In London in the 1970s and 80s I used to review movies for the British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin. That serious, no-frills journal, founded in 1934, aimed to cover every feature film released in UK cinemas. Some of the films that came my way for review – decades before the Internet opened the gate to explicit pornography – were slapdash crudely censored soft-core sex pictures. Each MFB review, whatever the merit of the film, required a one-paragraph plot synopsis and a one-paragraph critical assessment. Payment was based on the length of the second paragraph. And in the case of the sex films, this rarely exceeded three or four lines. Penelope ‘Pulls It Off’ (UK), Emmanuelle II – L’Anti-Vierge (France), There’s No Sex Like Snow Sex or, in the original, Beim jodeln juckt die Lederhose (West Germany).
I was reminded of the hours I once spent in tiny underground Soho viewing theatres – diligently recording what balding Kurt did to nubile Inge – while seated the other day in the comfort of my own home watching a Blu-ray disc of the BFI’s re-mastered 4K restoration of Women in Love (1969), and by one scene in particular that I’ll come to in a moment. The movie was directed by Ken Russell: the cherubic enfant terrible of the era who was then beginning to shift his so-called ‘appalling talent’ away from TV arts biopics to feature films. The, to my mind, over-literal script, drawn from a famous novel by D.H. Lawrence, once considered ‘pornographic’ but now a set text, was by the American playwright Larry Kramer. Kramer was also the film’s producer and moving spirit. A number of other film-makers, including Stanley Kubrick, declined to direct the script before Russell threw himself into the job with gusto.
Released by United Artists, Women in Love made a big splash on its well-advertised first run in the dying months of the Swinging Sixties. Word spread. Stark naked men were to be seen grappling on a carpet – a polar bear pelt having been dramatically hurled aside! Glenda Jackson, the young actress from the Royal Shakespeare Company who a few years earlier registered a claim to future stardom in the role of Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, in Peter Brook’s sensational stage production of the Marat/Sade, was said to disrobe in a way that would make the eyes pop right out of your head.
The wrestlers – Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed, left) and Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates)
In the movie, Mr Brangwen, a modest grammar school craft-instructor in a Midlands colliery town, has two lively daughters, Gudrun and Ursula, freethinking women in their radiant twenties who are preoccupied with the question of marriage. This was Lawrence’s principal theme: How, precisely, in these modern times, are we to live together, woman and man, man and man, woman and woman? But what, I would suggest, strikes today’s reader of the novel Women in Love most forcefully is Lawrence’s volcanic, convoluted desire to write about sex in a new and more honest way – and his failure, despite every effort, to make the act of sexual intercourse between healthy young people in any way convincing. Violent – essentially, embarrassed – passion seems to sweep everything else aside. Isn’t sex on the page supposed to be, at the very least, sexy? Not here.
Lawrence circles and circles and defers and defers. The flow of stock imagery, the self-acknowledged repetitious language, the reach-me-down adjectives and weak adverbial modifiers render these passages at first enervating, then annoying, and finally downright ludicrous. Not wholly unlike, but in a different register, those soft-core scenes of Bavarian ladies, free at last from their bust-constricting dirndl, gripping their large self-satisfied men in feathered hats and shiny lederhosen as they sledded down the mountainside emitting shrieks of delight.
The film is handsomely shot by Billy Williams, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work, and is a memorable symphony of contrasting tones – an ominous night-time lake, the dark surface pricked by the reflection of Chinese lanterns; the mellow wood-panelled room where the wrestling match takes place before the blazing fire; the eye-dazzling sequence in the snowy landscape around Zermatt where matters come to a fateful climax. The four main players, Jennie Linden and Glenda Jackson as Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and Alan Bates and Oliver Reed as their respective lovers, Rupert Birkin, a preening intellectual school inspector, and Gerald Crich, a depressed colliery magnate, do their best with all the ponderous talk of highfalutin ideals. But in the end, it seems to me, very little of this talk strikes the viewer as authentic. One longs, sometimes, for the simple uncomplicated sound of real human conversation.
In a movie dotted with deliberately caricatured secondary players, it is perhaps Vladek Sheybal, the Polish-born character actor, who stands out as the most clear-sighted caricature. He plays Loerke, a gay German artist (with an arch blond boyfriend straight out of Central Casting – though the actor who plays him was in fact straight as a die), who’s inserted into the Zermatt sequence to demonstrate to Gudrun that there really is a life of art that’s separate from (and unquestionably superior to) any self-defeating quest for love. And at one point he laughs with strikingly honest cynicism at the posturing of these half-blind English folk – and also perhaps at the pretension of the film itself. His laughter, however, earns him a flattening Marquess of Queenberry punch from the affronted Gerald.
