Women in Love

British filmmaker Ken Russell embraced the new freedoms of 1960s filmmaking for his 1969 screen adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s classic 1920 novel exploring love, sex, class, and morality in the age of industrialization. The titular women are sisters: practical Gudrun (Oscar-winner Glenda Jackson) and romantic Ursula (Jennie Linden), both intelligent and observant schoolteachers living in a provincial British mining town that they find suffocating. Alan Bates plays Rupert, a bohemian school inspector who woos Ursula and pursues a friendship with mining scion Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed), who takes over the family business with modern ideas on capital and labor while also pursuing the enigmatic Gudrun. Scripted by playwright Larry Kramer, the story follows the two relationships as the characters debate the nature of desire, commitment, and sex between bouts of physical coupling, setting their odysseys against life in Britain after World War I, as traditional values meet modern ideas. The dialogue is adult, serious, and full of provocative ideas, while Russell presented sex as a primal, earthy activity, that was—if not revolutionary—refreshingly frank and erotic (and, in the film's infamous scene featuring Bates and Reed wrestling nude in front of a roaring fire, homoerotic). Daring in its day, Women in Love remains an intelligent, passionate film that is arguably Russell's best. Presented in a handsome Criterion Collection edition with a 4K transfer, extras include 2003 audio commentary tracks with Russell and Kramer, new and archival interviews with cast and crew, Russell's autobiographical 1989 documentary A British Picture, the 1972 short film Second Best (written and produced by Bates), and a booklet. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)