Sick Product of a Sick System

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

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.

DH Lawrence's novel Women in Love is possibly the most sensual work of literature ever. It drips with color. And gushes with often unsettling emotion.Ken Russell was born to film this book. His adaptation condenses a lot, as it must. But it captures the sensory, hallucinatory feeling of the book, in a way that I think will never be surpassed.The casting is equally fortuitous. Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed are the perfect match, the perfect flamboyant stars to play Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen: two people whose passion can only annihilate itself. The ostensible leads, Alan Bates and Jennie Linden, take a back seat, but are equally appropriate to their roles: the man who must understand, and the woman who is content to simply be part of the process of life. (A most unfair summary, of course.)Like the novel, the film isn't entirely pleasant. Both expose too many things we'd rather not dwell upon. But both are masterpieces in their respective media. They'll take you places, emotionally, that you've either never been aware of, or have been vaguely trying to avoid. It's a worthwhile journey, but you will not be the same afterward.

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.

At first glance, Ken Russell's "Women in Love" may look like one of the many movies exploring the new permissiveness of the silver screen (and in fact it got released around the same time as "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"). But it is also important to pay attention to its focus on England's class system. In my opinion, probably the most effective scene is during the opening credits, as Gudrun (Glenda Jackson) and Ursula Brangwen (Jennie Lind) - both dressed in fancy aristocratic clothes - walk through an economically depressed neighborhood, barely if at all moved by the poverty surrounding them. Of course, it's hard not to remember Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) and Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) fighting each other. That scene probably goes to show the falsity of the rich English lifestyle: they act like these refined individuals, but the whole time they're ready to explode. Back when D.H. Lawrence wrote the novel, he probably never guessed that the movie would look like this.All in all, this is certainly one that I recommend. I often say that the period from about 1967 to 1973 saw some of the greatest movies released, and this backs that up. Also starring Eleanor Bron (the woman in "Help!") and Michael Gough (Alfred in the Batman movies from 1989 to 1997).I've never heard of people cutting open figs and eating only the inside. I've always just eaten the whole fig.