SnoopyStyle Sisters Gudrun Brangwen (Glenda Jackson) and school teacher Ursula Brangwen (Jennie Linden) belong to the upper crust society of England's industrial Midlands during the 20's. Ursula falls for the philosophical Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates). Gudrun is taken with his best friend Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) who ruthlessly runs his father's coal mine. This is high art erotic romanticism based on D. H. Lawrence's novel. There are some great work from director Ken Russell. I especially love the one cut from the post-coital Ursula-Rupert to the dead lovers. There is the homoerotic wrestling scene pushing the envelop. The performances of Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed are superior. It does run a bit long which is not unusual among the films of that era. Overall, it is a superior work of high art erotica of the British upper class.

The_Film_Cricket I am sort of ashamed to admit that I am not that familiar with Glenda Jackson's work. In fact, I've only seen two of her films, Women in Love and A Touch of Class – the two films for which she won Oscars – and while I (obviously) liked her work in the first, I did not like her much in the second. In Women in Love she is intelligent and sexually free without keeping us at arm's length but in A Touch of Class she is sexually free but grates on my nerves.Yet in Ken Russell's film, she has an endearing spark as the unfortunately named Gudrud Brangwen (pronounced Goo-Drud), a woman in 1920s British high society who spends her days with her sister Ursula (the wonderful Jennie Linden) discussing the promises and the qualities of love. Watching the wedding of a naval officer, their eyes lock on two good-looking chaps in the wedding party. Jennie spots the free-wheeling Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) while Gudrud focuses on the stiff but handsome Gerald Critch (Oliver Reed). Soon they are locked in passionate love affairs with their respective men but their personalities bring about different results.Gerald loves Gudrud's fiery passion but she admits that he really doesn't know how to love her. He is full of anger and frustration and doesn't really understand her. Gudrud is a woman with personality and intelligence whose sexuality is surprisingly frank, but she is also sexually liberated in the head. Not content to just be taken, she wants to be made love to mentally as well as physically. She's very smart, her mind is open where Gerald's is not. She penetrates right to his inner weakness and it is a trait he cannot deal with. He can't give her a proper kind of passionate love (there are minor indications that Gerald is privately in love with Rupert).Jackson is not classically beautiful. She has a bony face with an odd-shaped mouth and large teeth. I think that works in her favor because she looks like a real person rather than the cover of a magazine. She is that rare actress who is always in the moment – when she isn't speaking she's listening. She is also the best thing about Women in Love, a movie I'm not terribly passionate about. Director Russell experiments with weird visual styles, as in several sex scenes involving Ursula and Rupert; one of which he films sideways and the other he intercuts with the dead bodies of a couple who have drowned. For these reason, and for the film's often deadening pace, Women in Love is more or less forgotten. It isn't a bad film but were it not for the performances, especially by Glenda Jackson, it would have completely faded into obscurity.All through the 70s, a new kind of woman would emerge, born from the women's movement. There would be a great many actresses who would find a new kind of voice in film. If you look carefully at the women who won the Oscar as Best Actress (and a great deal who were nominated), you will find that nearly all of them – Glenda Jackson, Jane Fonda, Liza Minnelli, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, and Sally Field (Louise Fletcher doesn't really count), played women either struggling to find their own voice or who were expressing themselves intellectually and sexually. None did a better job then Jackson who managed to play a character who is intelligent, liberated but doesn't keep us at arms length. She was a new kind of character, one whose life goal isn't to land in the arms of a man because she has to, but simply because she wants to.

disinterested_spectator This is one of those movies that under normal circumstances I would have quit watching after about twenty minutes. But since it was based on a novel by D.H. Lawrence, I persuaded myself that it must be important somehow, and since I had not read the book, I thought maybe I could get myself a little culture on the cheap.Eleanor Bron as Hermione does her usually marvelous job of playing a woman you could not stand to be around even if she were rich, which she is. This is important, because the other characters in the movie are the sort you would not want to be around either, but compared to Hermione, they seem fairly tolerable.But not very. In addition to being an all-round unpleasant fellow, Gerald enjoys being cruel to his horse, whipping him furiously and digging his spurs deep into the animal's flesh, simply because the terrified creature refuses the cross the railroad tracks while a freight train speeds by. Gerald has a bisexual friend named Rupert with whom he wrestles, all naked and sweaty, but Gerald is not quite ready to put Rupert in that special hold Rupert longs for. Rupert does not do mean things like torment horses, but he does have some irritating personality traits, such as acting as if anything he does is justified because it is spontaneous.Central to the movie are two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. They witness Gerald's mistreatment of his horse and seem horrified at the time, but they continue to socialize with him as if nothing is wrong, and so it is hard to like these women after that, especially Gudrun, who ends up having sex with him. Ursula takes up with Rupert, and she has the naïve idea that marriage should simply be based on the love between a man and a woman, and she never does quite understand why Rupert thinks it should involve other people as well, especially men.The four of them take a vacation to Switzerland, where Gudrun meets a German artist. The artist tells of how he brutally beat a woman to make her pose properly for the picture he was painting. Women are like horses in this movie: you have to beat them until they submit to your will, which is what turns Gudrun on, because she soon decides to go live with him. This makes Gerald homicidal, and then suicidal, wandering off into the snow so he will freeze to death. Rupert's thoughts upon looking at his dead friend was how Rupert had offered himself but never had a chance to have that special experience with him. Ursula still does not quite know what to make of Rupert's strange ideas.

Eumenides_0 Women In Love is one of the strangest movies I've seen in a while, and I've been watching lots of surrealist masterpieces lately. I guess in these movies the strangeness ends up making sense. Whereas in Ken Russell's movie we have stark realism constantly marred by misplaced corny scenes.For instance, and no doubt owing to the influence of the free love period this movie was made in, we have many scenes of outdoor nakedness, with people rolling around in the grass and making love. It seems Larry Kramer read the novel and only registered the dirty bits (of which there aren't many really). But this is based on a D. H. Lawrence novel, even if it's not the most explicit one; but it doesn't matter: people expect lots of sex from Lawrence and Russell and Kramer were only too happy to oblige.Left out were most of the philosophical aspects of the novel, but fortunately not its homosexual subtext, one of the most interesting things about the novel. Left are the bohemian aspects of the novel, left are the tense relationships between the Brangwen sister and father; left is the relationship between Gerald Crich and his dying father. The movie is a streamlined adaptation of a five-hundred-page, hardly-visual novel.No doubt the story sidetracked in favor of pretty pictures. At times one feels Russell is more interested in this as a period piece than as a narrative. With the help of Billy Williams, he shoots coal mines and streets in all their squalor, and nature and bodies in all their beauty. It's great to look at, not necessarily good to watch.The acting is top notch, and I'm shocked only Glenda Jackson got an Oscar for it. Alan Bates, Oliver Reed (his greatest performance ever?) and Jennie Linden are all amazing in their incoherent but heartfelt roles.All in all it's a movie worth watching.