Women In Love (1970) - Ken Russell
Related: D.H. Lawrence - Ken Russell
Women In Love (1970) - Ken Russell [Amazon.com] 
Novel (1920)
Women in Love is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence published in 1920. It is a sequel to The Rainbow (1915), following 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 and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The novel ranges over the whole of British society at the time of the First World War and eventually ends high up in the snows of the European Alps.
Like most of his works, Women in Love caused controversy over its sexual subject matter. One early reviewer said of it "I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps — festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven."
It was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1969. It was one of the first theatrical movies to show male genitals, when Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) and Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) wrestle in the nude. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Love [Mar 2006]
Film (1970)
Before director Ken Russell's name became synonymous with cinematic extravagance and overkill, he actually directed what is one of the most passionate and involving adaptations of D.H. Lawrence in recent memory. Oliver Reed and Alan Bates star as friends who fall in love with a pair of sisters (Jennie Linden and Glenda Jackson, who won an Oscar for the role). But the relationships take markedly different directions, as Russell explores the nature of commitment and love. Bates and Linden learn to give themselves to each other; the more withdrawn Reed cannot, finally, connect with the demanding and challenging Jackson. Shot with great sensuality, it was surprisingly frank for its period (1970) and includes one of the most charged scenes in movie history: Bates and Reed as manly men, wrestling nude by firelight. --Marshall Fine for Amazon.com
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