Look, when someone tells me that something is a “modern retelling of the Oedipus myth,” forgive me for thinking someone’s gonna bang their mom, kill their dad, and blind themselves. If you leave all that out, isn’t it not the Oedipus myth anymore? It’s like “Crime and Punishment” without the crime, or “The Odyssey” if Odysseus just stayed home.
Paul Morel (Dean Stockwell) is part of a coal miner family in the East Midlands, but his aspirations go beyond the pit. His mother Gertrude (Wendy Hiller) believes Paul has the talent to escape, but Paul’s drunken miner father Walter (Trevor Howard) resents the idea that a miner’s life is one to “escape” at all. Moreover, Gertrude’s domineering emotional love of Paul impacts Paul’s ability to connect with other women, and when he gets his chance to study art in London, he turns it down to stay by his mother’s side.
As for the “lovers” part of Sons and Lovers: Paul is in some kind of love with Miriam Leivers (Heather Sears), whose own mother has indoctrinated her into thinking the “sins of the flesh” are ugly.1 Paul also dates Clara Dawes (Mary Ure), a “liberated woman” who is separated from her husband. Then Gertrude dies, Paul decides to go to London to study art, and Miriam asks him to marry her. The movie closes with Paul telling her why he can’t do that:
I did belong to my mother. And now she’s dead, and I don’t want her to live again in you—not even in you, Miriam. I’m sure I’ll never find anyone as good as you, or any love as good as yours, but I don’t want to find it because I want to be free. I don’t ever want to belong to anyone again—never, anymore. And perhaps I’ll understand at last what it is to live. Goodbye.
Rating: 7/10, would’ve been better if Paul defeated the Sphinx and became king of Thebes.
Cast and Crew
Though the movie is about Paul’s emotional awakening, it’s actor Trevor Howard, who played Paul’s father Walter, who was nominated for Best Actor.2 Early in the film, Gertrude mentions that Walter “only shouts when he’s wrong”; well, I guess he’s wrong the whole film, because Trevor Howard spends the whole movie yelling.
Trevor Howard is only mentioned on Jeopardy with respect to his role as Capt. Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)—though that role was played more famously by both Charles Laughton and Anthony Hopkins.3
Dean Stockwell, who played Paul, has a fun connection with trivia: he won this 1992 episode of Celebrity Jeopardy. He even answered this highbrow question correctly:
His trip to the U.S. inspired the “American” string quartet as well as the “New World” symphony.4
Stockwell was considered a celebrity in 1992 because of his role on “Quantum Leap,”5 but his film career decades earlier was no joke. He was a child actor who starred in The Boy with Green Hair (1948) and Kim (1950), and later filmed Compulsion (1959) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962). He eventually settled into non-starring roles in noteworthy films and his career stretched into the 2010s. Here’s his unsettling lip-sync performance to “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet (1986).
D. H.6 Lawrence wrote the semi-autobiographical novel “Sons and Lovers” (1913), and it is considered one of his great works. Like his character Paul, Lawrence was an artist7 and his father was a coal miner. After “Sons and Lovers,” Lawrence wrote “The Rainbow” and its sequel “Women in Love,” about the lives and loves of generations of the Brangwen family in the context of industrialization.8
But Lawrence’s most noteworthy work was “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” about the affair of Constance Reid (now Lady Chatterley) and her gamekeeper after her husband is paralyzed. Because of the book’s language and depictions of sex, only censored versions were available in the U.S. and U.K. until 1960, when Penguin Books published an unexpurgated edition and then survived an obscenity trial.
The Trivia
Paul asks Clara Dawes out at a protest for U.K. women’s suffrage. When playing trivia in the U.S., the main British suffragette you’ll need to know is Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which used tactics like hunger strikes and arson to agitate for women’s rights. A deeper cut is Emily Davison, a suffragette who ran onto the Epsom Downs racetrack to protest and was hit and killed by a horse owned by King George V.
But you should know lots about the U.S. push for women’s suffrage. Put broadly (read: reductively and incorrectly), it started with the Seneca Falls Convention and ended with the 19th amendment. Let’s touch on some milestones.
The Seneca Falls Convention: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Quaker Lucretia Mott planned the 1848 two-day event in upstate New York to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women. Amelia Bloomer was also there, and the convention convinced her to start the first newspaper for and by women. The output of the convention was the Declaration of Sentiments.9
Sojourner Truth gave the “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention held in Akron. It’s a banger speech.
