Details

Kate Beckinsale (Everybody's Fine) heads an all-star cast in Oscar winning director John Schlesinger's delightful and charming film adaptation of Stella Gibbons' much-loved, award winning comic novel, Cold Comfort Farm, coming to DVD on 29th August 2011 from Fremantle Home Entertainment.

Directed by Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy; Marathon Man; Billy Liar) from an adapted screenplay by acclaimed author Malcolm Bradbury (The History Man) and described by Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert as "eccentric and very funny", the film co-stars Ian McKellen (The Lord Of The Rings), Joanna Lumley (Mistresses), Stephen Fry (Bones), Rufus Sewell (The Pillars Of The Earth), Miriam Margolyes (Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows), Eileen Atkins (Psychoville) and Rupert Penry-Jones (Whitechapel).

When sensible, sophisticated London girl Flora Poste (Beckinsale) is left orphaned and homeless at nineteen with barely enough annual income to keep her in "furs and stockings", she looks to her relatives for place to stay. Declining generous offers from those living in the city, she decides instead to move to the countryside of deepest Sussex to take up residence at the run-down Cold Comfort Farm with the Starkadders, relatives on her mother's side who agree to take her in to repay a mysterious wrong done to her father years earlier.

An eccentric extended family of wary, stuck-in-their-ways country folk, the Starkadders are presided over by a reclusive, stern and elderly matriarchal figure known as Aunt Ada Doom, said to have been driven mad by seeing "something nasty in the woodshed" when she was a young girl. Realizing there is a great deal of improvement work to be done, not only on Cold Comfort Farm itself but also on its stubborn inhabitants, Flora immediately gets down to the business of setting things in order.

As refreshing as a cool glass of fizzy lemonade on a hot summer's day, Cold Comfort Farm is a hilarious feel-good movie that perfectly captures the essence of one of the most popular comic novels of all time.

Special Features

  • Filmographies
  • Stella Gibbons biography and bibliography
  • Picture gallery