Buy from eBay Women In Love Release Date: 25 March, 1970 Director: Ken Russell Staring: Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson Studio: MGM/UA Video Rated: R (Restricted) Buy this film on eBay Amazon.com Customer Reviews   Rated 1 out of 5 What a disappointment One of the great pleasures of seeing this film in the theatre was the lush green of the English countryside. This print (or pressing) looks like it was abandoned on a deck chair in the south of France ... dry and faded.   Rated 5 out of 5! COUNTRY MANNERS......... STILL, very moving, erotic, devastating and rather frightening in its frank sexual portrayal! D.H. Lawrence veiled expose of the ’’Bloomsbury’’ Set and ’’other encounters’’ - today’’s imitations pale by comparison. Masterful performances by Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, and the late Oliver Reed. Lush direction - and adaptation by Ken Russell and superb costumes by Mrs Russell - all lovingly restored on the late but ’’collector’’s item DVD. Quite true to the flamboyant novel and a veritable primer for the aspiring actor. Now, how about more Russell Restorations??   Rated 5 out of 5! Excellent presentation of Lawrences warm blooded themes Film versions of novels rarely get everything right but this comes pretty close. I especially like how effective the film is at conveying the importance of the body and physical sensation so vital in Lawrence’’s writing. I think a film can only attempt to show what the book more specifically says so to the mind the book will always be preferred but with a writer like Lawrence film makes perfect sense. In fact Lawrences flaw is perhaps that he at times uses too many words when an image would suffice. So I love that someone as visually audacious as Ken Russell made this film. I’’ve seen it many times and always love different things about it. Russell is usually equated with excess but here everything exists in just the right amount, nothing is overdone, he finds just the right way to convey literary content without overly revering it and so framing it too neatly. Russell remains true to the book,and to his credit the way he injects the Lawrentian themes enlivens his characters, make them seem even more vital which is no small accomplishment and so the film never feels "literary" even though it is very literary in the best sense. To Lawrence love and any kind of relationship was always marked with struggle and restlessness because it could never be perfected. He was not interested in the bourgeoisie convention of marriage which domesticated love into something else but in its truest most uncompromised state. So in this film Ken Russell gives us that. Not every detail of the whole story but the essential feeling of love as experienced by four very different temperaments and all four main characters are very different types indeed, and all react differently to passion and interpret its meaning differently also. The most beautiful scenes are the wordless ones when the characters stop analyzing what their lives are about and allow themselves to simply inhabit their own passion and instincts. I think Russell is very true to Lawrence’’s concerns, perhaps shares them, but articulates them in his own visual way which really makes this a kind of collaboration with Lawrence as some of the scenes have no precedent in the book. The characters all remain complex and interesting and much remains unresolved because it is unresolvable. He also did a version of Women in Love’’s companion novel The Rainbow which is only about half as good.     Related Films: Lady Chatterley