Bawdy, boisterous, and full of heart, Tom Jones won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director (for Terry Richardson). In the film’s perhaps most famous scene, the raffish but utterly charming Tom (Albert Finney) shares a tavern meal with a Mrs. Waters (who, unbeknownst to Tom, just may be his mother). The dinner begins innocently enough, but their furtive glances soon turn into almost incandescent gazing: even a village fool can see where this is going. It’s a simple two-shot scene, oft parodied, that fleshes out, both literally and figuratively, the sometimes eye-winkingly genteel descriptions in Henry Fielding’s picaresque novel.
INTERESTING FACT: Director Richardson would later — and more than a tad harshly, we think — call his work “incomplete and botched.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tezjznL9NzM]