In 1869, Wyoming, not even yet a state, gave women the right to vote, and later adopted the nickname The Equality State.
Some women believed the Supreme Court would, if pressed, rule that the Constitution already protected women’s suffrage. To push the issue, many women, including Susan B. Anthony, voted and were arrested for it. The Supreme Court later ruled in Minor v. Happersett that the Constitution did not grant suffrage (darn), so the fight for a constitutional amendment began.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was formed in 1890 when two other suffrage organizations were combined.10 Its first president was Stanton and its second was her friend Anthony.
Alice Paul organized the Woman Suffrage Procession, which was held the day before Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated. Paul later formed the National Woman’s Party (NWP), favoring more extreme tactics than the NAWSA. Their protestors were known as the Silent Sentinels, and many were arrested. They, like the WSPU (remember them? from the beginning of this section?), used methods like hunger strikes to achieve their ends.11
The 19th amendment was ratified in 1920, and afterwards Carrie Chapman Catt, herself a former president of the NAWSA, founded the League of Women Voters.
Odds and Ends
Walter uses the term “poltroon,” which is an old-timey word for “coward”…Paul and Clara play cribbage; here’s a guide on it…a larder was a cool place food was kept before we had refrigerators; it gets its name from the process of covering meat with fat to preserve it…Walter says Gertrude once thought of him as a lily of the valley—the birth flower of May—but now thinks of him as cow parsley…Paul’s brother William gives a reading of Robert Browning’s “Home-Thoughts, from the Sea”…Paul and Miriam reference the Dark Lady, who appears in Shakespeare’s sonnets 127 to 152, and the Lady of the Lake, who gives King Arthur the sword Excalibur.
Also, you might have thought that a movie retelling the Oedipus myth would make a great excuse for a Trivia section on Greek plays. You’d be right, but this You Gotta Know column from 2016 already covered that terrain nicely. Give it a skim if, say, Jocasta isn’t a proper noun you’ve already got at your fingertips.
She gets over it. In an odd coincidence, this is the second movie we’ve watched where a character played by Heather Sears loses her virginity outside. (The first was Room at the Top.)
You can also catch Howard in a scene-stealing supporting role in Father Goose (1964). In that film, Cary Grant is marooned on an island and Howard makes him spot enemy planes in exchange for directions to hidden whiskey.
Antonín Dvořák.
“Quantum Leap” (1989-1993) starred Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett, who involuntarily traveled through time righting historical wrongs. Dean Stockwell played his best friend who appeared to him as a hologram. “Quantum Leap” was rebooted in 2022 and, having seen fifteen minutes of it in a hotel room, I can conclusively tell you that it seems fine. (Oh, BREAKING NEWS: in April 2024, the reboot was canceled.)
David Herbert, if you’re into knowin’ authors’ initials.
Many of Lawrence’s paintings can be found in Taos, New Mexico, where he once lived. Artist Georgia O’Keeffe also spent time in Taos, and while there, she painted a tree on Lawrence’s ranch.
Lawrence’s focus on physical intimacy and the body sought to combat Western civilization’s overemphasis on the mind. That was obviously silly and unnecessary and please don’t think about that at all as you continue reading your weird newsletter about trivia. You can also ignore this quote from Sons and Lovers’ Walter: “All this cleverness of yours […] doesn’t seem to have brought you much happiness.” Nah, that’s all wrong, cleverness is great.
The “Oneida Whig” reviewed the Declaration thusly: “This bolt is the most shocking and unnatural incident ever recorded in the history of womanity. If our ladies will insist on voting and legislating, where, gentleman, will be our dinners and our elbows?”
The two were the National Woman Suffrage Association (founded by Stanton and Anthony) and American Woman Suffrage Association (founded by, among others, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe). One key difference between the two was that Anthony and Stanton, in their newspaper “The Revolution,” ripped the proposed 15th Amendment, since it guaranteed the vote irrespective of skin color but not sex. Stone (perhaps the first woman to keep her maiden name after marriage) and the AWSA supported the 15th Amendment through their newspaper, “Woman’s Journal.”
The NWP under Paul later fought for women to be included as a group protected against discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and supported the Equal Rights Amendment.