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"Sons and Lovers" (1960)


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I watched a DVD of "Sons and Lovers" (1960), directed by Jack Cardiff and photographed by Freddie Francis. It won the b&w Oscar, nominated along with "The Apartment" (Joseph LaShelle), "The Facts of Life" (Charles Lang), "Inherit the Wind" (Ernest Laszlo) and "Psycho" (John Russell). The DVD transfer is on the mediocre side, region-free, but seems to have some odd PAL-to-NTSC conversion artifacts in motion.

You see a lot of what Francis would later do on "The Elephant Man" in terms of recreating Industrial Era England in anamorphic, in this case, using CinemaScope lenses. Some wonderful lighting in small rooms, and great landscape shots. Fairly deep focus as in "The Innocents", which I'm sure helped improve the sharpness of CinemaScope lenses.

The movie is classic D.H. Lawrence territory, so whether you enjoy it depends on how you feel about Lawrence (I incorrectly said Thomas Hardy originally.)

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Beautiful! I’ve always been curious about this film after hearing about it in the Jack Cardiff documentary ‘Cameraman.’

After observing Bjorn’s CinemaScope lens restoration project from a few years ago, it’s amazing to me how big and heavy these lenses were back in the day.

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