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.

The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951)

The late 1940s and early 1950s were a golden age for British film comedy, and Alec Guinness was right at the heart of it with his roles in The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951), The Captain's Paradise (Anthony Kimmins, 1953), and The Ladykillers (Mackendrick, 1955). It was the period when comic actors like Margaret Rutherford, Terry-Thomas, Alastair Sim, and the young Peter Sellers became stars, and British filmmakers found the funny side of the class system, economic stagnation, and postwar malaise. For it wasn't a golden age for Britain in other regards. Some of the gloom against which British comic writers and performers were fighting is on evidence in The Lavender Hill Mob, but it mostly lingers in the background. As the movie's robbers and cops career around London, we get glimpses of blackened masonry and vacant lots -- spaces created by bombing and still unfilled. The mad pursuit of millions of pounds by Holland (Guinness) and Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) and their light-fingered employees Lackery (Sidney James) and Shorty (Alfie Bass) seems to have been inspired by the sheer tedium of muddling through the war and returning to the shriveled routine of the status quo afterward. Who can blame Holland for wanting to cash in after 20 years of supervising the untold wealth in gold from the refinery to the bank? "I was a potential millionaire," he says, "yet I had to be satisfied with eight pounds, fifteen shillings, less deductions." As for Pendlebury, an artist lurks inside the man who spends his time making souvenir statues of the Eiffel Tower for tourists affluent enough to vacation in Paris. "I propagate British cultural depravity," he says with a sigh. Screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke taps into the deep longing of Brits stifled by good manners -- even the thieves Lackery and Shorty are always polite -- and starved by the postwar rationing of the Age of Austerity. Clarke and director Charles Crichton of course can't do anything so radical as let the Lavender Hill Mob get away with it, but they come right up to the edge of anarchy by portraying the London police as only a little more competent than the Keystone Kops. The film earned Clarke an Oscar, and Guinness got his first nomination.