The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981)

Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Hilton McRae, Emily Morgan, Charlotte Mitchell, Lynsey Baxter, Peter Vaughan, Colin Jeavons, Liz Smith, Patience Collier, Leo McKern. Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on a novel by John Fowles. Cinematography: Freddie Francis. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Carl Davis. 

When I used to teach a course on Victorian literature, I would assign, in addition to Dickens and George Eliot and the Brontës, John Fowles's 1969 novel The French Lieutenant's Woman because, more than any other critical work I know of, it illuminated what those 19th-century novelists were up to: what they were telling us that their contemporary readers knew firsthand about the manners and morals and sexuality of their times. And about the intellectual controversies, such as Darwinism and societal change, that raged in the times. And crucially, about the conventions and evasions of fiction itself. Not much of this is readily translatable into cinematic terms, so when Karel Reisz came to film the novel and Harold Pinter to write the screenplay for it, much of that, especially the metafictional aspect of Fowles's book, had to be jettisoned. Instead, Reisz and Pinter chose to tell the main story of the novel -- the love affair of Sarah Woodruff (Meryl Streep) and Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons) -- within the framework of a story about the actors, Anna (Streep) and Mike (Irons), also having a affair while performing in a movie about Sarah and Charles. The result, for anyone who relished the novel, was bound to be disappointing, even with actors as skilled as the film's stars. The movie is splendidly mounted and photographed, the music score is ravishing, and the performances are subtle and witty. But the frame seems gratuitous. Fowles's novel famously had alternate endings for its story about Sarah and Charles: one conventionally tidy in the manner of Victorian fiction, the other enigmatic in the manner of modern novels. The film instead assigns the Victorian ending to Sarah and Charles, the modern one to Anna and Mike, which only approximates the point Fowles was trying to make about fictional conventions. Streep got an Oscar nomination for her performance, and it's her usual carefully detailed work. To some it's a little too detailed and self conscious, and it doesn't quite match with Irons's performance: He admitted that, as a stage-trained actor making his first major film, he was puzzled by what Streep was doing until he realized that she knew much more about acting for the camera than he did. It's possible that if you haven't read the book, you're at an advantage, but as one who admires the original, I find this version pretty but flat. 

Sons and Lovers (Jack Cardiff, 1960)

Dean Stockwell and Wendy Hiller in Sons and Lovers

Cast: Dean Stockwell, Wendy Hiller, Trevor Howard, Mary Ure, Heather Sears, William Lucas, Conrad Phillips, Ernest Thesiger, Donald Pleasance, Rosalie Crutchley, Sean Barrett. Screenplay: Gavin Lambert, T.E.B. Clarke, based on a novel by D.H. Lawrence. Cinematography: Freddie Francis. Production design: Thomas N. Morahan. Film editing: Gordon Pilkington. Music: Mario Nascimbene.

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.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960)

Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Arthur: Albert Finney
Doreen: Shirley Anne Field
Brenda: Rachel Roberts
Aunt Ada: Hylda Baker
Bert: Norman Rossington
Jack: Bryan Pringle
Robboe: Robert Cawdron
Mrs. Bull: Edna Morris
Mrs. Seaton: Elsie Wagstaff
Mr. Seaton: Frank Pettit
Blousy Woman: Avis Bunnage
Loudmouth: Colin Blakely
Doreen's Mother: Irene Richmond

Director: Karel Reisz
Screenplay: Alan Sillitoe
Based on a novel by Alan Sillitoe
Cinematography: Freddie Francis
Art direction: Edward Marshall
Music: John Dankworth

The 24-year-old Albert Finney was spot-on casting for the antihero of Alan Sillitoe's adaptation of his novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. With his slicked-up coif, predatory grin, and omnipresent cigarette, Finney's Arthur Seaton exudes the kind of sexual attractiveness that allows one to ignore his rough edges. Always on the prowl, Arthur is the quintessential working-class yobbo, drinking too much and sleeping around too carelessly. He gets his comeuppance when Brenda, married to the stodgy Jack, becomes pregnant -- Jack's sexual neglect makes her sure the child is Arthur's -- and Jack's brother and another soldier work Arthur over in a vacant lot. Meanwhile, he has fallen for Doreen, and the film ends with Arthur and Doreen on a hillside overlooking their factory town, planning a wedding and dreaming of a home of their own. But from what we've seen of Arthur, this is almost a parody of a happy ending. Doreen's a tough cookie, too, and we can only foresee a kind of grim muddling-through future, a recapitulation of the lives of their parents and neighbors. It's to the credit of Finney and a superb supporting cast that the film is not a dreary slog through blighted lives, but a kind of tribute to the persistent energy of the working class. It helps that the movie is filmed by the great Freddie Francis, who finds a rich palette of grays in the surroundings, and provides a needed burst of action in the fairgrounds sequence. But above all, it's Finney's show, launching one of the great movie careers, from rakish young leading man to invaluable character actor.

Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959)

Simone Signoret and Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top

Joe Lampton: Laurence Harvey
Alice Aisgill: Simone Signoret
Susan Brown: Heather Sears
Mr. Brown: Donald Wolfit
Charles Soames: Donald Houston
Elspeth: Hermione Baddeley
George Aisgill: Allan Cuthbertson
Mr. Hoylake: Raymond Huntley
Jack Wales: John Westbrook
Mrs. Brown: Ambrosine Phillpotts

Director: Jack Clayton
Screenplay: Neil Paterson
Based on a novel by John Braine
Cinematography: Freddie Francis
Art direction: Ralph W. Brinton
Music: Mario Nascimbene

Laurence Harvey's narrow eyes and sharpish features (and a long brush cut that makes him look a little like Clint Eastwood) provide the right wolfish look for Joe Lampton, a young man from the provinces on the make. Heir to such classic challengers to the class system as Stendhal's Julien Sorel, Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré, and Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths, Lampton is determined to break down the British barriers to upward movement. He arrives in the Yorkshire city of Warnley to take on a government job and walks right into a hormonal stew, the eager young men and women of his office casting eyes on one another, but especially on the newcomer. But Lampton knows what he wants when he sees her: a rich young woman named Susan Brown, whose father is a local factory owner. Learning that Susan is a member of an amateur theatrical group, Lampton joins up, only to find himself edged aside by the well-to-do Jack Wales, who is paying court to Susan. Every move Lampton makes to ingratiate himself with Susan, who is inclined to return his attentions, is thwarted by her parents, especially her formidably snobbish mother. We sense Mrs. Brown's backstory: She has married rich herself, to a working-class self-made man, and is determined to keep climbing higher -- no lower-class Lamptons allowed. Determined as he is to win Susan, whose parents send her away on an extended vacation on the Riviera,  Lampton comforts himself with another member of the theater company, Alice Aisgill, an older woman with a bullying, unfaithful husband. When Susan returns, Lampton resumes his pursuit of her, but finds that he has fallen in love with Alice, whose maturity offers something that makes Susan's girlishness seem cloying. When he manages to seduce Susan, he's bored and annoyed by her reaction to losing her virginity: She doesn't feel different, she simpers and keeps asking him if she looks different. But Susan gets pregnant, forcing the Browns into an accommodation with him: marriage and a lucrative job -- everything he wanted. The crisis with Alice this precipitates is predictable, but the film makes a sharp turn into melodrama before the ending. Room at the Top was a hit, winning Simone Signoret a best actress Oscar and Harvey a nomination (along with a nomination for Hermione Baddeley in the very small role of the friend who lends Alice her flat for the trysts with Lampton). It's a little slow in the middle section, as the affair with Alice progresses, and Harvey was an actor of limited range, so the shift from the predatory Lampton of the first part of the film to the man infatuated with Alice doesn't quite come off. But it's a perfect example of the Angry Young Men films, plays, and novels that revolutionized British culture in the austere postwar 1950s.

Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991)

I don't think I've ever seen J. Lee Thompson's 1962 version of this film, but nothing about Scorsese's version shows me why a director of his skill and stature thought it necessary to remake it. I'm even more puzzled to learn that Steven Spielberg originally planned to film it, but when he decided it wasn't exactly his thing, he traded with Scorsese for the rights to make Schindler's List (1993). (Which in turn makes me wonder what Scorsese's version of List would have been like: Would Robert De Niro have played Oskar Schindler or Amon Goeth?) It's also puzzling that anyone really needed to remake this specific material (James R. Webb's screenplay based on a novel by John D. MacDonald, revised here by Wesley Strick) when the premise of the film, an ex-con takes revenge on the man he blames for sending him to prison, is such a staple of melodrama. The only real twist to the premise is that the object of revenge is not the prosecuting attorney or the judge who sentenced Max Cady (De Niro), but his defense attorney, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), who was so revolted by Cady's rape and battery of a young woman that he suppressed evidence of the woman's promiscuity, which he might have used at least to get a lighter sentence for Cady, who learned about the suppressed evidence when he studied law in prison. The Scorsese version is certainly watchable -- Scorsese has yet to make a film that isn't -- but it is what it is: a melodrama ratcheted up to the heights. Scorsese's direction is literally in your face: He has Freddie Francis film some dialogue scenes in closeups, with the camera slowly pulling in even closer on faces as the characters talk. The one time Scorsese decides not to do this is actually the best scene in the film: when Cady talks with Bowden's daughter, Danielle (Juliette Lewis) on the stage of her high school's theater. Here the distance the camera keeps from them at first allows for a tension that grows in intensity, until finally the camera draws nearer. De Niro pulls out all the stops in a performance that earned him an Oscar nomination, but at times verges on self-parody, especially the Southern (?) accent that he adopts (and occasionally drops). Nolte and Jessica Lange (as Leigh, Bowden's wife) are fine, as one expects them to be, but the best performance is given by Lewis, who was 18 and makes Danielle a credible 15-year-old, her rebellious streak reinforcing her attraction to Cady at the same time that she knows to be wary of him. It earned her an Oscar nomination and launched her career. The casting of Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck, the Cady and Bowden of the first film, in cameo roles is just a gimmick, and not an especially effective one.