Ken Russell (1969)

Ken Russell had already directed two feature films – the seaside comedy French Dressing (1964) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the third of the Harry Palmer espionage pictures.  Both flopped; when Women in Love appeared, Russell was still best known as a TV director for the BBC series Monitor and Omnibus, for which he’d made films such as Elgar (1962) and Song of Summer (1968), about the relationship of the elderly Frederick Delius and his amanuensis, Eric Fenby.  As dramatisations of their subjects’ lives, these were pioneering in the field of television arts documentary as well as harbingers of Russell’s penchant for classical composer biopics:  by the mid-1970s, he’d done (plenty of people thought in more ways than one) Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Liszt.  Russell was prolific at this stage of his film-making career.  Three of his pictures opened in cinemas in 1971 – The Music Lovers, The Devils and The Boy Friend, in that order.  It’s a mark of how quickly he was characterised in the British media as a what-is-he-like shock merchant that a number of reviews of The Boy Friend expressed jokey relief that the Sandy Wilson stage musical hadn’t been turned into an ensanguined orgy.  Because Russell was so soon a publicly outrageous figure, at increasing risk of self-parody, it’s hard to revisit this D H Lawrence adaptation and see Russell’s Women in Love for what it once was – the original (also in more ways than one) expression of its director’s scandalous flamboyance.

The film remains fascinating.  It’s often borderline ridiculous, and occasionally merely ridiculous, but it shares those qualities with its source material.  Lawrence’s exploration of psychosexual relations is, despite its faults, an arguably great novel; I don’t know that anyone has argued for Russell’s film being great yet his visual flair and daring reproduce on screen the essence of some of the book’s episodes.  My Penguin copy of Women in Love runs to 536 pages.  The 131-minute film, with a screenplay by Larry Kramer (who also co-produced) inevitably compresses the novel:  for viewers familiar with it, Russell’s version (he rewrote Kramer’s script extensively without getting a screenplay credit) feels like ‘Scenes from Women in Love‘.  In plot terms, the film is reasonably faithful but unsurprisingly majors in highlights from the novel.  Russell doesn’t try to create a cinematic equivalent of Lawrence’s voice but the narrative develops sustained weight and tension – thanks to Lawrence’s words, Russell’s images, Georges Delerue’s score, and some of the performances.

In the film world of the early 1970s, when substantial female lead roles were thin on the ground, Glenda Jackson emerged as a distinctive and dominating star.  She was the go-to actress on the rare occasions that a film centred on an uncompromising woman not intimidated by men and who scorned decorative femininity.  Within a few years, Jackson had become, like Ken Russell as a film-maker, a trademarked screen presence – an imperious ball-breaker – although, unlike the received idea of Russell, this wasn’t quite fair:  her acting was nearly always richer than this stereotyping suggests.  It certainly was in Women in Love.  As Gudrun Brangwen, she’s required to say things like:

‘You’re so insistent.  You have so little grace.  So little finesse.  You are crude.  You break me – and waste me – and it is horrible to me.’

Gudrun is describing to Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) how he makes love to her.  It’s asking a lot for this kind of language, spoken aloud, not to sound ridiculous but in Jackson’s voice it doesn’t.  Her authority gives her words a solemn force that feels like an acknowledgement of their source (the above is lifted nearly verbatim from the novel); her engagement with the character she’s playing invests them with individual meaning.  Reviewing Women in Love in 1970, Pauline Kael recognised Jackson’s ‘interpretation of an unyielding, castrating woman [as] original and bold and a considerable feat’ but took issue with her ‘stony, artificial quality that is like an Expressionist study of Gudrun’s soul.  In Lawrence’s portrait, this was on the inside of a soft, desirable woman; now that it’s outside, any man could spot it and beware’.  Kael is commenting on Jackson’s own physical characteristics as much as on how she plays Gudrun.  While it’s true that her forbidding features don’t make it easy for her to incarnate ‘a soft, desirable woman’, she’s emotionally nuanced in this film and Billy Williams’s sensitive lighting of her face helps bring out the shadings in her portrayal of Gudrun.  Often witty, Jackson is exciting too, never more so than when Gudrun and her sister Ursula (Jennie Linden) witness Gerald’s spurring his horse and drawing blood from the terrified animal.  Glenda Jackson’s fusion of fury and exhilaration at what she sees Gerald doing is extraordinary.

Jackson’s harsher aspects actually help the audience understand her character better than others in the film just because, as Pauline Kael rightly points out, Russell and Larry Kramer, whether through personal taste or simply because the novel is so necessarily abridged, don’t give much idea of what drives the principals:  Women in Love could use more than one Expressionist study of the souls in question.  The school inspector Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) has the most to say but his wordy misanthropy is unexplained.  In the early stages, Bates delivers his lines with zest but his characterisation seems to have no underpinning beyond Birkin’s understandable loathing of Hermione Roddice (Eleanor Bron), the rich woman he’s having an affair with.  Things change once Birkin confides in his longstanding friend Gerald that:

‘I do believe in a permanent union between a man and a woman.  … But [it] isn’t the last word, it certainly isn’t.  … We’ve got to take down this love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal.  We want something broader.  I believe in the additional perfect relationship, between man and man.’

From this point on, Alan Bates’s performance starts to crystallise, impressively, around Birkin’s relationship with Gerald rather than his romance with and eventual marriage to Ursula.  In retrospect, it’s hard not to wonder if the actor’s own, unacknowledged sexuality sharpened this focus – and to apply equivalent 20:20 hindsight to Larry Kramer’s contribution to Women in Love.  Kramer will be remembered chiefly as a doughty gay rights activist and the author of The Normal Heart (1985), one of the first ‘AIDS plays’.  His CV inevitably prompts speculation that the relationship ‘between man and man’ interested Kramer more than the state of affairs in Lawrence’s title.

