Women in Love

Taking on DH Lawrence's book was of interest, but the artsy side of things made it a chore to get through. I did enjoy the whole Switzerland part and even the English bits. However, the odd music interludes and monologues put me off. I saw it since it was on the NYT 1000 movies list. SLC DVD.

Bates, Linden, Reed, and Jackson are all superb. Russel's willingness to push the sexual content to a near frenzy gives the film a wild and unpredictable energy that is endlessly rewarding.

Alan Bates is unforgettable in this classic masterpiece.

I can't think of anything to praise about this bore fest. Made it onto the BFI Top 100 and contains one of the gayest scenes ever put to film. The rest of the picture is just rambling boring nonsense. Stunningly boring.

You have Reed and Bates at the same time in this Ken Russel's. Pretentious as you expect. Filmed in the style, it's not coherent. The naked fighting scene is unforgettable as if Roman paintings.

some things i liked about this but overall, i didn't much like it

I like that some critics describe Women in Love as having "homoerotic undertones" when there is literally a scene with two men wrestling naked in front of a fireplace, after which one of them expresses his distaste for marriage to women and the need for closer companionship with other men; that's some real "Sappho and her friend" matierial. While completely unfamiliar with the source novel, I can recognize some real ambition in the narrative for a novel from 1920 and have been assured that there is considerable context that only literature can adequately convey. However, that ambition falls rather flat in this film adaptation, which seems to be more pretentious musings than sincere commentary on the nature of romance and sexuality among the upper classes. Some intermittent individual scenes appear well-composed, but the final product doesn't seem cohesive and the film often feels unrealistic or tonally confused in its efforts to be artistic. The performances are good, but Russel's strange surrealism just doesn't seem like a fit for the plot. In 2020, I can't look at mustachioed Oliver Reed without thinking that it is a strangely dramatic turn for present-day Mark Hamill. (3/5)

The acting was stronger than the story for me.

A breakthrough as important as the ending of the ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover earlier in the 1960s. A beautiful exploration of human relationships and intimacy. Ranging from earthiness in romance between Alan Bates and Jennie Linden to chauvinistic lust versus liberal feminism in the relationship between Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

In one of the most baffling decisions of the 1970s the Academy decided to award the Academy Award for Best Actress in a leading role to Glenda Jackson in this film as her role could probably be considered supporting and she isn't particularly good. It's not that I don't love Jackson, she's a revelation in A Touch of Class (1973), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and Hedda (1975), but she doesn't register at all in this film and I hoped for more from someone with so much talent. The film itself is directed by the loathsome Ken Russell whose fixation on sex and provoking his audience takes precedent over telling an interesting or coherent story and drawing the best work out of the talented actors that he works with. I felt myself tuning out at several points in the film as there really did not seem to be a point to anything that was happening and as a slice of life portrait the characters were not interesting enough to keep me invested. In 1920 in Beldover, England two sisters, Gudrun, Glenda Jackson, and Ursula Brangwen, Jennie Linden, decide that they want men that they can fall in love with and commit to. They find these men in school inspector Rupert Birkin, Alan Bates, who has already interacted with Ursula when he inspected her classroom while Gudrun takes an interest in wealthy mining heir Gerlad Crich, Oliver Reed. All four meet again at a post-wedding party where interpretive dances occur and the pairings of Gudrun and Crich and Birkin and Ursula commit to one another after he breaks off his relationship with Hermione Roddice, Eleanor Bron. Complicating their relationships is the homosexual attraction between Crich and Birkin which is stronger than the attraction between themselves and the women in their lives. Birkin and Ursula are married and the two couples head to the Alps where more conflict arises and the men admit that they don't really love the women close to them. The film was at most times the height of pretentiousness as we get nonsensical scenes in which Birkin is hit in the head by his ex-girlfriend and walks out into a field where he removes all of his clothing and rolls around in the wheat. Had these scenes been in service of a larger point maybe I could have accepted how false they seem but because they were just non-sequiturs they were simply irritating. The dancing scenes also dragged on for too long as the dances were not enjoyable to watch as they seemed as though the actors were just improvising and again they did not make any real point. This sort of lack of focus seems to be a hallmark of Russell's films as he has various fetishes that he seems to think the audience are as fixated on as he is and he trains the camera on them for far too long. The other issue with the film is that it does not delve deeply enough into the fascinating concepts it flirts with. Possibly the most famous scene from the film is that in which the two men wrestle in homoerotic fashion and then confess their attraction to one another to various degrees. This scene is impressive as we witness two men who really struggle with their feelings express in physical actions what they do not have the bravery to say to one another. We then drop this plotline for about 90 minutes as we head off to explore the relationship between Birkin and Ursula without reference to Birkin's connection to his friend. I wanted so much to see more about the relationship between the two men, more moments between them or more discussion of the difficulties they face, without that relationship I was left adrift with people I did not care for. The performances were unimpressive as Reed and Bates seem unsure of what tone they are going for in most scenes and the two women don't get enough to do. I would say that Carrie Snodgress is doing much better work than Jackson in Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and would have been a much better choice for Best Actress. Sure, the film may look pretty but there's almost nothing beneath that façade and at times this film is a difficult watch due to it's pretension and love affair with itself.