THE GO-BETWEEN 1971

"You flew too near the sun; you were scorched."

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for discussion

Gee, I can’t imagine why one of my most beloved and cherished films from the early 1970s is a movie about a sheltered and naïve adolescent boy who becomes hopelessly infatuated with Julie Christie.

Well, perhaps I can.

To anyone who knows me, it’s hardly a secret, and indeed, has become something of an overbelabored point, that I have been ga-ga over Julie Christie since I was a pre-teen...way back in the days when The Beatles were still together.  

What started out for me at eleven years old as a mere crush after seeing Julie Christie on screen for the first time in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) has only grown more adulatory and devoted over the years. My admiration for Christie's talent and twitterpated adulation of her beauty found echoed justification with each successive film. 

The face that stared out at me from our living room coffee table

Though (paradoxically) I think Julie Christie tends to shine most brilliantly in period films, it has always been her distinctly contemporary quality that most defined her appeal to me. Combining a direct, emotional honesty with assured intelligence, wit, sexual independence, and self-possession, Julie Christie seemed to me the very embodiment of the modern image of woman in film. An image updated and of a very different stripe than the Hollywood leading ladies I grew up watching.

Looking back, it's quite a sobering thing to reflect that I’ve been absolutely, unabatedly besotted with Julie Christie for more than half a century.

And The Go-Between is all about reflecting.

By beating out Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice for the Grand Prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, The Go-Between’s win represented a distinct personal-rivalry victory for director Joseph Losey. But the prestigious Palme d’Or ultimately failed to work its magic at the American boxoffice or hold much sway with Academy voters, for the film was largely a critical success and received only the scantest Oscar attention (a Best Supporting Actress nod for Margaret Laighton was the film’s sole Oscar nod). 

I saw The Go-Between in 1972, when I was 14, and recall being surprised—what with the above-the-title Christie and Bates paired for the first time since Madding Crowd—that the film’s focus was not on its adult characters, but on the experiences of a boy very nearly my age. And though nothing about the story’s timeline and setting (England, 1900) suggested I should encounter anything even remotely relevant to me, my life, or limited frame of experience, I was thrilled to discover just how much the film truly resonated with me personally.

I don't recall ever before having the experience of feeling that I both understood and could relate to the inner nature of a character whose life, while nothing like my own, nevertheless held several canny and "I thought I was the only one who felt that way!" parallels… parallels far and beyond the whole “adolescent crush on the exquisite Julie Christie” angle.

Julie Christie as Marian Maudsley

Alan Bates as Ted Burgess

Dominic Guard as Lionel "Leo" Colston

Margaret Leighton as Mrs. Madeleine Maudsley

Edward Fox as Viscount Hugh Trimingham

Michael Gough as Mr. Maudsley

The Go-Between is a picturesque and commendably faithful adaptation of the 1953 novel by L. P. Hartley (author of The Hireling). Directed by Joseph Losey (Secret Ceremony, Boom!) from a literate script by playwright Harold Pinter, The Go-Between marks the duo’s third and final collaboration, following their synergistic partnership on the films The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967). 

The titular Go-Between of the story is Lionel “Leo” Colston (Dominic Guard), a sensitive, earnestly sincere 12-year-old of a somewhat dreamy nature that all-too-easily—and injuriously—lends itself to a kind of emotional fragility and flights of superstitious fancy. Out of a need to feel he has some power over his life—his father recently died, his mother’s finances are strained, and he’s bullied at school—Leo places great stock in the determining forces of the Zodiac, half-convincing himself that he has the power to levy magical curses.