At any rate, there’s no doubt the film dramatises the bond between the male leads more clearly than their relationships with Gudrun and Ursula.  This is most obviously because the screenplay is largely shorn of Lawrence’s expatiations upon what’s happening inside his title characters’ heads but there are other factors involved, positive and negative.  As Gerald, heir to his father’s colliery in the Midlands mining town in which the story takes place, Oliver Reed has a morose intensity that’s nearly unrelenting.  That may reflect Reed’s limitations as an actor but it seems right enough, chiming with Gerald’s continuing failure to understand Gudrun and growing apprehension that their affair is doomed to failure – feelings with which the viewer sympathises.  Gerald snaps out of his saturnine agony only at times of heightened physical involvement:  diving into a lake; maltreating his horse then, between the sheets, Gudrun; most notably, wrestling with Birkin.  The wrestling, especially sensational on the film’s original release because of the full-frontal nudity, is still one of its strongest sequences.  You now admire the two actors less for daring to be naked for several screen minutes than for wrestling so convincingly and in character – which Ken Russell captures powerfully.

The Brangwen sisters have followed in the footsteps of their father (Michael Gough) in teaching at the local grammar school.  Gudrun is, as well as an art teacher there, a sculptor in her own time, which is meant to mark her out as creatively questing.  Even allowing that Ursula lacks her sister’s imagination, Jennie Linden, for the most part, seems too conventional in the role:  her emotional range is that of a more familiar screen woman-in-love than Ursula should be.  It doesn’t help that the lengthy episode in which she and Birkin have a huge row followed by reconciliation and supposedly transcendent sex (see below), is the one awkwardly edited part of the film.  On the plus side, Jennie Linden’s speech rhythms occasionally echo Glenda Jackson’s, which helps you believe, as little else does, that the two are sisters.  And Linden – though this is damning with faint praise – is far better than Eleanor Bron.  Her overplayed Hermione Roddice is embarrassing, in the wrong way, from the moment that Hermione interrupts Birkin’s visit to the botany class that Ursula is teaching, and his sexually charged discourse on the habits of catkins.  Bron makes the exquisitely self-conscious Hermione cartoonishly ridiculous.  When Birkin turns on her, excoriating Hermione’s lack of ‘any dark, sensual body of life – all you’ve got is your will and your lust for power’, you feel he must lack any sense of humour.

Although Women in Love isn’t exactly a roman-à-clef, the received wisdom is that each of the five main characters was based on a real person:  Birkin on Lawrence himself, Ursula on his wife Frieda, Gudrun on Katherine Mansfield, Gerald on John Middleton Murry, and Hermione on Ottoline Morrell.  Those connections reinforce one’s sense of the novel, first published in 1920, as a highly contemporary work.  The film tries to reflect this in the political context of its story – the jingoism and trauma of the recently ended Great War, incipient female emancipation (women’s suffrage in Britain, in a limited form, began in the year the War ended) – and in popular songs of the time, particularly ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ (which also started life in 1918).  Russell manages this background well enough even if it sees him marking time until the next of his spectacles.

These aren’t in short supply.  There’s the occasional dud – the sun-drenched, slow-motion sex between Birkin and Ursula, physically revealing as it is, now has the feel of a high-end cosmetics advert – but more of Russell’s showstoppers really are arresting.  There’s Gudrun’s inexplicable dance that disturbs then subdues a herd of Highland cattle on the Crich estate; the accident in which Gerald’s newly-married sister (Sharon Gurney) and her naval officer husband (Christopher Gable) drown; Gerald’s ailing father (Alan Webb) languishing in bed before a startling haemorrhage suddenly ends his life.  At the start of their ill-fated Alpine holiday, Gudrun, Ursula, Gerald and Birkin fool around in the snow; even as they do so, its ‘dazzling whiteness’ (Lawrence) is ominous and absolute.  In this final part of the story, Russell almost looks to be thinking ahead to the big number in his next film, The Music Lovers:  Gudrun and the charismatic German sculptor Loerke (Vladek Sheybal), who so impresses her, act out what happened in the railway train that took Tchaikovsky and his wife Nina on honeymoon.  Vladek Sheybal is one of the standouts in the smaller parts, along with Alan Webb and twelve-year-old Phoebe Nicholls (in those days, she appeared under her middle name, Sarah), who’s splendidly vivid as the younger of Gerald’s sisters.

Because of Alan Bates, the last scene of Russell’s film is curiously complementary to that of John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967).  In the latter, the newly married Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba (née) Everdene (Julie Christie) are in the parlour together, though she’s reading the newspaper rather than looking at him.  There’s a clock on the mantelpiece which was Bathsheba’s wedding gift from her first husband, the late Sergeant Troy.  When it strikes the hour, a miniature soldier, wearing a red uniform as Troy once did, emerges from the clock’s glass dome – a recurring reminder to Bathsheba of the love of her life and to her second husband that he’s second best.  In Women in Love’s finale, in the aftermath of Gerald Crich’s suicide, Birkin and Ursula sit in chairs facing each other but these newlyweds too seem far apart, though the atmosphere is similarly claustrophobic.  Already shocked by Birkin’s unconcealed grief at Gerald’s death, Ursula tells her husband that his professed love for his friend is ‘an obstinacy … a perversity:  you can’t have two kinds of love.  Why should you?’  ‘It seems as if I can’t,’ Birkin replies, ‘yet I wanted it’.  ‘You can’t have it,’ insists Ursula, ‘because it’s impossible’.  His answer is, ‘I don’t believe that’.    As Gabriel Oak, there’s nothing that Alan Bates can say.  As Rupert Birkin, he decidedly has the last word.

2 July 2022