Women in Love

Despite a growing portentousness towards the end, and moments of silliness scattered throughout, a surprisingly restrained, even respectful adaptation of DH Lawrence's novel.

Directed with style and punch by Ken Russell, this is an episodic but challenging and holding pic.

Yet it is to the film's great credit that, in depicting that "puritanical insistence," heterosexuality is revealed to be the most unnatural form of coupling.

Bates and Reed's homoerotic sparring would be sexy and shocking in any context. But Women in Love's talkier scenes are more exciting than any screen nudity could be.

Ken Russell is interested in using the novel's sexually charged characters as figures to be placed into a series of fevered tableaux.

The story occasionally grows choppy and diffuse, yet the visual splendors never fail to take command.

A sterling confluence of three distinct icons, Women in Love is a key masterpiece of 1970s era British cinema, and one which has outlasted its infamous bits to reveal a decadent, lush, study on the amorphous subjects of love and sexuality.

The most successful adaptation of a Lawrence novel to the screen.

All these people pushing the film in personal ways are really dominated by Lawrence and his apocalyptic vision. So the movie ends up like a gaudy chariot pulled by twelve furious stallions who have been nibbling on locoweed.

To make the novel so excitedly, lip-smackingly "period" in its decorations leaves unreconciled problems of thought and character, a kind of weightlessness never securely anchored in Russell's direction or in Larry Kramer's devoted script.