Women in Love | |
---|---|
Directed by | Ken Russell |
Screenplay by | Larry Kramer |
Based on | Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence |
Produced by | Larry Kramer |
Starring | Alan Bates Oliver Reed Glenda Jackson Jennie Linden Eleanor Bron |
Cinematography | Billy Williams |
Edited by | Michael Bradsell |
Music by | Georges Delerue Michael Garrett |
Production company | |
Distributed by | United Artists |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 131 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Budget | $1.6 million [1] |
Box office | $4.5 million (Worldwide) [1] |
Women in Love is a 1969 British romantic drama film directed by Ken Russell and starring Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, and Jennie Linden. [2] The film was adapted by Larry Kramer from D.H. Lawrence's 1920 novel Women in Love . [3] It was the first film to be released by Brandywine Productions. [4]
The plot follows the relationships between two sisters and two men in a mining town in post-World War I England. [5] The two couples take markedly different directions. The film explores the nature of commitment and love.
The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, with Jackson winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role, and the film receiving other honours.
The film takes place in 1920, in the Midlands mining town of Beldover. Two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, discuss marriage on their way to the wedding of Laura Crich, daughter of the town's wealthy mine owner, Thomas Crich, to Tibby Lupton, a naval officer. At the village's church, each sister is fascinated by a particular member of the wedding party – Gudrun by Laura's brother, Gerald, and Ursula by Gerald's best friend, Rupert Birkin. Ursula is a school teacher and Rupert is a school inspector; she remembers his visit to her classroom, interrupting her botany lesson to discourse on the sexual nature of the catkin.
The four are later brought together at a house party at the estate of Hermione Roddice, a rich woman whose relationship with Rupert is falling apart. When Hermione devises, as entertainment for her guests, a dance in the "style of the Russian ballet", Rupert becomes impatient with her pretensions and tells the pianist to play some ragtime. This sets off spontaneous dancing among the whole group which angers Hermione and makes her leave. When Rupert follows her into the next room, she smashes a glass paperweight against his head, and he staggers outside. He discards his clothes and wanders through the woods. Later, at the Criches' annual picnic, to which most of the town is invited, Ursula and Gudrun find a secluded spot, and Gudrun dances before some Highland cattle while Ursula sings "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles". When Gerald and Rupert appear, Gerald calls Gudrun's behaviour "impossible and ridiculous", and then says he loves her. "That's one way of putting it", she replies. Ursula and Rupert wander away discussing death and love. They make love in the woods. The day ends in tragedy when Laura and Tibby drown while swimming in the lake.
During one of Gerald and Rupert's discussions, Rupert suggests Japanese-style wrestling. They strip and wrestle in the firelight. Rupert enjoys their closeness and says they should swear to love each other, but Gerald cannot understand Rupert's idea of wanting to have an emotional union with a man as well as an emotional and physical union with a woman. Ursula and Rupert decide to marry while Gudrun and Gerald continue to see each other. One evening, emotionally exhausted after his father's illness and death, Gerald sneaks into the Brangwen house to spend the night with Gudrun in her bed, then leaves at dawn.
Later, after Ursula and Rupert's marriage, Gerald suggests that the four of them go to the Alps for Christmas. At their inn in the Alps, Gudrun irritates Gerald with her interest in Loerke, a gay German sculptor. An artist herself, Gudrun is fascinated with Loerke's idea that brutality is necessary to create art. While Gerald grows increasingly jealous and angry, Gudrun only derides and ridicules him. Finally, he can endure it no longer. After attempting to strangle her, he trudges off into the cold, to commit suicide and die alone. Rupert and Ursula return to their cottage in England. Rupert grieves for his dead friend. As Ursula and Rupert discuss love, Ursula says there can't be two kinds of love. He explains that she is enough for love of a woman but there is another eternal love and bond for a man.
Larry Kramer was an American who moved to London in 1961 to work as an assistant story editor at Columbia and had become an assistant to David Picker at United Artists. [6] United Artists wanted Kramer to move to New York but he wanted to live in London and produce, so he quit his job. He went to work on 1967's Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush as producer and ended up rewriting the script.
