Women in Love

A mining town in England at the start of the twenties. Two sisters: Gudrun is a sculptor, Ursula a teacher. They meet two men; one is Gerald, son of the family that owns the mine, the other Rupert, a school inspector. Four separate relationships form among the four, and none resembles another. Rupert believes marriage is not enough and looks for a bond with Gerald as well. What is between Gudrun and Gerald becomes a struggle for power. Ken Russell directs. The source is D. H. Lawrence's novel. Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson and Jennie Linden are in the cast. Glenda Jackson won the Academy Award for best actress for the part. The most discussed passage is the scene in which the two men wrestle in front of a fire; it is unusually explicit for its time and counts as a first in British cinema. Ken Russell is known for an extravagant visual manner and this is among his most measured films; even so some passages are deliberately excessive. The subject is the form of relationships: Lawrence's novel argues about the limits of marriage and friendship, and the film carries that directly. The period is drawn in detail: the mining town, the difference of class and the closing section in Switzerland. Who it is for: viewers who like British literary adaptation and cinema of the late sixties. Who it is not for: it is long, dense with talk, and the characters' arguments sound abstract to an ear today.