The Woodlanders
1997, 96 minutes, Rated PG
For centuries the community of Little Hintock has been sustained by the surrounding woodland, neither knowing or needing much from the outside world. Grace Melbury (Emily Woof), a timber merchant's daughter, has been sent away to an elegant finishing school by her ambitious father and arrives home in a state of some social confusion. Now too refined for her hapless fiancee Giles Winterbourne (Rufus Sewell), she is not quite acceptable in the circles of the leisured landowner classes.
Her beauty is, however, a potent passport to the affections of Dr. Edred FitzPiers, an aristocrat and snobbish newcomer who seems to regard the local peasantry as so many anatomical specimens provided for his sole use. Watched stoically by Giles, who suffers the torments of the damned whenever he sets eyes on Grace, FitzPiers' courtship progresses quickly, approved by Grace's beaming father.
Giles' misery is disregarded by everybody but Marty South, who worships Giles in much the same way that he worships Grace. A working woman with rough hands and drab clothes, Marty's only claim to beauty is her head of chesnut hair, much coverted by another interloper in the district, the rich widow, Mrs Charmond. She owns the big house and much of the land the woodlanders love and work on. Thoroughly spoilt and unused to being crossed, she imperiously makes Giles homeless after a minor confrontation and in the same spirit reneges in an invitation to take Grace travelling with her when she realixes the girl's beauty will take the edge off her own mature charms.
His incurably roving eye wanders in the direction of Mrs Charmond and soon they are enjoying a far from descreet affair, much to the scandalized delight of the locals. Mr Melbury, mortified at pushing Grace into a marriage with such a scoundrel, promises to investigate the possibility of divorce and for a few helicon weeks Grace and Giles seem once again destined to marry. But divorce proves impossible and Giles falls dangerously ill. Bereft of all hope he is astonished, one stormy night to find Grace on the doorstep of his dilapidated hovel, seeking shetler from FitzPiers who has returned to claim her...
- Director:
- Phil Agland [1],
- Starring:
- Rufus Sewell [19], Polly Walker [23], Tony Haygarth [5], Emily Woof [6], Cal Macaninch [1], Sheila Burrell [1], Walter Sparrow [2], Jodhi May [7],
- Screen Formats:
- Full Frame 1.33:1
- Language and Sound:
- English Dolby Digital Stereo
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