Sons and Lovers (1960)
Overview
The son of a working-class British mining family has dreams of pursuing an art career, but when he strikes up an affair with an older, married woman from the town it enrages his kind but possessive mother.
Cast
Mary Ure
Clara Dawes
Trevor Howard
Walter Morel
Dean Stockwell
Paul Morel
Wendy Hiller
Gertrude Morel
Heather Sears
Miriam Leivers
William Lucas
William Morel
Conrad Phillips
Baxter Dawes
Ernest Thesiger
Mr. Hadlock
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Dean Stockwell is on good form here, as the artistically talented "Paul" who lives with his miner father "Walter" (Trevor Howard) and mother (Wendy Hiller). When tragedy strikes their local mine, she is even more determined to ensure that this son does not go down the pit - and when "Hadlock" (Ernest Thesiger) offers him an opportunity to come to London and work - it looks like he might escape this dead-end existence. His dad, however, comes home drunk and he and his wife have an altercation that makes "Paul" stay put. Is he staying to protect her, or because he is really too afraid to cut the apron strings? Jack Cardiff really does lay the foundations for this story well; a good solid cast deliver a story with plenty of simultaneously running themes. The tightly-knit family with their individual demons, trapped in an economic bubble of low income, minimal opportunities, and other people's wives. Hiller is superbly understated as the inadvertently domineering, but well meaning matriarch and though Howard features but sparingly, his presence in each scene has purpose. The title is a bit misleading - one assumes it is a romance, or some sort of Jane Austen style of story; but D.H. Lawrence has imbued these characters with a plausibility that engenders sympathy, fury and frustration from the audience. Sixty years on, this is still a potent social commentary that many families and communities may well continue to relate to.
