Quotes of the Day

"Seth, drain the well. There's a neighbor missing."

Ian McKellen as Amos Starkadder in Cold Comfort Farm (1995).


"Highly sexed young men living on farms are always called Seth or Reuben."

Kate Beckinsale (lovely and pre-boob job and pre-dye job) as Flora Poste in the same movie.


"You're all damned! Damned! Do you ever stop to think what that word means? No, you don't. It means endless, horrifying torment! It means your poor, sinful bodies stretched out on red-hot gridirons, in the nethermost, fiery pit of hell and those demons mocking ye while they waves cooling jellies in front of ye. You know what it's like when you burn your hand, taking a cake out of the oven, or lighting one of them godless cigarettes? And it stings with a fearful pain, aye? And you run to clap a bit of butter on it to take the pain away, aye? Well, I'll tell ye, there'll be no butter in hell!"

Ian McKellen, yet again, as Amos.

This is a very funny movie based on Stella Gibbons' novel about a polished, orphaned young woman (Beckinsale) in 1920s London, who goes to live with an eccentric branch of her family, the Starkadders. Begrimed farm people with an opera-worthy collection of emotional baggage, they speak in over-the-top rural accents, scattered liberally with a made-up country vocabulary. Cold Comfort Farm was written as a take-off of the sort of novels Mary Webb, Thomas Hardy and the Brontes wrote. The film is played straight, as it should be, which makes the over-wrought emotions so funny. The cast is rounded out with Rufus Sewell (as Seth), Eileen Atkins and Stephen Fry. But the whole cast is perfect!