Word: morel
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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...
...hero seemed unlikely enough-an obsessed French dentist named Morel with a passion for elephants. The creation of French Novelist Romain Gary, in his novel The Roots of Heaven, Morel had brooded in a Nazi concentration camp, conceived such a blazing reverence for life that, once freed, he took off for Darkest Africa to become a self-appointed protector of wild beasts threatened with extermination by onrushing civilization...
Living Character. Shortly after Gary's novel first came out in France in 1956, Gary had a long letter from a game warden living in the Ivory Coast territory of French West Africa. Raphael Matta, a Frenchman of Italian descent, seemed Morel sprung to uncanny life-though Gary and Matta had never met or heard the other's name. Like Morel, Matta had undergone a shattering World War II experience. An exploding land mine almost took his life, and left him totally deaf...
...Stuttgart as a teacher, to Java with the Dutch army, to Abyssinia as a trader, gunrunner and, probably, slaver. Now James Ramsey Ullman (The White Tower) has come down from the mountains long enough to try to fill in the gaps. In his fictionalized biography, Rimbaud becomes Claude Morel; Charleville, his home town in the Ardennes, becomes Cambon; and Verlaine becomes Maurice Druard...
Mountaineer Ullman has stuck to the few known facts of Rimbaud's story, has imagined the unknown credibly enough. But in the end, he has after all unearthed only Claude Morel. Arthur Rimbaud and his bellyful of bitter dead still lie buried...