WOMEN IN LOVE: KEN RUSSELL: D.H. LAWRENCE: POCKET MOVIE GUIDE By Jeremy Mark Robinson. Women In Love (1969) is the most well-known film of a D.H. Lawrence novel. It was included in the British Film Institute's Top 100 British movies. People always cited Women In Love as their favourite Ken Russell film. Russell complained that he has made better films than Women In Love, his third feature as director, but recognized that it seemed to chime with the public. Russell is right there: The Devils, Savage Messiah, and The Music Lovers are better movies cinematically, but it's Women In Love that people remember more than those three pictures.
There are lengthy chapters on every aspect of director Ken Russell. A filmmaker like no other, Russell remains one of cinema's extraordinary talents, a creator of masterpieces such as The Devils, Tommy and The Music Lovers, and a body of work that flies from the pastoral, Romantic lyricism of Delius: Song of Summer and Elgar to the wild extremes of Lisztomania, Altered States and Mahler.
It certainly helped Ken Russell's career to have made Women In Love - it did good business, first of all, and it won an Oscar for Glenda Jackson and was also nominated for the best director, screenplay and cinematography Oscars. It helped too that Women In Love contained scenes which had people talking - primarily, the nude wrestling scene.
Despite its faults, Women In Love has become The D.H. Lawrence Film, the one by which all subsequent adaptions will be judged (though there were many adaptions prior to that, and Lawrence himself was not averse to a film adaption of his book. Lawrence had considered a movie of Women In Love in the 1920s, according to Harry T. Moore. Tho' what Lorenzo would've made of the 1969 United Artists picture is anybody's guess!
Plus chapters on the novel of Women in Love; on D.H. Lawrence, and film adaptions of his work; appendices on The Rainbow (1989) and Lady Chatterley (1993), both directed by Ken Russell; filmographies; resources, video and DVD availability, and fans on Women In Love.
Fully illustrated, including many images of the movie, and Ken Russell's cinema. Bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861715074. 268 pages. www.crmoon.com
JEREMY MARK ROBINSON has written many critical studies, including Hayao Miyazaki, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean-Luc Godard, and The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, plus literary monographs on: J.R.R. Tolkien; Samuel Beckett; Thomas Hardy; André Gide; Robert Graves; and Lawrence Durrell.