Marcus Maudsley (Richard Gibson) introduces an anxious Leo to Brandham Hall.
Their modes of dress highlight the stark differences (among them, class and the
 unearned self-assurance of wealth) between the schoolmates

The course of Leo’s life changes irrevocably when he accepts an invitation from a wealthy classmate to spend a sweltering summer at the latter's family’s baronial country estate, Brandham Hall—a sprawling, Gosford Park-ish affair that, by the looks of it, takes up a sizable chunk of Norfolk, England. There, Leo, an outsider unversed in the caste-specific rules and obligations of the upper classes, becomes the unwitting and naively complicit facilitator in a scandalously illicit affair between the aristocratically betrothed Marian (Julie Christie) and Ted, a working-class tenant farmer (Alan Bates), when he’s elected as the covert couple’s letter-carrying liaison.

Leo is so dazzled, he's blinded.

Set in the Edwardian Era and told from Leo’s fish-out-of-water perspective, The Go-Between is most manifestly a turn-of-the-century coming-of-age story that offers a trenchant indictment of the rigid, suppressive constraints of the British class system. But through Pinter’s insertion of brief, melancholy flashforwards to the late 1950s—wherein we encounter Leo as a sad-eyed adult (Michael Redgrave) and learn that what we’re watching are his memories of that fateful summer—it becomes clear that The Go-Between is also a reckoning-with-the-past story.

Michael Redgrave as the adult Leo Colston

Thanks to Gosford Park, Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age, and, most significantly, the Merchant-Ivory films, period costume dramas are now as familiar to American audiences as the Western.

But back in the early ‘70s, they were still something of a rarified genre, typically coming in one of two varieties: mouldily old-fashioned Oscar-bait (Nicholas and Alexandra -1970, Ryan’s Daughter - 1970) or highbrow deconstructivist (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis -1970, Death in Venice -1971).

The Go-Between most determinedly qualifies as the latter. In their thematically exacting adaptation of Hartley’s often misunderstood novel, Losey and Pinter use the temporal beauty of a meticulously recreated, period-romantic world to beguile the viewer (as it does Leo) before pulling the Victorian rug out from under us, revealing the dappled gentility of The Go-Between to be mere window dressing masking a tale of lacerating emotional brutality and psychological trauma rivaling anything in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  or They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

That Noise You Hear Is the Sound of Illusions Shattering
Reality inevitably intrudes upon Leo's blinkered idealization of Marian and Ted  

1970s cinema distinguished itself as the age of disenchantment, unhappy endings, and antiheroes, making The Go-Between—a tale without heroes, set in a world full of hypocrisy, class elitism, and the callous manipulation of the vulnerable by the wealthy—a perfect Nixon-era zeitgeist piece.

Moral ambivalence is also a characteristic of '70s cinema

Lacking a male figure in his life, Leo responds to the paternal kindness of the two very different men in love with Marian—Ted, whom she loves but cannot wed, and Hugh, to whom she's obliged to wed, but does not love. Leo is faced with a moral dilemma when his go-between duties come into conflict with his conscience. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What I love about this film? Well, Julie Christie, of course — as commanding a screen presence as ever — in a role that finds her once again finding the humanity in a superficial character and leveraging her sirenic beauty with chilling assurance. The word "chilling" points to one of the top reasons The Go-Between captured my imagination as a youth, and why it has remained a film I never tire of revisiting. 

With its dark subtext and its setting used as a dominant, active participant in the narrative, watching The Go-Between is like watching a Gothic fairy tale (a Sunshine Gothic, if such a thing exists). 

Against a backdrop of bright daylight, frilly frocks, and posh British accents, Leo, like Wonderland’s Alice and Oz’s Dorothy, is introduced as an innocent transported to an unfamiliar world where his adventures lead to a harsh moral education, resulting in a devastating psychological reckoning/loss of innocence. 

Michel Legrand’s lushly romantic, subtly ominous score for The Go-Between (replacing composer Richard Rodney Bennett) contributes invaluably to the film's mounting sense of dread. With each new lie told, each risk endeavored, and each confidence unstably guarded, Legrand's melodramatic piano motif drives home the tense certainty that none of this can end well.