He was looking for another project when Silvio Narizzano, who had directed the successful Georgy Girl (1966), suggested Kramer make a film of Women in Love. Kramer read the novel, loved it, and optioned the screen rights for $4,200. He wrote a screen treatment based on the chapters and succeeded in selling the project to David Chasman and David Picker at United Artists. [6] [7]
Kramer originally commissioned a screenplay from David Mercer. Mercer's adaptation differed too much from the original book and he was bought out of the project. "It was a horrible Marxist tract," Kramer said. "Just horrible. I had no script and no more money for another writer. [7]
Ultimately, Kramer wrote the script, although he had not written one before. "I became a writer not by choice but out of necessity," he said. [8]
Kramer said "slightly more than half the film" was directly from the novel. He took the rest from various sources including Lawrence's letters, essays, poems and plays. [8]
"I wanted to show you can convey emotion along with action and that ideas and talk and beautiful scenery are not incompatible in films," said Kramer. "My first draft was all dialog, the second was mostly visual. The end result was a combination of both." [8]
Narizzano, intended as director, left the project after suffering a series of personal setbacks. He divorced his wife for a man who died soon after. After Narizzano's departure, Kramer considered a number of directors to take on the project, including Jack Clayton, Stanley Kubrick and Peter Brook, all of whom declined. [7]
Ken Russell had previously directed only two films, and was better known for his biographical projects about artists for the BBC. His second film, Billion Dollar Brain was admired by Chasman and Picker at UA, who told him "they thought it got a raw deal from right wing critics and that I could do better with a more sympathetic subject." [9] Chasman and Picker sent a copy of Kramer's script to Russell, who liked it. The director read the novel, which he loved; he called Women in Love "probably the best English novel ever written." [10] He and Kramer collaborated on further drafts of the script, using information from Lawrence's own life and adding extra bits from the novel. [9] This included adding the nude wrestling scene. "It wasn't in the original script," wrote Russell. "I didn't think it would pass the censor and I knew it would be difficult to shoot. I was wrong on my first guess and right on my second. Olly [Oliver Reed] talked me into it. He wrestled with me, jujitsu style, in my kitchen, and wouldn't let me up until I said, 'OK, OK, you win, I'll do it.'" [11]
By the time United Artists approved the script, the project had a second producer, Martin Rosen. [9]
Russell says casting was "difficult" in part because most of his television work was done with non-actors so he was "totally out of touch to the real talent at hand." [9]
Kramer had been talking to Alan Bates about playing Birkin for a number of years and he was cast relatively easily. Bates sported a beard, giving him a physical resemblance to D.H. Lawrence. [9]
Michael Caine, who had just made Billion Dollar Brain with Russell, says he was offered a lead role but turned it down because he felt unable to do the nude scene. [12]
Kramer wanted Edward Fox for the role of Gerald. Fox fitted Lawrence's description of the character ("blond, glacial and Nordic"), but United Artists, the studio financing the production, imposed Oliver Reed, a more bankable star, as Gerald even though he was not physically like Lawrence's description of the character. Russell had worked with Reed before and said even though the actor "wasn't ideal physically for the part he couldn't have played it better." [9]
Kramer was adamant to give the role of Gudrun to Glenda Jackson. She was, then, well recognised in theatrical circles. As a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company she had gained a great deal of attention as Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade . United Artists was unconvinced, considering her not conventionally beautiful enough for the role of Gudrun, who drives Gerald to suicide. Russell was unimpressed when he met Jackson and says only in seeing Marat/Sade "did I realise what a magnificent screen personality she is." [9]
The last of the four main roles to be cast was that of Ursula. Both Vanessa Redgrave and Faye Dunaway declined to take the role, finding it the less interesting of the two sisters and that they would be easily eclipsed by Glenda Jackson's acting skills.[ citation needed ] It was by accident that Russell and Kramer came upon a screen test that Jennie Linden had made opposite Peter O'Toole for The Lion in Winter , for a part she did not get. [13] Linden had recently given birth to her only son and was not eager to take the role but was persuaded by Kramer and Russell.
Bates and Reed received a percentage of the profits while Linden and Jackson were paid a straight salary. [8]
The composer Michael Garrett who also contributed to the score can be seen playing the piano in one scene.