Gudrun (Glenda Jackson) and Loerke (Vladek Sheybal)
Birkin and Ursula at long last seek sexual relief – and this was the scene that jogged my memory: the frantic struggle to undress; the waving grass, teasing like a burlesque girl’s ostrich-feather fan; bodies floating in air as in a gauzy dream; a soft-focus slow-motion tone of utter unreality. Consider too the scene in which Birkin, having been struck on the head with a glass paper-weight by Hermione Roddice, his former lover, sheds his clothes and wanders through the woods in concussed delirium touching the birch trees, rubbing his body with bracken, and then collapsing prone on the soil. All that’s lacking to bring matters to a climax is one of those ripe figs that Birkin so naughtily described (from a later Lawrence poem), in order to shock the ladies, at one of Hermione’s white-linen lakeside luncheon parties. It’s hard to know, sometimes, whether Ken Russell, the enfant terrible, ever completely removed his tongue from his cheek.
Blissfully floating free – Rupert and Ursula (Jennie Linden) in Ken Russell’s orientation
After his despised father has died, Gerald Crich sets out into the night, his mind in turmoil. At his father’s grave, he plunges his hand into the freshly turned soil and squeezes a handful of mud. He then proceeds to the Brangwens’ terraced house. The front door is not locked. He enters, passes a dozing Mr Brangwen in the parlour, and ascends the stairs. He opens the door to Gudrun’s room. A large study of a female head, redolent, perhaps, of The Rite of Spring, decorates the wall behind the bed. Gudrun awakes and calls her sister’s name. But there stands Gerald, with his muddy boots and his muddy fist. What would an artist such as Picasso have made of him? He’s not exactly a spry mischievous satyr with panpipes. Gudrun sits up, surprised but unshocked. She’d already kissed Gerald in the narrow night-time tunnel where the miners have their trysts and told him she finds his large square face beautiful. This, now, is not unexpected. She’s sexually curious, unafraid and unabashed.
Then comes the moment above all others, I’d say, that clinched Glenda Jackson’s Oscar for Best Actress of 1971. The eyes of the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences must indeed have popped right out of their heads. ‘What do you want from me?’ Gudrun asks. Pause. She then lifts off her nightdress in a single fluid gesture and looks straight at the camera without shame or embarrassment. (An unanswerable riposte, today’s film scholars might say, to the dreaded Male Gaze.) But what follows, alas, is another ludicrous passage of febrile love making, after the interminable unlacing of Gerald’s boots, that ends – none of the sex in this film is touched by any discernible tenderness – with the not inconsiderable bulk of Oliver Reed falling insensible, as men do, on top of poor Glenda Jackson. Gudrun awakes early next morning giving the impression of having had nothing less than a comfortable night’s sleep. Now, however, it’s time for Gerald to put on his muddy boots and go home before the Brangwen household wakes up for breakfast.
*
But this is not quite the whole story. Larry Kramer, the American producer/scriptwriter of Women in Love, who went on to become one of his country’s leading gay activists and a controversial but notably successful campaigner for the rights of people with HIV/Aids, saw an opportunity in this film to expand on D.H. Lawrence’s underdeveloped theme of ‘Men in Love’. At the end of the famous wrestling match, Gerald and Rupert lie side by side on the carpet, shoulders almost touching, spent and exhilarated – looking, in fact, as if they’ve just had sex, and actually enjoyed it. Rupert suggests they might, like those German knights of old, swear an oath of undying brotherly love. But since this is the twentieth century, he implies, they need not actually mingle their blood. Gerald is taken aback: he’ll have to think about that, he says. But in the event, as the future unfolds, and his relationship with Gudrun disintegrates, Gerald fails to act on Birkin’s suggestion. Out of ignorance, cowardice or simple lack of self-knowledge – who knows? Yet the offer was clearly made – and there it lies, at the end of the film, waiting as it were for another generation to take it up.
© John Pym, 2021
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
I respond with some hesitation to John Pym’s post, since it is many years since I saw Ken Russell’s film of Women in Love – though I did then return to it, with enjoyment, two or three times. What I do remember was the incongruity of blond, snow-doomed Gerald being played by swarthy Oliver Reed; and the slight, even weedy Birkin filled out by Alan Bates, who was surely more at home as strapping Gabriel Oak in Far From the Madding Crowd. Ursula and Gudrun were better cast.
