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| Dean Stockwell and Wendy Hiller in Sons and Lovers |
Dean Stockwell has had an interesting career, or rather three careers. He started as a child actor in movies like Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945) and The Boy With Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1948), then matured into a handsome actor of considerable resources, holding his own in the company of Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards in Sidney Lumet's 1962 filming of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. He never quite made it as a movie star, however, and did most of his work in television before re-emerging in the 1980s as an off-beat character actor, most memorably in Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984), Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), and Married to the Mob (Jonathan Demme, 1988), earning an Oscar nomination for the last film. Sons and Lovers is probably Stockwell's most impressive work as a young leading man. He maintains a credible British accent and stands up well to such legendary actors as Wendy Hiller and Trevor Howard. The film itself is more solid than impressive. It was originally envisioned by producer Jerry Wald with Montgomery Clift as Paul Morel, but fell afoul of the Production Code enforcers' strictures on extramarital sex: For the story to make any sense, or at least to cohere to something like D.H. Lawrence's vision of the characters, Paul has to deflower the repressed Miriam (Heather Sears) and have a passionate affair with Clara (Mary Ure), who is married but separated from her husband. So the film was shelved and Clift grew too old for the role. When the Code was on its last legs, Wald revived the project and commissioned a fresh screenplay. The film version tosses out a lot of the novel, but tries to evoke Lawrence's vision of the somewhat Oedipal relationship of Paul and his mother (Hiller) and her still-simmering sexual attraction to Paul's father (Howard), as well as the frigidity instilled in Miriam by her pious mother (Rosalie Crutchley). The relationship with Clara is a bit more sketchy, suggesting that social pressure rather than psychosexual incompatibility leads to its breakup. All of these relationships encumber the film with a lot of talk, though Freddie Francis's cinematography gives it a good deal of visual interest. Francis won a well-deserved Oscar for his deft use of the often unwieldy CinemaScope aspect ratio, coming up with some impressive compositions, sometimes placing the actors off to the side in long-shots and often posing one figure in the foreground and another recessed into the frame. It may also be noted that the director, Jack Cardiff, was himself an Oscar-winning cinematographer.
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