The Go Between is the 2nd of four films that
Alan Bates and Julie Christie would make together

And speaking of tense...one aspect of the film's psychological tension that registered more acutely in the film than in the novel is the way in which The Go-Between plays with the viewer's alliances. Initially, Marian and Ted, as lovers thwarted by the draconian inanities of classism, are the objects of sympathy. But with the introduction of Hugh, someone we expect to be the problematic "other guy," but who is, in actuality, a decent, likable, and quite dashing fellow, the lovebirds' actions come off as deceitful and cruel. 

Looming large over Leo in this shot are the two differing
ideals of masculine identity that Hugh and Ted represent  

Then there's social-climbing Mrs. Maudsley, who, though ceaselessly shooting daggers of distrust at her daughter, is nevertheless all hospitality and egalitarian graces when it comes to lower-class Leo. So... despite my empathizing with the difficult position he has been placed in, during a scene where Leo engages in an ill-masked deception, telling a bald-faced lie to the woman who had heretofore only shown him kindness, my heart went out to Mrs. Maudsley. 

From the novel: 

Leo - “I saw how green I must have looked to her and how easy to take advantage.”  

It's Not Easy Being Green

The gift of a Lincoln green summer suit (from Lincoln, England, the shade associated with Robin Hood)—an act of kindness that endears Marian to Leo and engenders his loyalty—comes to take on the hue of something tarnished when Leo learns from his friend: “It’s green [referring to a bike Miriam intends to give Leo on his birthday...to help him deliver messages faster] Bright green. And you know why? Because you are green yourself. It’s your true color. Marian said so herself.”

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Cinematographer Gerry Fisher (Secret Ceremony, Fedora) imbues The Go-Between with a studied romanticism that reinforces the film’s picturesque setting while shoring up its darker psychological themes. The film's visual texture, designed to transport the viewer to a time and place distant and alien from the present—making tangible the novel’s famous opening line, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”—also establishes the film's narrative perspective; we’re seeing this world through Leo’s eyes.  

Glowingly honey-colored and sun-dappled at the start (the tale is set, significantly, at the turn of the century…Leo’s innocence standing in for pre-war England’s optimism), the film grows incrementally gloomier (radiant sunshine giving way to torrential rainstorms) in coincident conveyance of Leo’s disenchantment and loss of innocence.  

Leo checks the mercury thermometer daily, believing that, though
the power of his will, he can induce the summer heat to rise 

The concepts of fate and destiny are poignant, cross-purpose leitmotifs in The Go-Between. Fate's neutral dominance and intractability are symbolized by nature, while destiny manifests as the misdirected efforts of characters who believe (fallaciously) that they have control over the outcome of events. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As an adolescent, I felt isolated as a middle-class Black kid in white-majority neighborhoods and schools; lonely because, despite having four sisters, I lacked someone to talk to; shy, which became my survival skill as a gay teenager; and lacking a male guidance figure since my mom had recently remarried, making my stepfather still somewhat of a stranger. I also had an inner life that felt more authentic to me than my outer reality. 

Movies became my refuge, escape, and discovery. 

I approached The Go-Between seeking escape, but instead, discovered a white, British, fin de siècle version of myself reflected back at me. In a Norfolk suit, no less. 

Leo's Monumentally Unlucky 13th Birthday

Scenes depicting Leo’s outsider’s awareness of being “in” Brandham Hall but not “of” Brandham Hall reminded me of every I'm-the-only-Black-person-in-the-room experience I had growing up. Just as my being a child of the H-bomb-anxiety '60s (the root of all those fantasy TV sitcoms of the day: My Favorite Martian, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie) made me relate to the coping mechanism comfort Leo finds in the quick-fix, wish-fulfillment belief in possessing magic powers.