But one can’t enter this discussion without recalling Lawrence’s own dislike of photography (‘Kodak vision’) and film, which he saw – accurately enough, for the time – as composed of ‘jerking’ stills rather than fluid movement. The medium for him was all part of our false vision of ourselves, a distracting visual objectification and externalisation: as if we were all arrested at the mirror stage. (It is no contradiction, surely, that when he was offered $5,000 dollars in 1924 for the film rights of Women in Love, Lawrence promptly accepted; one had to live. And anyway, the project came to nothing; which is perhaps just as well, given the time.)
Lawrence’s view is particularly relevant, I feel, to consideration of the sex scenes, on which John Pym chooses to focus. Not only does Ken Russell misrepresent – how could he not? – the scene where Gerald comes uninvited to Gudrun’s bedroom in her parents’ house, where the exact nature of the significant physical encounter is left obscure (nothing ‘eye-popping’), but in the balancing scene where Birkin and Ursula do remove their clothes and have full, joyous and fulfilling intercourse, this happens (significantly) in the darkness in the middle of Sherwood Forest. Lawrence is careful to distance us not only from visual but even from too much verbal voyeurism:
‘They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh…his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence…never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.’ Pace certain unsympathetic commentators (and I would rather not line up John Pym with these), this is not nonsense. It is a way of writing about sex which reminds us that sex is not essentially a visual experience, but one of tenderness, touch, and transcendence; a cinematic representation of which – however well-intentioned – will always be some kind of betrayal.
This Comment is already too long (sorry Patrick), but I would like to add that I do recognize that Lawrence develops (rather than changes) his technique of sexual description in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – many episodes happening outside and in broad daylight. And I have seen one or two film versions which manage to engage with the sexual activity maintaining an appropriate respect for the ‘tenderness’ involved (this being one of Lawrence’s provisional titles). Whether Lawrence would have approved – even for $5,000 dollars – I’m not sure. Because even here, the real drive of his description is inward, to what is inscribed by actions on the sensitive emotional centre.
I should like to take up John Pym’s description of Larry Kramer’s script as ‘over-literal’. When I first saw the film in 1970, I could not know whether it was ‘faithful’ to the novel to the point of ‘literalness’, as I had not read the book. However, I think I assumed the film was ‘faithful’, as it certainly seemed focussed on what John Pym calls ‘Lawrence’s principal theme’ and Birkin calls ‘sex marriage’. Watching the film again in 2020, I was so struck by the dialogue that I looked in my copy of the novel, e.g. at the last two pages, and this confirmed that the lines were ‘literally’ what Lawrence had written.
However, having now read the novel twice, I feel that Kramer/Russell’s treatment of the sex scenes, which John Pym rightly focusses on, was doomed to dissatisfy everyone. A ‘literal’ treatment of the scene in Gudrun’s bedroom would not have shown her even removing her nightdress. In the text, Gerald wants maternal comfort: he buries his head between her clothed breasts, he cleaves ‘intensely’ to her ‘like a child at the breast’, he is ‘infinitely grateful’ to her ‘as an infant is at its mother’s breast’. How do you externalise these deep unspoken feelings in a film? Kramer/Russell may have sincerely hoped they could make the point by having Gudrun instantly offer her breasts, but the effect is inevitably misconstrued by the spectator — although Oliver Reed’s face does at first convey extreme pain and relief rather than lust. The ‘literal’ approach to this scene would surely have fallen flat, and Kramer/Russell’s ‘creative’ approach fails too, because it simply seems like gratuitous striptease.
Similarly, the film scene in which Birkin struggles to take his and Ursula’s clothes off in order to have ‘compulsive’ sex on the ground is literal in the sense that historically, yes, it would have taken ages to get those clothes off, and it is literal in so far as Kramer/Russell’s version makes it clear that Birkin really wants something ‘beyond’ passion; but this version leaves Ursula in tears and the impression that their first sexual contact was a disaster, whereas in the text Birkin, at least, went home ‘satisfied, fulfilled’, feeling he had had ‘this ultimate and triumphant experience of physical passion’. Here, then, the film version is hardly even ‘faithful’ to the text.
As Damian Grant has explained in his Comment, the actual consummation of what Birkin wants from a ‘sex marriage’ relationship occurs in a pitch-black forest, and is therefore largely tactile. Obviously, the film does not attempt to show this. Yet here, for me at least, not having had John Pym’s professional exposure to the soft pornography of the 1960s, Kramer/Russell’s sunlit dream sequence amongst the pink (!) rosebay willow herb succeeds in conveying much of the intended ‘paradisal’ meaning of the text…
Finally, I think that the film version of the sex scene between Gudrun and Gerald in their ski chalet room fails entirely to be ‘literal’ to the text: it comes across as a pornographic rough romp, when in the novel it is presented as a revenge rape.
