Recently, I was staying with a friend who had borrowed Ken Russell's 1971 film of D. H. Lawrence's "Women in Love." Both of us had seen it 30 years ago and remembered the nude wrestling scene, but little else. Both she and I found the movie too boring and incoherent to watch now (maybe if she'd had it on DVD we could have found the wrestling scene, which probably would also have underwhelmed us, too).

On the movie's initial release, I had no idea who writer Larry Kramer or director Ken Russell. Astonishingly, both Ken Russell were nominated for Academy Awards for their efforts (and Glenda Jackson won her first Oscar for her overheated resentful Gudrun Brangwen). Russell went on to make the loathsome "Music Lovers" and some other wretched excesses. Kramer's only other screenplay was for the hideously bad musical version of "Lost Horizons," and he wrote a vicious and boring novel the title of which epinions content filter does not allow.

So, now I have strong negative expectations of Kramer and Russell. And since we abandoned watching the movie (while Eleanor Bron (the ogress of "The Little Princess" and one of the ogresses in "The House of Mirth") was sulking after her "artistic" dance was supplanted by 1920s-style boogying), I would not write a review. However, I found that I had written a review in 1971... and what I had forgotten was how boring I found the movie when I did watch it all the way through. What follows is what I wrote in the June 1st 1971 issue of the Phalanstery Review, my college's semi-underground weekly:

The first eight hours of the movie were merely tedious and picturesque. The next sixteen were even worse. The editing was abysmal, providing no coherence, little action, and less motivation. There is a lot of pious proclamation of Lawrentian "philosophy." The crucial dramatic moments are rendered merely melodramatic, and the changes they supposedly produce are unconvincing and more talked about than acted upon or shown. A very verbose Alan Bates turns in the worst performance of his career. Even the much-honored Glenda Jackson (she won a New York Film Critics Award and a National Film Critics Award, as well as an Oscar), playing a sort of youngish Katherine Hepburn in heat, as not particularly effective. Fortunately for the viewer, the scene in which significant looks are exchanged by the future lovers in the churchyard was not repeated beyond the movie's first five hours (unlike a similar scene endlessly repeated in "The Virgin and the Gypsy").

A good movie of a D. H. Lawrence novel has never been made [this remains true in 2002]. This attempt's only progress is showing male genitals, but the movie is less psychologically illuminating than "Sons and Lovers" made ten years earlier, so it appears that censorship is not the problem. Is there something inherent in Lawrence that dooms movies derived from his works?

Lawrence's writings were richly evocative. "Women in Love" attempts to match the verbal richness with visual richness, but is merely over-ripe. Its England looks tropical in garish greens and pinks. Worse, the images are not used to convey what Lawrence was trying to say about class, sexuality, and nature. Every scene in the whole endless-seeming movie is artily beautiful, totally failing to distinguish what should be ugly from what Lawrence exalted.

"The Virgin and the Gypsy," which looked at least as good as "Women in Love" does had fewer maneuvers (plot) to compress into one sitting, but still failed to convey more than a tiny bit of Lawrence message (the flood in the movie being more Freudian than Lawrentian).

Something crucially missing from the movies thus far made from Lawrence's works [including Ken Russell's more recent film of The Rainbow, the prequel to Women in Love] is a cataclysmic sense of passion. In the movies characters become dead, but they don't die of lust, or of anything else: they are, perhaps, like the audience, bored stiff, but more literally. Despite a long, dull speech explaining what was wrong, Glenda Jackson's motivation seemed motivated more by pettiness than by passion. Her earlier Isadora Duncanish dance with the bulls seemed pre-erotic rather than erotic. All of Alan Bates's speeches sounded inauthentic, sillier even than those mouthed by the "liberated" couple in "The Virgin and the Gypsy." Lawrence is a very suspect philosopher, but the long speeches in movies based on Lawrence are noisy, childish prattle.

It seems to me that all the problems that confront anyone trying to transform something good from one medium to another are magnified in adapting Lawrence to the screen. Film-makers [even the notably tasteless Ken Russell!] are too respectful to try to make anything cinematic, so they just provide pretty pictures illustrating the surface of the story, losing the power as well as the style of the book(s). Movies based on Lawrence novels have consisted either of scenes lifted seemingly at random from the books interspersed with pseudo-soliloquies ("Sons and Lovers," as well as "Women in Love") or literal renditions of minor works like "The Fox" or "The Virgin and the Gypsy."

Back to the present day

I was plenty harsh then, and already interested in why good books so often become the basis of not-very-good movies (see my recent epinion about "Reunion"). I didn't mention how mind-numbing Eleanor Bron was as Hermione Roddice. From what I saw in the aborted second viewing, Oliver Reed seemed not too bad as the rich Gerald Crich. Jennie Linden failed to register anything as Ursula Brangwen. In 1971 I had not seen Glenda Jackson look frustrated and irritated as often as I did in subsequent years. She could also do imperious, but her range does not seem to me very great. And I saw enough to confirm my youthful judgment that Alan Bates was at his worst thrashing about (and I do mean literally thrashing about) as Rupert Birkin.

As much as I loathe other work by Kramer and Russell, now I am inclined to share more of the blame for the tedium with D. H. Lawrence. I'd give the movie one and a half stars now, but I'm sure that when I wrote the review above I'd have given it one, and so round down.


Recommended:
No

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