In a year with such top grossing films as the $24 million earning From Russia with Love, $57 million earning Cleopatra and $46 million earning It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Tom Jones emerged the critical success of the year, and this despite being a British import. Perhaps significantly it was also the last film screened for President John F. Kennedy during a visit to Palm Beach, Florida on Sunday November 17, 1963 before his assassination.

Budgeted at nearly $1 million it was John Osborne's adaptation of Henry Fielding's famous novel of the same name. Directed and produced by Tony Richardson, noted participant in the revolution of the British movie industry during the 1950s and '60s, the resulting film is a pleasant enough comedy of misadventure and confused identity.

Opening with the never serious narration of Micheál MacLiammóir who supplies the film with its satirical voice, Tom Jones is the story of an eponymous youth born from questionable origin. When the English gentlemen Squire Allworthy (George Devine) discovers a presumed bastard child in his household, he takes the boy in as his own and banishes the mother, Cherry Jones (Joyce Redman), along with another servant called Thwackum (Peter Bull).

The bastard becomes a man and this adult Tom Jones (Albert Finney) appears as a lusty, beautiful youth with a heart of purity and a body ready-made for affection. Unfortunately Squire Allworthy's nephew, and legal heir, Blifil (David Warner) hates his more charismatic cousin in their draw for family attention. Of course Tom doesn't help matters any with his many personal affairs although his one of true love is the daughter of Allworthy's neighbor, a gruff, ill-mannered lout named Squire Western (Hugh Griffith).

Sophie Western may hold the key to Tom's heart but circumstances transpire to complicate any straightforward romance between them as Blifil manipulates Allworthy from behind the scenes and for his own end. Concealing certain key information, the devious Blifil successfully banishes Tom from his childhood home thereby forcing him to leave the beloved Sophie and travel to London to make his fortune.

Along the way he saves a woman named Ms. Waters from soldiers, meets the Allworthy household's former servant Thwackum and is mistakenly implicated in an adulterous affair. Ultimately he makes it to London where he tries wooing Sophie even as his bastard origins are turned on end by Ms. Waters, born Cherry Jones, and Thwackum who reveal Tom's true lineage as Allworthy's nephew, much to Blifil's chagrin.

Just as he's to be hanged for complications related to his complicated love life, Squire Western rescues young Tom and delivers him to Squire Allworthy and the household from whence he was reared. Sophie is given free reign to love him, Blifil is given his comeuppance and Tom's world is made complete with the fulfillment of fortune and the love of one good woman.

Throughout the picture John Addison's Oscar- and Grammy-award winning score punctuates the action along with the rich production design of Ralph Brinton working with art director Ted Marshall, set director Josie MacAvin and costume designer John McCorry. Assembled as a story set in the mid-18th century Tom's journey is never a particularly tragic or serious one although it is quite lovely to look at and listen to.

Partly this level of success must be considered in light of the film's strong performances, Finney by virtue of his centrality to the piece, but also in the work of York and Redman, but most especially Griffith. His uncouth, loud, drunken Squire Western is a terrific comic foil to the relatively stolidity of his sister Miss Western (Edith Evans) who constantly berates him for his unprincipled rearing of Sophie.

In the end, though, Tom Jones is an enigmatic picture in the history of the Academy Awards. It is a good film but not a great one that is, in and of itself, not particularly remarkable when considering the number of good films that have won Oscars at the expense of other, greater word. But it is also a foreign title, even if it's a foreign title originating from an English speaking country that likely minimizes the typical impediment of American xenophobia.

How Tom Jones won the Best Picture Academy Award is anyone's guess. It's not hard to dismiss it as an important film, nor is it a particularly good demonstration of the burgeoning British movie industry then experiencing a revolt similar to the sea change introduced by the French New Wave a few years earlier. Yet Tom Jones is an appealing comedy of manners that found an audience and carried the occasional preference for English over American pop culture products by virtue of their seeming to have a more sophisticated and superior pedigree.

That the film doesn't amount to very much more than a bawdy costume drama isn't to discount it but is, instead, meant to define a limit within which to view the film. Richardson's main contribution to the work was surely in finding a way to adapt Fielding's celebrated novel onto the big screen but also in his use of documentary film devices to demonstrate the constructedness of mainstream movies.

Namely there are numerous moments in Tom Jones when characters interrupt the conversations and actions of which they're taking part to directly address the audience and wink, nudge or make certain remarks. Likewise there are several moments when still frames are used to illustrate changing emotional states and a variety of moving camera effects used to follow a deer hunt, among other sequences of outdoor action. Then there is MacLiammóir's narration that self-consciously brings attention to the way narrators normally function in movies to bridge disconnected actions, seal audiences into a story and to give movies the feel of mastery from a single authorial point-of-view. The narrator of Tom Jones is everywhere presumed to know everything that's happening which makes his interruption of certain more prurient scenes all the more humorous even while undercutting the typically transparent quality of mainstream movie narrators.

Is this departure from convention successful? Yes. Is it groundbreaking? Perhaps. Should we remember Tom Jones because of this effort to deliver saccharine thrills with a professional mien and some formal sophistication? Yes. Is this overall effort worthy of the Best Picture honor subsequently bestowed on the film with its release?

Nominated against America, America, Cleopatra, How the West Was Won and Lilies of the Field, Richardson's movie may very well have been the most entertaining and palatable of the lot. Still, it's somewhat amazing that more Academy attention didn't fall to The Birds and Hud that were, and remain, far more important and provocative films.

This isn't to say Tom Jones is bad, or even that it's not deserving of some measure of real critical celebration. Instead it's to point out that the Hollywood Foreign Press may have gotten it right when they awarded the film the Best Motion Picture - Musical/Comedy award and the Best English-Language Foreign Film award at the Golden Globes. If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had followed suit it would have left the historical record in tact, as far as lauding Richardson's film, but it might've made room at the top for Hitchcock's masterwork as the year's true top film.