Have To Believe We Are Magic
Until I saw this movie, I didn't know that the desire for magical powers is a common fantasy in children. I once failed to study for an upcoming test at school and wished-wished-wished to get sick overnight so I could stay home. No such luck. But when I got to school the next day, the TEACHER was sick, and we had a sub...and no test!!
At the time, you could not have convinced me it wasn't all my doing. 

As I was an internal, self-serious kind of kid, I particularly identified with Leo's idealization of adults. With me, it manifested in a tendency towards being crush-prone whenever any grown-up paid me the slightest bit of attention (in grade school, I fell in love with a teacher who happened to look just like Sally Kellerman, simply because she asked for my help rolling the film strip projector cart back to the AV room).

A scene that’s always intrigued me is the one where all the Brandham Hall boys are off swimming, and Leo, who doesn't know how, is off to the side, sneaking a peek at Ted, who is sunbathing in the nude. The scene is ambiguous, leaving the viewer free to interpret, on Leo’s part, either a natural curiosity about a stranger (he and Ted have not yet met) who is relaxed and comfortable in himself, or an equally natural adolescent sexual curiosity. Being that I’ve always been of the mind that Alan Bates could arouse sexual curiosity in a rock, I saw it as the latter, projecting another point of identification with the character of Leo.

It's a perception that felt, if not “correct,” then perhaps validated when, in later years, after finally reading The Go-Between, I learned that author L.P. Hartley was gay and based his book on a summer he spent at an estate in Norfolk called Bradenham Hall when he was sixteen. It seemed Hartley only publicly acknowledged his sexual identity came late in life, and in 1971, published The Harness Room, his only gay-themed novel. 

PERFORMANCES

OK, what can I say about La Christie that I haven't already covered in the NINE essays already posted about her films?  Julie Christie is marvelous in The Go-Between, and of her performance I contend that if it can be said she possesses a niche gift, it's her peerless ability to inhabit and humanize (without trying to make them likable) characters who are blithely cruel. (Christy's Kitty Baldy from 1983's The Return of the Soldier [with Alan Bates] is like Marian Maudsley...the later years.)

18-year-old Dominic Guard in Picnic at Hanging Rock -1975

The Go-Between is a reminder of what a tremendous impact a well-cast leading child's role can have on a film (the young actors in 1972's The Other and that TV version of The Shining ruined both movies for me). Dominic Guard is perfection...simply because his natural, unaffected reactions feel as nascent as everything about Leo and his sense of self. Contrasted with the young actor who plays Leo in the 2015 BBC-One adaptation of The Go-Between: the kid is excellent...but he's acting the hell out of the part, and I was never unaware of that fact. 

The Go-Between, as realized by Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter, is for me a near-perfect screen adaptation of Hartley's heartbreaking novel, capturing both the beauty and the brutality of the story.

Of course, it isn't lost on me that my revisit to this movie some 54 years after my first experience of it, fittingly parallels the film's flashforward sequences that have adult Leo returning to "the scene of the crime" of the death of his innocence.

Happily, that's where the parallels end, for when I look at this 1971 masterpiece now, I feel more keenly than ever its humanist soul. The world that my 68-year-old eyes look out at today seems in a race to make a virtue of what is most weak in us (our capacity for cruelty) while turning the only true strength humans have (our compassion) into a liability.

The Go-Between is like a cautionary tale, reminding me of the damage that's inflicted by oppressive social structures, and what's at stake for humanity when we forget that we really should handle one another with a great deal more care. 

Clip from "The Go-Between" (1971)

BONUS MATERIAL

May December (2023)

Michel Legrand's mesmerizing score for The Go-Between was used to evocatively melodramatic effect when it was reorchestrated and adapted by composer Marcelo Zarvos for the Todd Haynes film May December, starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.

The Go-Between (2015)

Randy old sod that I am, the only improvement I could find in the faithful, perfectly serviceable TV adaptation of The Go-Between is that it grants us several Leo 's-eye-view shots of Ted Burgess (Ben Batt) in the altogether. Broadcast in September 2015, this version features Vanessa Redgrave and Jim Broadbent as old Marian and old Leo, respectively.