Filming started 25 September 1968 and took place in northern England and Switzerland. [14] The opening scene with credits was shot at what is now Crich Tramway Museum in Derbyshire. It took sixteen weeks and was budgeted at $1.65 million but came in at $1.5 million "because everyone was helpful," says Kramer, including key participants taking a percentage. [8] [15] Jackson was pregnant during filming. [16]
The film features a famous nude wrestling scene between Bates and Reed. Kramer says Reed turned up to the shoot drunk and got Bates drunk. [8] "I had to get drunk before I exposed myself on camera," said Reed. [17]
The wrestling scene caused the film to be banned altogether in Turkey.[ citation needed ]
Russell said he regretted omitting a scene where the sisters went to London "where they sample la vie boheme. It helped form their characters and explains their subsequent behaviour. At least two of the actors were miscast while another had to be replaced after his second appearance. But none of that matters when a movie turns you on. You can have brilliant camerawork, great editing, a fine script and good acting, but it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." [11]
Russell later wrote "I've made better films than Women in Love but obviously it had something that tickled the public's fancy, and it wasn't just the male members of Messrs Bates and Reed. It might have probed intimacy between the sexes as few movies had before, but I can take scant credit for that. I was only putting on the screen what D.H. Lawrence had written half a century before. But the film did have some excellent performances...and both Alan and Olly really came to grips with the subject, especially in the nude wrestling scene." [11]
The film was passed uncut by the British censor. [18]
The film was one of the eight most popular films at the British box office in 1970. [19] As it cost $1.6 million, it recouped its costs in England alone. [6] It made $3.0 million in rentals in the U.S. and Canada [20] and made $4.5 million worldwide. [1]
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "It is hard to imagine what a completely faithful translation of Lawrence would look like, or even if it would be at all watchable. Women in Love has peopled an authentic landscape with the right faces and a 'crowded canvas' of detail in the hope that the author's vision will inevitably shine through. The result is no more or less successful than the rather different approach to the smaller task of adaptation in The Fox . On the strength of it, Women in Love probably deserves as kind a reception as The Fox and is certainly more enjoyable than Joseph Strick's aesthetically grinding and all too willed adaptation of selections from Ulysses ." [21]
Women in Love currently holds an 83% rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 23 reviews with an average rating of 7.5/10. [22] Film critic Emanuel Levy has said of the film: "Though deviating from D.H. Lawrence's novel considerably, this is Ken Russell's most fully-realised narrative film, lavishly mounted and well-acted, especially by Glenda Jackson in an Oscar-winning performance." [23]
Women in Love was released on VHS by MGM Home Entertainment in 1994, and on DVD in Regions 1 and 2 in 2003. The film was released on Blu-ray and DVD by the Criterion Collection on 27 March 2018, with the Blu-ray featuring a restored 4K digital transfer. [31] [32] The supplementary materials on the Criterion release include audio commentaries and various interviews, along with the 1972 short film Second Best, produced by and starring Alan Bates, based on a story by D.H. Lawrence. [33] [34]
Sir Alan Arthur Bates was an English actor who came to prominence in the 1960s, when he appeared in films ranging from Whistle Down the Wind to the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving.
Dame Glenda May Jackson was an English actress and politician. Over the course of her distinguished career she received numerous accolades including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and a Tony Award. A member of the Labour Party, she served continuously as a Member of Parliament (MP) for 23 years – for Hampstead and Highgate from 1992 to 2010, and then, following boundary changes, for Hampstead and Kilburn from 2010 to 2015.
Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was a British film director, known for his pioneering work in television and film and for his flamboyant and controversial style. His films were mainly liberal adaptations of existing texts, or biographies, notably of composers of the Romantic era. Russell began directing for the BBC, where he made creative adaptations of composers' lives which were unusual for the time. He also directed many feature films independently and for studios.
Robert Oliver Reed was an English actor, known for his upper-middle class, macho image and his heavy-drinking, "hellraiser" lifestyle. His screen career spanned over 40 years, between 1955 and 1999. At the peak of his career, in 1971, British exhibitors voted Reed fifth-most-popular star at the box office.
The Devils is a 1971 historical horror-drama film written, produced and directed by Ken Russell, and starring Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed. A dramatised historical account of the fall of Urbain Grandier, a 17th-century Roman Catholic priest accused of witchcraft after the possessions in Loudun, France, the plot also focuses on Sister Jeanne des Anges, a sexually repressed nun who incites the accusations.
