Certainly you don't want the kids to see it. (Just Joking: Kate is quite fetching in the Rubenesque shot.) To be honest, though, this really is a tragedy that still has the power to offend some sensibilities. As a public service I want to warn any modern viewer who might be offended at seeing Kate Winslet naked to avoid this film. Victorian readers found that scene most offensive. Modern film goers will hardly notice the implied critique of marriage that offended Victorian readers, but they might find the scene where Arabella throws the pig's 'part' at Jude indelicate. 'The Bishop of Wakefield, disgusted with the novel's insolence and indecency, threw it in the fire,' according to Terry Eagleton who wrote the Introduction for the New Wessex Edition of the book. The story itself, a naturalistic tragedy that in some respects anticipates Theodore Dreiser, et al., was considered immoral in its time. In Jude, Winslet's sharp, confident and commanding style is given greater range and she comes across with a performance that is full of life, effervescent, delightful, witty, sly, clever, and very expressive, and she looks beautiful doing it. She was very good in that film, her budding talent immediately obvious as the spinning, laughing, crazy teen who went off the deep end emotionally. I have seen Winslet in several films, including her first feature film when she was18-years-old, Heavenly Creatures (1994), an interesting film made in New Zealand based on a sensational matricide from the 1950s. The movie starts rather slowly, if picturesquely, until Kate appears and then the movie comes to life. But this is a pretty good movie anyway, highlighted by an enthralling performance by Kate Winslet. An earlier TV mini series version made by the BBC that I have not seen, Jude the Obscure (1971), ran for almost four and a half hours in six episodes. It need hardly be said that any motion picture, and certainly not one running only about two hours, can hope to do justice to Hardy's novel (his last, incidentally) which is about 180,000 words long (about 400 pages of dense text). Its original title was 'The Simpletons,' a title modern viewers of this movie might find appropriate considering how Jude and Sue round out their lives. A bowdlerized and altered version of that novel first appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine as a serial beginning in December 1894. This pessimistic and rather brutal cinematic production is based on the nineteenth century novel Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy.
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