L’Amant de lady Chatterley (1955) - film review

Sir Clifford Chatterley, a wealthy pit owner, is wheelchair bound as a result of wounds sustained during the war.  His wife Constance continues to love him even though their conjugal life is at an end.  Sir Clifford is so desperate for an heir to his great fortune that he suggests his wife should become pregnant by another man.  Constance is shocked by this proposal; she cannot bear the idea of being unfaithful to her husband.  Then she meets Mellors, Sir Clifford’s gamekeeper.  Lady Chatterley cannot help being drawn to the muscular young man, and he is equally taken with her.  Within no time, they are pursuing a passionate love affair, blind to the difference in their social status and to the scandal that may arise if their affair were ever to be discovered.   The unexpected return of Mellors’ estranged wife brings a brutal end to their idyllic affair.  Intent on revenge, she betrays Mellors to his employer.  When she returns to England after an extended stay in Venice, Lady Chatterley must reveal to her husband that she is pregnant, by his gamekeeper...

Five years before Penguin Books published the full unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, resulting in a high profile obscenity trial (thirty years after the author’s death), French cinema audiences were treated to this surprisingly risqué film adaptation by French film director Marc Allégret.  The first adaptation of Lawrence’s most famous novel, L’Amant de lady Chatterley may appear tame by today’s standards, but for the mid-1950s it was pretty steamy stuff and the film was banned outright in the United States.   Based on a stage play by Gaston Bonheur and Philippe de Rothschild, the film is a characteristically Gallic reinterpretation of Lawrence’s novel, far more concerned with the class implications of an illicit relationship than with the lurid details of a torrid love affair.  Whilst the film’s love scenes are discreetly handled, they are highly suggestive and represent something of a milestone in the portrayal of sex in the cinema.

Danielle Darrieux, arguably the most glamorous French actress of her generation, was the obvious choice for the part of Lady Chatterley, and whilst the film is not one of her best remembered, the performance she gives in it is assuredly one of her finest.  The agonising trauma of a woman having to choose between the man she loves out of duty and the man she loves by instinct and necessity is powerfully conveyed by Darrieux in the film’s most compelling scenes.  At first, it is tempting to regard Allégret’s casting of British and Italian actors for the roles of Sir Clifford Chatterley and the gamekeeper Mellors as an egregious example of national stereotyping.  Is it necessary to stress the Arctic frigidity of the one and the hot-blooded temperament of the other in such a crude way?  In fact, the casting turns out to be inspired.  Leo Genn, a well-regarded English actor who had previously been nominated for an Oscar for his work in Quo Vadis (1951), perfectly embodies Lawrence’s most tragically drawn character, a man hopelessly dependent on his wife’s misguided view of love, whilst Erno Crisa, a charismatic star of Italian cinema, conveys not only the passionate nature of Mellors but also his psychological complexity.  The film’s power lies not in its direction and writing, admirable as these are, but in the blistering authenticity that the three principals bring to their performances.

Marc Allégret directed L’Amant de lady Chatterley towards the end of his career, when he was mainly preoccupied with lightweight popular comedies such as En effeuillant la marguerite (1956) and Un drôle de dimanche (1958).  Previously, Allégret had distinguished himself with such films as Fanny (1932) and Entrée des artistes (1938), although he was never considered to be a great filmmaker of the standing of Carné, Duvivier or Renoir.  His D.H. Lawrence adaptation represents one of the artistic highpoints of his career, not just an inspired rendering of a daring and very problematic novel, but also a wry commentary on contemporary attitudes towards marital infidelity, class and the portrayal of sex in cinema.  There have been several film adaptations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover since this one, including Pascale Ferran’s sizzlingly sensual Lady Chatterley (2006), but Allégret’s film has its own unique charm.  The severe censorship limitations of the 1950s may have prevented Allégret from showing us the more lurid aspects of Lawrence’s novel, but his film captures its essence and perhaps manages to express Lawrence’s ideas about the inseparability of love and desire, the union of the mind and the body, more succinctly than the author himself.   This film, like the novel on which it is based, is surely ripe for a fresh reappraisal.

© James Travers 2012

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