Sons and Lovers (1981)

There is Paul Morel (Karl Johnson) with his 2 lovers, Miriam Leivers (Leonie Mellinger) and Clara Dawes (Lynn Dearth) looking like a daft apeth.

Miriam (Leionie Mellinger) and Clara (Lynn Dearth) would have been well shut of him if you ask me. A right waste of time and space he was.

Even though he’s making it Miriams fault she’s messing him about and why he can’t love her (because she’s ‘too spiritual’ to give herself to him sexually)

This is Paul Morel aged 14. Played by Karl Johnson aged 33, but looking about 43.

The casting of Karl Johnson as Paul Morell is bizarre. He’s like some shambolic bony old uncle creeping out lovely ladies with his agonisingly tortured mother-fixation. Nothing about him is attractive, dynamic, compelling. There’s no Lawrentian fiery charisma.

What could Miriam possibly be wanting him for, or be all too consumingly in love with?
Drop him luv. Find a man who can reciprocate your loveliness.

‘It has always been you fighting me off’ says Miriam.
When actually it should be the other way around. She should be fighting him off. With a long handled broom. Or a damp dishcloth.
Well, thats what this adaptation makes me/you feel.
So perhaps Leonie Mellinger is also miscast as Miriam. She’s too attractive.

And then he starts messing about with suffragette Clara Dawes. She has to suffer more of his Oedipal complex confusion and anguished ambivalence.
He can’t satisfy Clara sexually. Just like Miriam couldn’t satisfy him sexually.
Although he wants sex he’s hopeless at it, and frustrated by it.
Its his Mother that’s fucked him up.

Eileen Atkins as Mother and Tom Bell as Father are spot on. Their embittered mismatched marriage makes you wince with how lovelessly estranged it is.

A TV review at the time thought this 7 part series too lush (Anna Raeburn) and too fast (John Pillinger) How times have changed. It seems relatively lesuirely compared with the ADHD rat a tat editing of today. I didn’t find it lush at all.
Valentine Cunningham missed the mysticism and the depth of the novel. I agree. You need the Laurentian language to lift it higher, make it soar. This was too earthed to the flat mucky ground. Like me, he wasn’t impressed with Karl Johnson as Paul Morel either.
Something music hall vaudevillian about how Karl Johnson scuttles around. He’s less magnetising dynamic presence and more figure of unintentional fun, of pathetic ridicule.

Better casting of Paul Morel could have bumped this up into very good. As it is, it’s good, as in decent enough. And at least it’s encouraged me to want to read the novel. To find out, and discover, all that depth and mysticism I was missing.

Dir: Stuart Burge, England

7/10

Footnote: Lynn Dearth (Clara) died early aged 46. Suicide?. And Leonie Mellinger didn’t really do much after this either. So many of these lovely actresses get their One Big Part, their one and only chance to shine – and then they are gone, they disappear without a trace.

The L Shaped Room (1962)

Watched this film off YouTube. Adaptation of a book by Lynne Reid Banks (i bought it 2nd hand but never read it) Another of those – or so i thought – juicy b/w Brit films of the 1960’s. By “juicy” i mean full of gritty realism about everyday ordinary kitchen sink lifes.

This has some kitchen sink and some suds, but the rubber marigolds are on protecting soft hands from getting too dirty or careworn. The characters aren’t recognisably everyday either; more like out of the ordinary misfit “types”: a gay black, a lesbian actress, a chatty tart, a struggling writer, and a petite French girl with a shameful secret.

They’re all living in a seedy London boarding house together. The French girl (Leslie Caron) Jane arrives and takes L shaped room in the roof. Wannabe writer (Tom Bell) Toby is soon sniffing around. The gay jazz trumpeter black guy is friendly. So too are the dykey kindly old actress and the soft-hearted tart. There’s a lot of “More tea dear?” talk.

Jane is pregnant (her secret) but unmarried (her shame) – and doesn’t know what to do: have it, or kill it. Toby is sort of falling in love with her, but gets stroppy after finding out shes up the duff; basically, he’s doesn’t wanna know. Jane Od’s on her “something special pills” given to her by the kindly dyke. She decides she’s gonna have the kid after all and go back to France. End of romance. Mind you, Toby was dumping her anyway (the selfish bar-steward)

A Brahms Piano Concerto is periodically pumped in to try to elevate all these “seedy” suddy proceedings up into – what exactly? I don’t know, give it an air of misguided romanticism – lift it out of its kitchen sinkness i suppose.

Although mildly diverting, i wasn’t particularly engaged by it. Not gritty enough to grab me around the short and curlies. It was trying to mix French New Wave sophistication with provincial English “Oh dear” resignation – which slopped tidily out as a mediocre melange of nothing muchness.

Dir: Bryan Forbes, UK

6/10