Cold Comfort Farm [HD]

"I Saw Something Nasty In The Woodshed!" The Starkadder Fam!
Originally broadcast in 1971, the telly production of Stella Gibbon's 1932 novel, "Cold Comfort Farm" helped to launch the first season of PBS's signature series, "Masterpiece Theatre".

This is a great remake and is director, John Schlessinger's acclaimed 1995 film adaptation starring a TERRIFIC Kate Beckinsale as the recently orphaned, Flora Poste.

Set in the 1930's, in England, Flora writes to all of her relation, hoping someone will take her in as she has no real drive or ambition, save for possibly becoming the next Jane Austen. Flora accepts an offer from The Starkadders Of Cold Comfort Farm in Howling, Sussex. She thinks that she just might like farm life and it might be good for her writing career. However, once she arrives she finds out that the farm has had a curse upon it along with all of the inhabitants, human and animal alike.

The Starkadder family is comprised of Amos & his forelorn wife, Judith, & their two virile & rakish sons, Seth...

SOMETHING NASTY HAPPENED IN THE WOODSHED...
This is a marvelous and fairly faithful adaptation of Stella Gibbons' 1932 novel of the same name. The film brilliantly captures the quirkiness of the novel which is a hysterically funny, tongue in cheek parody of the heavy handed, gloomy novels of some early twentieth century English writers who had previously been so popular. The film is likewise hysterically funny and itself seems to parody British costume dramas.

The film starts out innocuosly enough, when well educated Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale) finds herself orphaned as a young woman. Discovering that her father was not the wealthy man she believed him to be, she is resigned to the fate of having to live on a hundred pounds a year. After some discussion with her good friend, the wealthy Mrs. Smiley (Joanna Lumley), Flora opts to live with relatives, rather than earn her bread. She seeks out a most unlikely set of relations with whom to do so, the decidedly odd Starkadder family who live in rural Howling, Sussex.

Therein...

An affectionate, funny film
I saw this film soon after its 1995 release and thought it wonderful, all the more so because Kate Beckinsale's interpretation of Flora Poste reminded me very much of my oldest daughter. So I was pleased to see that it has finally come out on DVD; I bought a copy, watched it again, and still think it wonderful.

You should be warned that you may have a hard time understanding what some of the inhabitants of Cold Comfort Farm are saying. However, that's intentional and straight from the novel, where the accents and strange word usages often leave Flora puzzled. Here's an exchange (from the novel) that I believe is reproduced pretty much verbatim in the movie, when Reuben comes in after working out in the fields not long after Flora has started living at Cold Comfort Farm:

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...After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence:

'I ha' scranleted two hundred furrows come five o'clock down i' the bute.'

It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to...

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