Marriage has become a battleground between drunk coal miner Trevor Howard and beleaguered Wendy Hiller, defending her sons, Dean Stockwell and William Lucas. The performances are excellent, the camerawork under Freddie Francis is great black-and-white stuff that deserves its Oscar win amidst the six nominations it got.
It is in D.H.Lawrence's story that I take no delight. His excellence has long been predicated on his raw sexual honesty. In the century that has passed, that glamor has faded and left us with a story of how two sons of a marriage they see as having failed come to cowardly conclusions that they will not take the risk of failure. This story is allegedly based on Lawrence's life - and a lot of the scenes are shot in the places that he lived in. It makes me wonder what Lawrence - and the film makers, struggling to get this past a prudish MGM - left out. There's a scene of Howard in one of those portable tin bath tubs, with his back being scrubbed by his wife that might have been tender some time in its long journey from incident in reality to its appearance on the screen. The net effect is to set up Howard's boorishness when one of his sons brings home a girl, and Howard sidles through dressed only in a bath towel.
Of course, we should only look at the evidence of the film in discussing a film, and that tells us that Howard is a terrible person who was once one good enough to captivate Miss Hiller. One of the sons asks how he changed from one into the other. There's no answer.
It is in D.H.Lawrence's story that I take no delight. His excellence has long been predicated on his raw sexual honesty. In the century that has passed, that glamor has faded and left us with a story of how two sons of a marriage they see as having failed come to cowardly conclusions that they will not take the risk of failure. This story is allegedly based on Lawrence's life - and a lot of the scenes are shot in the places that he lived in. It makes me wonder what Lawrence - and the film makers, struggling to get this past a prudish MGM - left out. There's a scene of Howard in one of those portable tin bath tubs, with his back being scrubbed by his wife that might have been tender some time in its long journey from incident in reality to its appearance on the screen. The net effect is to set up Howard's boorishness when one of his sons brings home a girl, and Howard sidles through dressed only in a bath towel.
Of course, we should only look at the evidence of the film in discussing a film, and that tells us that Howard is a terrible person who was once one good enough to captivate Miss Hiller. One of the sons asks how he changed from one into the other. There's no answer.