Sons and Lovers
Director: Jack Cardiff
Year Released: 1960
Rating: 2.0
A budding artist from a poor family (Dean Stockwell, looking from certain angles a bit like James Dean) has two significant love affairs - one with a prudish girl-next-door, another with a married woman - before getting a great offer to leave for London and hone his painting skills. Though Cardiff gets some of the details right from the semi-autobiographical D.H. Lawrence novel, the romantic relationships aren't as developed as the relationship the young lad has with his alcoholic father and doting mother, and, as the late, great Pauline Kael noted, this gets the facts of Lawrence right but miss the passion and vivacity of Lawrence's text (it doesn't help I'm a devotee of old saucy Dave). The black and white cinematography by Freddie Francis is good, but color might have been more appropriate - this doesn't fit in that well with other excellent Kitchen Sink sagas, like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
