Sons and Lovers: Flight from the [S]mothering Text

Abstract The 1960 screen version of Sons and Lovers appeared over a decade after another Lawrence adaptation, The Rocking Horse Winner, yet it resembles its predecessor in a number of ways. Like Anthony Pelissier’s effort, it is another relatively short, careful British production filmed in black and white. Yet the challenges of adaptation facing its director, Jack Cardiff, were absolutely the reverse of those Pelissier encountered. Pelissier needed to spin out and finesse a fifteen-page short story into a feature-length film. Cardiff, on the other hand, confronted a heavyweight novel, well over four hundred pages long, with the prospect of squeezing it into a movie about the same length as Pelissier’s. This, in fact, is exactly what he did. The finished print of Sons and Lovers, including a scene excised by the censors, amounts to ninety-nine minutes of film—a paltry eight-minute increase in running time over The skills that Cardiff brought to this project—and to the challenge of effective adaptation—were primarily camera-related. Sons and Lovers was only his third directorial assignment,