Women in Love (film)

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.[5] 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.[5][6]

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.[6]

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.[7]

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.[7]

"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."[7]

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.[6]

Ken Russell had previously directed only two films and was better known then 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."[8] 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."[9] He and Kramer collaborated on further drafts of the script, using information from Lawrence's own life and adding extra bits from the novel.[8] 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. Oily [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.’"[10]

By the time United Artists approved the script, the project had a second producer, Martin Rosen.[8]

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."[8]

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.[8]

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.[11]

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."[8]

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."[8]

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. 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.[12] 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.[7]

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 north England and Switzerland.[13] 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.[7][14] Jackson was pregnant during filming.[15]

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.[7] "I had to get drunk before I exposed myself on camera," said Reed.[16]

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. And at least two of the actors were miscast. 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."[10]

The film was passed uncut by the British censor.[17]

The film was one of the eight most popular films at the British box office in 1970.[18] As it cost $1.6 million it recouped its costs in England alone.[5]

It made $3.0 million in rentals in the U.S. and Canada[19] and made $4.5 million worldwide.[1]

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."[10]

Released in Britain in 1969 and the US in 1970, the film was applauded as a good rendering of D.H. Lawrence's once controversial novel about love, sex and the upper class in England. During the making of the film, Russell had to work on conveying sex and the sensual nature of Lawrence's book. Many of the stars came to understand this was to be a complex piece. Oliver Reed would do a nude wrestling scene with Alan Bates. He went as far as to persuade (and physically twist the arm of) director Russell to film the scene. Russell conceded and shot the controversial scene, which suggested the homoerotic undertones of Gerald and Rupert's friendship. The wrestling scene caused the film to be banned altogether in Turkey. Considered the best of Russell's films, it led him to adapt Lawrence's preceding novel The Rainbow into a 1989 film of the same name, followed by the 1993 BBC TV miniseries Lady Chatterley.

Women in Love received positive reviews from critics and currently holds an 83% rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 23 reviews with an average rating of 7.5/10.[20] 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."[21]

• Powell, Dilys (1989) The Golden Screen. London: Pavilion; pp 244–45
• Russell, Ken (1991). Altered states. Bantam Books.
• Taylor, John Russell (1969) Review in The Times 13 November 1969