The Music Lovers is a 1971 British drama film directed by Ken Russell and starring Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson. The screenplay by Melvyn Bragg, based on Beloved Friend, a collection of personal correspondence edited by Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara von Meck, focuses on the life and career of 19th-century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It was one of the director's biographical films about classical composers, which include Elgar (1962), Delius: Song of Summer (1968), Mahler (1974) and Lisztomania (1975), made from an often idiosyncratic standpoint.
Women in Love is a 1920 novel by English author D. H. Lawrence. It is a sequel to his earlier novel, The Rainbow (1915), and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The emotional relationships thus established are given further depth and tension by an intense psychological and physical attraction between Gerald and Rupert.
The Rainbow is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence, first published by Methuen & Co. in 1915. It follows three generations of the Brangwen family living in Nottinghamshire, focusing particularly on the individual's struggle to growth and fulfilment within the confining structures of English social life. Lawrence's 1920 novel Women in Love is a sequel to The Rainbow.
Frieda Lawrence was a German author and wife of the British novelist D. H. Lawrence.
Jennie Linden is an English actress. She is best known for her starring role in Ken Russell's film Women in Love (1969) as well as her starring role in the cult film Nightmare (1964).
Sunday Bloody Sunday is a 1971 British drama film directed by John Schlesinger, written by Penelope Gilliatt, and starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch, Murray Head and Peggy Ashcroft. It tells the story of a free-spirited young bisexual artist and his simultaneous relationships with a divorced recruitment consultant (Jackson) and a gay Jewish doctor (Finch).
Salome's Last Dance is a 1988 British film written and directed by Ken Russell. Although most of the action is a verbatim performance of Oscar Wilde's 1891 play Salome, which is itself based on a story from the New Testament, there is also a framing narrative that was written by Russell.
The Triple Echo is a 1972 British drama film directed by Michael Apted starring Glenda Jackson, Brian Deacon and Oliver Reed, and based on the 1970 novella by H.E. Bates. It was shot in Wiltshire.
Joseph Daniel Turner Mawle is an English actor. Mawle is best known for his roles as Benjen Stark in Game of Thrones, Detective Inspector Jedediah Shine in Ripper Street, Firebrace in Birdsong, Jesus Christ in The Passion, Adar in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Odysseus in Troy: Fall of a City.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is a 2008 American comedy-drama film and a sequel to the 2005 film The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The original cast return to star in the film. It was directed by Sanaa Hamri and written by Elizabeth Chandler, who wrote the previous film. The film is based upon the fourth novel in the book series: Forever in Blue (2007), but incorporates scenes and storylines from The Second Summer of the Sisterhood (2003) and Girls in Pants (2004).
The Rainbow is a 1989 British drama film co-written and directed by Ken Russell and adapted from the D. H. Lawrence novel The Rainbow (1915). Sammi Davis stars as Ursula, a sheltered young pupil, then schoolteacher, who is taken under the wing by the more sophisticated Winifred.
The Boy Friend is a 1971 British musical comedy film written and directed by Ken Russell, based on the 1953 musical of the same name by Sandy Wilson. The film stars Twiggy, Christopher Gable, Tommy Tune, and Max Adrian, with an uncredited appearance by Glenda Jackson. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made extensive edits to the film for its American release. The missing material was restored and the film was re-released in 1987. The Boy Friend was released on DVD on 12 April 2011.
The Class of Miss MacMichael is a 1978 British comedy drama film directed by Silvio Narizzano, and starring Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, and Michael Murphy. It was based on the 1978 novel of the same name by Sandy Hutson.
Women in Love is a British two-part television film, a combined adaptation by William Ivory of two D. H. Lawrence novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920). Directed by Miranda Bowen and produced by Mark Pybus, it features Saskia Reeves, Rachael Stirling, Rosamund Pike, Rory Kinnear, Joseph Mawle and Ben Daniels. It was first transmitted on BBC Four on 24 and 31 March 2011. It was made by Company Pictures and filmed in South Africa. Other cast members included Ben Daniels as Will Brangwen. Music by Chris Letcher.
The Rainbow is a BBC television three-episode serial of 1988 directed by Stuart Burge, adapted from the D. H. Lawrence novel The Rainbow (1915).