Can a film just look too good?

The new film version of the Thomas Hardy novel comes to us courtesy of the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, so perhaps the geography was a little confusing to him. Or maybe the American money in this co-production caused the problem.

Whatever the case, almost the first thing you see in this film is the word “Dorset”, quickly followed by “200 miles from London”.

This made me giggle and set the film on the wrong footing. Was that intended to reassure American cinema-goers where Dorset might be?

At least they didn’t put “Wessex” up on the screen, which was the name Hardy appropriated for the south-west of England where he set his often gloomy stories.

That would really have confused them in Chicago. Or perhaps those 200 miles were intended as a joke, indicating that Dorset was a long way from the madding crowds of London.

Who knows, but it all struck an odd note. But then quite a lot about this film did too for this viewer. The reviews have been solidly respectful, and there almost seems to be a rule that anything Carey Mulligan stars in is well received.

Was she right for Bathsheba Everdene, the independent-minded young woman who unexpectedly inherits a sheep farm from her uncle, the woman who insists she doesn’t need men, but finds herself pursued by three suitors?

Mulligan holds the screen well, yet she seemed a little modern, in dress and attitude, although the feminist-in-waiting element of her character was down to scriptwriter David Nicholls, who built up that part of the story.

Of the three men who wish to marry Bathsheba, Matthias Schoenaerts was easily the best as Gabriel Oak, as fine and solid as his character’s name suggests.

This film certainly looks wonderful, too good perhaps, as films sometimes do.

Cinematography is now very advanced, so much so that the past always has a burnished glow.

Was everything really so pretty and picturesque back then? A little more mud and blood and a sense of the stench of rural life would have been welcome.

It’s a relatively short film, around 90 minutes or so, and that gives it a truncated air, suggesting a series of well-imagined scenes rather than a coherent whole.

Despite such doubts, it’s still worth a visit. Although nothing in it excited me as much as the trailer revealing that there will soon to a Spooks film, The Greater Good. That news had passed me by and I can’t wait.

• PD JAMES and Ruth Rendell, both crime-writing greats, changed the shape of the modern British crime novel. Both were members of the House of Lords, James for the Tories and Rendell for Labour. Despite their political differences, they were great friends.

James died last year, and now, six months later, we have lost Rendell too, at the age of 85. The crime writer Val McDermid wrote at the weekend of Rendell that: “No one can equal her range or her accomplishment; no one has earned more respect from her fellow practitioners.”

Rendell spoke at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival two or three years ago. She was physically slight but tough and sparky, funny and a little prickly. Like her friend PD James, she won over the audience.

Two greats in six months, and only a few years since we lost Reginald Hill, surely the greatest British male crime writer of recent times.

Hill spoke at Harrogate too and was drily amusing, as you would expect from the author of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels.

We were introduced in the bar and he teased me for wearing a suit. God only knows what put the idea in my head, but Hill looked me up and down and said with a sparkle that he remembered when journalists were scruffy.

Now Ruth Rendell has gone to join PD James and Reginald Hill in the great panelled reading room in the sky. I fancy they are sitting up there, watchful, quietly amused, swapping murder scenes and still plotting whodunit.