As Damian Grant says, Lawrence’s ‘sex scenes’ are all about what is happening to his characters inwardly. These scenes fail in Russell’s film since, as John Pym rightly suggests, they come across merely as soft porn. Thank you, gentlemen, for two endlessly engaging and challenging analyses!
Damian (if I may) and Patrick, many thanks for your perceptive points. I had not known of Lawrence’s regrettable antipathy to the Seventh Art – he had perhaps not seen the fluid genius of, say, Buster Keaton. One wonders what the Hollywood studio that paid Lawrence $5,000 in 1924 for the rights to Women in Love would have made of the book. It would, of course, have been a silent film, but it would have been made in that golden period before the Hays Code wrapped any suggestion of screen sex in a cloak of decency.
As for the general perils of screen adaptations of classic novels, here is the first paragraph of Ian Leslie Christie’s review of Women in Love (Sight and Sound, Winter 1969/70): “Ken Russell’s [film] has already received the dubious distinction of provoking a scathing protest from that redoubtable Lawrence champion F. R. Leavis. But although Leavis’ main contention – that ‘it’s an obscene undertaking to “write again” for the screen’ – seems merely vituperative, the rest of his case does, in effect, point to the crux of the matter. ‘No one,’ he asserts, ‘who had an inkling of the kind of thing the novel is, or how the “significance” of a great work of literature is conveyed, or what kind of thing significance is, could lend himself to such an outrage.’”
Thank you John (yes, we may!). I doubt whether Lawrence ever got that $5,000; if the deal fell through, he would have had to pay it – or some of it – back anyway. I don’t have his ledger! Nor I suspect did he.
As for Leavis, even when he is right he is intolerably so. I do agree with the last sentence you quote; but especially in his latter years Leavis wrote so much like a pressure cooker about to explode that one just wants to keep one’s distance. I remember when he came to give a talk at Manchester University in the late 60s, about Olivier’s Othello. (Film again in the dock.) He was trembling with rage at the lectern; could hardly contain himself as he fulminated against the vulgarity of Olivier’s performance. One was shouted out of any possible sympathy with this point of view.
The eternal questions revolving round the relation between the verbal and the visual require more sober and patient consideration. I suggest it has to do with the contrast between image and imagery. The visual image is a defined and delimited thing, which — whatever its symbolic associations — remains thus: iconic. Whereas imagery, on the verbal plane, sets up a network, multilayered and tentacular; it is inexhaustible. Blake’s ‘Pity’ is an extraordinary image, but it doesn’t have the intense and at the same time diffused, unfocussed emotional appeal of Shakespeare’s lines: ‘Pity like a naked new-born babe / Striding the blast.’
Interesting that Lawrence took to painting in his last years; but said he couldn’t work from a model. The model ‘got in the way of’ the vision.
‘No one who had an inkling of the kind of thing the novel is, or how the “significance” of a great work of literature is conveyed, or what kind of thing significance is, could lend himself to such an outrage [as creating a film from a work of narrative prose]’, Leavis said in the wake of the film of Women in Love (quoted by John Pym in his Comment below). But it is an alogical sentence. There is no reason on earth why someone with a developed sense of what a great novel is can’t contemplate translating it into another art form. With characteristic selective blindness, Leavis forgot that most of his beloved Shakespeare’s plays are dramatisations of others’ narrative prose works. It is similarly farcical that Leavis should fulminate (see Damian Grant’s Comment) against Olivier’s portrayal of Othello in the National Theatre’s 1964/65 stage and film production, when the interpretation was based on Leavis’s own reinterpretation of the play — I had that from the head of scripts at the National Theatre a day or two after Leavis’s death in 1978.
Personally, I regard Leavis as the greatest literary critic we have ever had (although I could do without his inveterate historicism). I believe, however, that he simply did not understand embodied performance, be it the theatre or the film. There was an element of wilful snobbery about this, but I think that as an academic he literally could not imagine acting a Shakespeare play, for instance; thus ignoring the fundamental point that the plays were written to be acted and not principally to be read.
In my view, Leavis’s tragedy was that he did not have the courage to leave Academe. His mind was far too big for the fusty, gowny old Cambridge of the period but he chose the easy, self-gratifying path of monologising at bemused undergraduates.
I come to Kramer/Russell’s film from the theatre and I think that the acting in the rather long episodes into which it falls is superb. The actors have successfully embodied Lawrence’s fundamental concerns in the novel. I do not miss in the film all the scene-chapters from the novel that Kramer rightly left out.