, but instead the matriarch's son, Alec d'Urberville (Leigh Lawson). He's intrigued by the idea of country cousins, but much more by Tess' beauty, with him and Mom eventually giving Tess a trial job as manager of the manor's poultry. It also transpires that Alec is not a real d'Urberville, having simply bought the name and coat of arms because he was from a working class family but worked his way up to prosperity and wanted a good name to go with that prosperity.

Alec also has the hots for Tess so seduces her, and eventually rapes her, knocking her up in the process. Tess is horrified and returns home, but doesn't take care of herself, and the child dies as an infant. Tess goes off again to try to escape her life, getting a job as a dairy maid. It's there that she meets Angel Clare (Peter Firth), a farmer who's hoping to grow his business as well. He falls in love with Tess, and eventually decides to ask for her hand in marriage even though his mom would prefer a better marriage for her.

It's only after the wedding that Tess decides to tell Angel about her background, specifically the having been raped and impregnated part. This being the Victorian era, that really ticks Angel off, with his thinking it's somehow Tess' fault. The two still kinda-sorta love each other, but for whatever reason Angel thinks they can no longer live together for the time being. He's going to go off to find himself, eventually coming back when he does after a long sojourn in Brazil of all places.

Tess, needing some form of support, decides to go back to Alec, which is why Angel has trouble finding Tess when he returns to England. And once Angel returns, Tess finds that perhaps having chosen to live with Alec wasn't such a good move. Not like she had anyone else to go to, however, since Dad finally died and the rest of her family became part of the indigent itinerants as a result. But Angel's return ultimately leads to tragedy....

I had never read Tess of the d'Urbervilles, so I didn't know what a mess it was in terms of plotting. That's partly because the novel was originally serialized. But in any case it's a sprawling story. Director Roman Polanski also wrote the screenplay for this adaptation, and he didn't bother to edit it down into a manageable length, so we get a story here that's fairly slow and all over the place. The technical parts of the movie -- the cinematography and production design -- however, are quite good, and both won Oscars.

Roman Polanski's original edit of the movie was a shade over three hours. The version that TCM ran in 31 Days of Oscar was a restoration from the early 2010s, and runs 172 minutes. However, as I write TCM only has the movie in a 165-minute block; the following presentation, an episode of MGM Parade, is set for 5:30 AM and runs 25 minutes in a half-hour block. The previous film, A Room With a View, is 117 minutes and starts at 12:30 AM. If A Room With a View were on during weekday daytime, TCM could conceivably put it in a two-hour block. But since this is part of a prime-time block, there's an intro and an outro, which would make it run past 2:30 AM if you wanted to put Tess in a three-hour block starting at 2:30 AM. By the time this actually posts, however, things may have changed.