The Go-Between opened in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 13, 1971  

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2025

WOMEN IN LOVE 1969

As a hormonal pre-teen whose nether regions went all atingle at the sight of Oliver Reed’s Bill Sikes waking up in Shani Wallis' bed in the 1968 kiddie musical Oliver!; no one wanted to see Ken Russell’s adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love more than I. More to the point: no 7^th grader with a wholesale unfamiliarity with either D. H. Lawrence or Ken Russell wanted to see Oliver Reed appearing full-frontal naked in a movie more than I.

But it was not to be.
For although my track record for persuading my mom to grant me permission to see age-inappropriate films on the basis of their “seriousness of content” was one both impressive and fruitful in one so young (my being both a shy and humorless 12-year-old got me into Bonnie & Clyde, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?); little did I know that my hopes for pulling the same stunt with Women in Love would be dashed thanks to my parents having seen the controversial film adaptation of Lawrence’s lesbian-themed novella The Fox (1967) a couple of years before. I was undone by the fact that the advertising campaigns for both The Fox and Women in Love downplayed the highbrow literary origins of these films in favor of stressing the inherently sensationalist virtues contained in their then taboo-shattering display of nudity and sexual frankness.

Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin

Glenda Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen

Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich

Jennie Linden as Ursula Brangwen

Eleanor Bron as Hermione Roddice

That I had been able to wheedle my way into the “Recommended for Mature Audiences” films listed above is largely attributable to the fact that they all pitched themselves as important, self-serious motion pictures commenting on contemporary issues. On the other hand, Women in Love, whose marketing betrayed a perhaps well-founded lack of faith in America’s interest in or familiarity with D.H. Lawrence, banked on the lure of eroticism to offset the stuffy reputation of British imports by choosing to go the exploitation route. Like The Fox before it, which used the promise of female-female sex as its prime publicity hook, Women in Love moved its homoerotic nude wrestling scene front and center as the defining image and focus of its entire marketing campaign.

And while I’m certain all of this paid off handsomely at the boxoffice, closer to home (seeing as it only solidified my mother’s perception of D.H. Lawrence as a high-flown pornographer, and strengthened her resolve to keep me far away from any film bearing his name) that particular marketing strategy ultimately proved disastrous to my private campaign to get a look at Oliver's reed. Roughly nine years passed before Women in Love's rounds at the revival theaters and my suitable chronological age coincided.

The stylish (if not eccentric) mode of dress of the Brangwen sisters not only establishes them as modern, independent-thinking women at odds with their dreary, working-class surroundings, but assert Women in Love's subthemes of internal (emotion and instinct), external (nature and environment), and man-made (industry and art) conflict.

Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen are two emotionally restless sisters whose naturally colorful natures chafe at the drab-grey existence proffered by their working-class status as schoolteachers in the coal-mining town of Beldover in postwar England, 1921. Both women are dreamy loners unable/unwilling to fit in with their surroundings. Both are also, if not exactly looking for love, reluctant to duplicate the domestic desperation of their mother, and therefore curious and receptive to exploring the experience.

Gudrun (Jackson), the youngest, is a self-styled artist and free-spirit sensually attracted to power and passion. (And, it would seem, brutality. In one scene she is shown becoming excited by the sight of Gerald mistreating a horse. In another, stimulated by a story an artist [Loerke] relates about having to beat one of his female models in order for her to sit still for a painting.)

"I would give everything...everything, all you love...for a little companionship and intelligence."
Vladek Sheybal  as Herr Loerke, a homosexual artist (Richard Heffer as his lover) presents Gudrun with a possibility of platonic love

Ursula (Linden), more of a realist and more sensitive than her sister, nevertheless envisions fulfillment as something achievable only through the surrendering of oneself to an idealized vision of one-on-one domesticated bliss. Into these sisters' lives, as though summoned by mutual longing, arrive Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich; best friends of dissimilar emotional temperament who contribute to forming, in their coupling with the sisters, two contrasting yet complementary halves of a cyclical treatise on the conundrum that is passionate love vs. romantic love. The perpetual struggle between the sexes.

