Tribute Presentation Film

Cold Comfort Farm

Great Britain 1995

Based on Stella Gibbon's classic comedic novel, which spoofed the soul-searing, rural-set stories of writers like D. H. Lawrence and Mary Webb, Cold Comfort Farm boasts a brilliant cast of British stars in a hilarious saga of rural life and eccentricity.

The story unfolds as Flora Poste, a cool, clever, and very modern young woman, finds herself suddenly orphaned. Faced with the prospect of making ends meet on her tiny inheritance, she announces to her dear friend Mrs. Smiling (Joanna Lumley), a London socialite and ardent brassiere collector, that she intends to claim her "rights" and seek refuge with her feudal relative, the doom-laden Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm.

Once there, she set about creating order out of chaos. The farm itself is a ramshackle, rundown ghost of its former grand self, peopled by a motley assortment of eccentric relatives and presided over by Ada Doom, a looney matriarch who holds her family in an iron grip and claims to have seen, as a child, "something nasty in the woodshed." For Flora, a young woman of "higher common sense," Cold Comfort Farm presents the ultimate challenge as she sets about the task of transforming and modernizing the fortunes of all who dwell there.

Deliciously witty and wicked, Cold Comfort Farm is brilliantly directed by John Schlesinger, who seems to relish the opportunity to parody the kind of doom-and-gloom rural saga he mastered so well with Far From the Madding Crowd. This hysterically funny comedy of manners is among his very best films.