I get the sense that Tony Richardson's adaptation of Henry Fielding's novel was botched during production. The editing is simply too chaotic, and I don't think it was intentional. There's way too much ADR and stitching together of scenes through what feels like random bits of B-roll footage to create montage for this to have been intentional. It's easily the most chaotic Best Picture winner from a purely cinematic craft point of view, a marked departure from the precisions of assembly that were films like Lawrence of Arabia, The Apartment, Ben-Hur, and West Side Story. That I find the film so entertaining ends up feeling kind of remarkable, and a lot of that has to do with the light and airy approach to the material as well as the amusing central performance from Albert Finney.
Squire Allworthy (George Devine) returns from London to his country estate to find a baby in his bed. Along with his sister Bridget (Rachel Kempson), they confront the boy's mother and father, casting both out from the house as Allworthy declares that he will raise the boy whom he names Tom Jones as his own son. Years pass, Tom becomes a man (Finney), and he's an attractive man who gains the attention of women wherever he goes. Being weak willed, he sets on a series of actions that, as the witty narrator (Micheál Mac Liammóir) says, will destine him for the gallows. The first object of his affections is the daughter of one of Allworthy's servants, Molly (Diane Cilento) who wants to use Tom to try and become a maid in the house. She also happens to get pregnant. Oops. This all happens while Tom is trying to court a woman above his station, Sophie Western (Susannah York), the daughter of Allworthy's neighbor Squire Western (Hugh Griffith). The scandal causes a rift between them, undone when Tom finds another man in Molly's room, the actual father of her child.
In opposition to Tom's position in life is Allworthy's nephew, Bilfil (David Warner), the son of the departed Bridget who carries with him a secret letter that her solicitor was supposed to give to Allworthy. It's antagonism born from Tom's bastard status and lower class, as well as jealousy from the fact that Sophie loves Tom rather than Bilfil, a match that Sophie's aunt, Miss Western (Edith Evans), arranges. The conflict creates a rift between Tom and Squire Allworthy, leading Tom to leave the estate and try and make his own way in the world.
He enters a series of misadventures, all of which involve women, as he makes his way from the company of some British soldiers on their way to Scotland to fight the Jacobites, mostly an officer who insults Sophie Western leading to a fight that incapacitates Tom. There's a woman Tom saves on the road, Mrs. Waters (Joyce Redman), leading to the famous scene of grotesqueries as they leer over each other as they eat several courses of food in an inn. It's famous for the grotesque nature of it, but it fits in well with the light and comic air of everything around it.
From the opening done in silent film style without dialogue and with intertitles to Finney's innocent take on this young man who has women of all walks of life throwing themselves at him except the woman he actually wants to rather silly performance by Griffith (purportedly drunk all throughout filming), Tom Jones is consistently amusing. I've seen the film twice, and I chuckle consistently through the whole thing. I don't go more than a couple of minutes before I get another small guffaw out of the action, the wit of the narrator, or the sometimes befuddled state that Finney feels as he goes from one little comic episode to the next, often as the butt of the joke.
The comic sensibilities move into farce in the later parts of the film as we get some mistaken identities, mostly around Mrs. Waters when it's discovered that she is actually Jenny Jones, the girl who was told to say she was Tom Jones' mother, a fiction we've all assumed wasn't the case since the start of the movie and gets cleared up explicitly pretty quickly (she's not, though Mrs. Waters does get a fun fourth wall breaking moment). In fact, there are a couple of fourth-wall breaking moments that make the film feel surprisingly modern.
Is it a great film? I wouldn't say so. The chaotic editing seems to be papering over a lot of issues from the production. There's a moment late where Tom is dancing with Lady Bellaston (Joan Greenwood), and we see her speak, but we cut to some random B-roll footage while Tom responds. It makes the film actually difficult to actually look at. The treatment of the story is more of a joke, like Richardson couldn't take the novel seriously, so he just spends the film trying to find easy humor. The easy humor is amusing, but it doesn't offer a whole lot else to grasp onto. When Tom is at the gallows late in the film, there's little tension around that situation because the movie itself doesn't take it very seriously. I mean...it's amusing and pretty consistently amusing, but that's kind of it.
Helped in no small part by the fact that Albert Finney was a charming young man and the women around him were generally attractive and witty. The contrast of the pristinely made films that won most of the Best Picture awards over the previous couple of decade against the very rough and tumble filmmaking of Tom Jones is also interesting in its own.
On its own, though, Tom Jones is lightly amusing from beginning to end. It's not a great film and it always feels like it's going to just fall apart into nonsense. I can sort of imagine how the Academy would come to award it based on the competition that year, especially against something as leaden as How the West Was Won. I mean, it had awarded far worse.