Woman in Love #1- Rupert & Ursula's loving relationship is often photographed in nature

Ursula finds romantic kinship—if little in the way of stability—with Rupert (Bates), a school inspector possessed of extravagantly quixotic theories about nature, life and love, all seeming to channel from a nascent awareness of his bisexuality. Meanwhile, Gudrun, perhaps out of want of stimulation or, as Rupert surmises, a lust for passion and greed for self-importance in love, is drawn to Gerald (Reed), the brutish, aristocratic son of the town’s coal industrialist. A shared quest for power, corrosively mixed with a need for both intimacy and independence, makes theirs a passionate, albeit combative, relationship more or less doomed from the start.

Woman in Love #2 - Gudrun & Gerald's doomed relationship is often photographed in dark surroundings

Intruding upon Ursula and Rupert’s self-perpetuating emotionalism and Gudrun and Gerald’s incessant power plays, are: Hermione (Bron), Rupert’s one-time love and the walking embodiment of orchestrated eroticism with none of the heat; and Rupert himself, whose unrequited love for the mulishly impassive Gerald encumbers his relationship with Ursula.

Men in Love - Rupert advances the possibility of an implicit, perfect love shared between two men

Many films have used the entwined relationships of two couples to explore the inconsistent, conflicting complexities of spiritual and physical love (my favorites being Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge and Closer), but Ken Russell’s Women in Love gets to the heart of the matter (so to speak) in a way that is as visually poetic as it is emotionally painful. It's one of the most intelligent and genuinely provocative films about love I've ever seen.

I was in my early 20s the first time I saw Women in Love, and had you asked me, I genuinely would have told you I'd understood it then. But it seems with each passing year, the film reveals itself to be about so much more than I'd initially thought, I'm certain what I'd gleaned from the film at such a young age was but the mere tip of the emotional iceberg Russell presents us with.

Michael Gough as Tom Brangwen

Women in Love is one of those rare films that seems to grow smarter in direct proportion to the amount of life experience one chalks up. So it would seem, although you couldn't have convinced me of it at the time, my mom was right in thinking I was too young for this. Not that I wouldn't have loved to have seen Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in the buff, but Women in Love is far too mature in its themes for any of this to have made a whit of sense to me as an adolescent.

Sumptuously filmed, magnificently costumed (by Shirley Russell), and so exceptionally well-acted you can watch it again and again without ever unearthing all the delightful nuances in the actors’ performances, Women in Love is a thoughtful, surprisingly restrained film, and a pleasant departure from the operatic bombast of Russell’s later works.

Gudrun's desire for power and its liberating effects is poetically dramatized in a sequence in which her lyrical dancing tames and eventually overcomes a threatening-looking herd of highland cattle. (Amusingly, a herd which, when photographed from the front, share Gudrun's coloring and haircut.) 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

My favorite thing about Women in Love is how artfully it tackles the unwieldy topic of love. Especially the pain and emotional upheaval born of that overused word never seeming to mean the exact same thing to any two people at any one time. 
Obscured by illusion, distorted by need, thwarted by cowardice; the impulse to love may be innate and instinctual, but it’s also intensely confounding. Ken Russell contrasts images of nature with images of the encroaching industrialism of postwar England to dramatize the natural urges of the characters as being in conflict with their repressed, intellectual notions about love. Ursula, Gudrun, Rupert, and Gerald all do a great deal of thinking and talking about love, but none betray a  trace of genuinely having any idea of what love really is or what they want. 

