The New Pictures

Sons and Lovers (20th Century-Fox) effectively translates a fine novel into film. The acting, in particular, is exceptional. Wendy Hiller is repellently pitiable as the carnivorous mother who entraps D. H. Lawrence's hero. Dean Stockwell fits exactly the author's descriptions of Paul Morel, the almost girlish young artist who calls his mother "pigeon" and dotes on her doting. Heather Sears and Mary Ure are appealing as the young women with whom, and by means of whom, Paul tries to break free; their characterizations are deep enough to show that each girl is in a trap of her own. But it is Trevor Howard, as Paul's hardhanded father, who gives the film's best performance.

Lawrence regarded the coal miner Morel with a somewhat priggish distaste, and the attitude marred his novel. Howard's Morel has a clumsy kindness and a drunkard's fitful dignity. He is no mere brute, although he has been brutalized by the pits in which he has grubbed since he was twelve. There is still no understanding between father and son, but Howard makes it clear, as Lawrence did not fully do, that this is part of the younger Morel's great loss.

The black-and-white photography is excellent, and it is to the credit of Director Jack Cardiff that he has used his Cinema-Scope cameras in sets seldom larger than the parlor of a miner's cottage, with none of the 40-foot ear lobes that sometimes result from wide-screen intimacy. Spectacle is firmly resisted; a disastrous mine explosion is recorded merely by a faint tremor on the surface of a millpond beside which two lovers are lolling. The impact, of course, is twice as forceful as if the air had been filled with flying coal carts. Much of the dialogue is Lawrence's, and it is a reminder of what a remarkable dialogue writer he was. Says a rasp-tongued widow: "I like a man about the house, if he's only something to snap at." Morel evokes enormous sympathy when he says quietly to his wife: "Always taking the curl out of me, aren't ye?"

These days, major films generally run well into the third hour, at great profit to the popcorn interests and at great cost to the patience of viewers, but this production, in only 103 minutes, includes everything important in Lawrence's 500-page novel. The most serious objection to the film is that it is inconclusive. But so is the novel: Lawrence chose to shut off his narrative after Mrs. Morel dies, but before Paul learns whether he has really been set free. If the ending lacks force, it is because it owes more to life than to art.

The Bellboy (Paramount) is 72 minutes of disconnected jokes that could be subtitled "Sight Gags from Prehistory to the Present Day." Written, produced, directed and played with simian ferocity by Funnyman Jerry Lewis, Bellboy gives celluloid refuge to such oldies as the timeless circus jape in which an endless file of clowns emerge from a tiny sedan, and the hoary quadruple mistaken-identity routine that had whiskers to its knees when Shakespeare used it 300 years ago in The Comedy of Errors. Filmed in and around Miami Beach's overstuffed Fontainebleau Hotel, Bellboy's air of what'll-we-do-next is often close to the amateurism of a Junior League Follies. Only a few of Jerry's fevered antics--notably his conducting of an invisible orchestra and bowing to clamorous applause from empty seats--mingle the pathos and wit that are at the heart of humor.

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