Women in Love (1969) - film review

England in the early 1920s.  Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are two sisters who live in a Midlands mining town, the former a schoolteacher, the latter an aspiring sculptor.  At the wedding of the local pit owner’s daughter, they meet Gerard, the bride’s older brother, and Rupert, his best friend.  Although all four of them have reservations about marriage it is not long before they succumb to the power of love.  Ursula and Rupert are irresistibly drawn to one another, whilst Gudrun and Gerard embark on an intensely physical love affair.  Yet conventional love appears to satisfy none of them.  Rupert desperately craves an intimate relationship with a man, but Gerard proves unresponsive to his needs.  Reluctantly, Gerard agrees to marry Ursula and the four friends decide to spend Christmas together in the Alps.  The holiday will end in tragedy...

Director Ken Russell garnered acclaim and notoriety, in roughly equal measure, for his adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.  Although the film was shocking in its time, mainly on account of its liberal use of full frontal male nudity, it has come to be regarded as Russell’s greatest film, his one unqualified masterpiece and arguably the finest adaptation a D.H. Lawrence novel.  At the time he made the film, Russell had already acquired a reputation as firebrand auteur, mainly through his radical biographical dramas for British television.  His Women in Love is the film that secured his standing as Britain’s most uninhibited and exciting new filmmaker, although he rarely matched the excellence of this early cinematic achievement and would only alienate critics and audiences with his increasingly flamboyant approach to cinema art.  

Women in Love is not only a superlative literary adaptation, which powerful evokes the essence and style of Lawrence’s revolutionary book, it is also a film that vividly reflects the era in which it was made, a time of burgeoning sexual and artistic liberation.  The film is most famous for the unashamedly homoerotic sequence in which the two male protagonists - magnificently portrayed by Alan Bates and Oliver Reed - indulge in a spot of naked wrestling, bathed in the golden light of a coal fire.   Homosexuality had only been decriminalised in the UK two years before the film was first seen and so this sequence, staged as a kind of primitive male lovemaking ritual (which is entirely faithful to Lawrence’s conception), could hardly to fail to ignite the pages of the more sensational newspaper columns.  The heterosexual couplings received less attention but these were also very daring for their time and contribute as much to the sensual allure and stunning visual artistry of the film.  Of particular note is the intensely lyrical sequence in which Ursula and Rupert are drawn to one another in their first clinch, the one rising up the screen in languorous slow motion, the other falling in the same way, the two characters drawn to one another like magnets, in defiance of the law of gravity and societal convention, to touch and coalesce in what is possibly the most romantic kiss ever seen in a British film.

Nor does Russell shy away from the inherent flaws in Lawrence’s novel, in particular the ghastly pretentiousness of some of the dialogue.  Rather, he uses this to great effect, even accentuating it with some artistic pretences of his own, to expose the failings of the four main characters as they try and fail to intellectualise their sexual and spiritual longings.  In some scenes, you can’t help feeling that Russell is viciously mocking Lawrence’s obsession with the earthier aspects of human nature, his unsubtle use of innuendo seemingly playing up to the writer’s popular reputation as a mucky author.  Yet this impression is a fleeting one and the overriding sensation is an appreciation of how thoroughly, how unreservedly Russell engages with Lawrence’s unique vision of human experience.  The frenzy of desire for an unattainable fulfilment, that perfect union of the mind and the body which sex appears to offer but can never truly deliver, is beautifully captured by Russell’s unfalteringly imaginative mise-en-scène and the arresting performances from his four lead actors (notably that of Glenda Jackson, who was rewarded with a Best Actress Oscar).   Women in Love is a spellbinding piece of cinema, the most perfect evocation of Lawrence’s great novel and quite possibly the finest British film of the 1960s.  How sad that Russell’s subsequent adaptation of The Rainbow, a prequel to this film made twenty years later, should be such an insipid and passionless affair.  Women in Love is, by contrast, a work of pure genius.

© James Travers 2012

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?