Rent Women in Love (1969)

Minor Masterpiece - Women in Love review by GI

Hugely controversial when originally released this is a tragic romance story adapted from the novel by D.H. Lawrence. Set in the 1920s mainly in the industrial Midlands shot as a contrast between the beauty of the natural landscape and the "dark, satanic mills" of the coal mines with images reminiscent of Lowry. Alan Bates and Oliver Reed play Rupert and Gerald, they are best friends, the former a bohemian teacher in love with his colleague Ursula (Jennie Linden), and the latter a rich mine owner in love with Ursula's sister, Gudrun (Glenda Jackson). The sisters resist the social expectations that they see women falling into, namely marriage, housewife and motherhood and dream of true love. Rupert and Gerald seek ultimate satisfaction from love that involves sex, dedication and contentment. The couples begin tempestuous relationships climaxing in a holiday to the Swiss Alps where tragedy strikes. This marks director Ken Russell's first foray into a style of film making that set him as having a unique eye and his ability to display images that were often very challenging. This film has probably one of the most famous homo-erotic scenes in any film and the sex scenes are graphic for their time. Ultimately this is a beautiful film, a landmark British film and its realistic depiction of the times whilst telling a story of tortured love marks it as a minor masterpiece. This is a must see film and definitely one to seek out if you've never seen it.

Sex, Sweat and the Fall of the House of Gerald - Women in Love review by griggs

Women in Love may wear Edwardian costumes, but Ken Russell films it as a society in ruins. His characters behave as if the ruling elite, bloodied by war, had to turned to pleasure to mask decline. The mood is then filtered through the free-for-all of the 1960s, where consumer freedom and countercultural style gave the illusion of change. Russell’s direction is fearless, shifting from painterly beauty to operatic hysteria, and the cast meet him: Glenda Jackson crackles as Gudrun, Oliver Reed radiates power in decline as Gerald, Alan Bates makes Birkin a restless intellectual, and Jennie Linden steadies Ursula with quiet resolve. Together, they become a portrait of a class order splitting apart.

Gerald, the industrial baron, is capital made flesh—money, patriarchy, machinery. He is not toppled by revolt, but undone by his own contradictions. Birkin, the intellectual, dreams of star-shaped harmony of love and friendship. But it is a fantasy of the bourgeois mind, promising escape while leave the world untouched. The wrestling scene says it best: class and desire knotted together, the new middle class grappling with the old elite, neither side victorious.

Russell’s message to his generation is blunt: liberation intoxicates, but collapse does not guarantee renewal. Gerald’s end is no revolution—it it’s the blaze of a dying order that could burn everyone standing too close.

Period Drama. - Women in Love review by Steve

Rambling version of DH Lawrence's modernist novel mainly succeeds thanks to its period production and Glenda Jackson's Oscar winning performance as a sexually emancipated single woman living among the intellectual elite of a mining town after the '14-'18 war. It's handsomely shot around the midlands and the north of England, but its location is vague.

It's a film of ideas, expressed through long conversations about love and sex, work and freedom. It's a period piece, but when the actors are advancing theories on free love, gender roles and communal living it feels like it's more about the late sixties. The trend for Edwardian fashion and beards in the hippie era, and the psychedelic inserts, also suggest this duality.

The two most famous and effective scenes have no dialogue. The naked wrestling between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in front of a blazing fire. And Jackson channelling her inner psychic bull by chasing a herd of cows across a field. But mostly this is a film of digressive philosophical talk. This is often fascinating, but eventually grows tiresome.

The later scenes in Switzerland are hard work. Ollie gives a strangely stoned performance as Glenda's repressed lover. Bates and Jackson give era defining performances, but are hardly ever on screen together. And if the film remains interesting as an insight into a long ago culture, this is England at the turn of the '70's, rather than after the great war.