As suggested by Women in Love's repeated use of the popular song "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," the characters all harbor romantic illusions about love: its potential for fulfillment, its ability to heal wounds, the emotional void it can fill. Conflict arises out of whether or not the grasping need of desire is capable of giving way to the vulnerability and freedom love requires.

Love & Death:  In a pairing shot that many critics of the day thought too heavy-handed (which, of course, meant I absolutely loved it), the drowning death of the film's only romantically idyllic couple (Sharon Gurney & Christopher Gable) is contrasted with Ursula & Rupert's unsatisfying first tryst. A premonition of blighted love, a graphic representation of romantic ideologies at cross purposes; the women's poses can be interpreted as lovingly embracing or greedily clinging to the men, the men, unequivocally adopting gestures of disentanglement.

Sharon Gurney as Laura Crich and Christopher Gable as Tibby Lupton

Gable would go on to appear in four other Ken Russell films and two Russell TV productions

PERFORMANCES

While Ken Russell's operatic zest and Larry Kramer's graceful screenplay mercifully spare Women in Love from the kind of over-reverential airlessness common in most film adaptations of classic novels, I attribute the lion's share of the credit for the film's vibrancy to the talents of the amazing cast. 

In an era that required so many actresses to play the compliant love interest to counterculture antiheroes, Women in Love was a refreshing change of pace in presenting two women who have a say in what they want from life and love. Personal fave Glenda Jackson (looking quite smart in her blunt, Vidal Sassoon bob) emerged in this film as something of the "New Woman" of '70s cinema.

Blessed with a mellifluous voice and an articulate beauty that radiates strength, intellect, and fleshy sensuality, Jackson is Old Hollywood star quality without the lacquered veneer. Much in the same way I attribute Woody Allen with unearthing Diane Keaton, Ken Russell and Glenda Jackson are a pair forever locked together in my mind. Her performance as Gudrun Brangwen, certainly one of the more complex, emotionally paradoxical characters in literature, is almost wily. Throughout the film she wears the look of a woman in possession of a secret she dares you to find out. The quintessential Ken Russell heroine, Jackson won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, and deservedly rose to stardom on the strength of this film. 

A real scene-stealer whose presence is very much missed when her character is required to recede into the background early on, is the ever-versatile Eleanor Bron as the pretentious Hermione: a potentially ridiculous individual made real and sympathetic by Bron's prodigious talent. Only after I'd read the book did I really come to appreciate the spot-on perfection of the self-enchanted sensual studiousness of Bron's performance.

Women in Love as a costume film/period piece, tightrope walks a space between stagy theatricality and naturalism that few but Russell—with his talent for finding natural locations that look like stage sets for an opera—could pull off. Alan Bates fits the film's romantic setting perfectly (because I find him to be so swoon-inducingly beautiful, I can’t honestly say I've ever been able to really evaluate his performance with much objectivity), and Jennie Linden is effective in the somewhat thankless role of Ursula.

Reed and Jackson bring such smoldering dynamic intensity to their roles that their scenes together always feel slightly dangerous. I can't think of another actress who could appear opposite Reed in a scene and leave you concerned for his safety. I think Reed's Gerald Crich is his finest screen performance. Employing his trademark whispers to great effect, he somehow manages to be brutish, refined, and heartbreakingly vulnerable all at the same time.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Given your average ratio of anticipation to disappointment, it came as no small surprise to discover, after having waited so many years, Women in Love’s fabled nude wrestling scene more than lived up to its reputation. Satisfied with merely being sensually enraptured by the sight of two obscenely sexy actors wrestling in the altogether; I wasn't at all prepared for what a dramatically powerful and daring scene it is. Daring not in its exposure of flesh, but in its exploration of a subtextual, taboo attribute of a great many onscreen male relationships (and, I daresay, many real-life relationships as well).

I'm not sure who said it, but someone once made the keen observation that homophobia in men is not really rooted in a general distaste for male-on-male sexual contact, but rather in the fear of "What if I like it?"
Heterosexual men have established a social order in which they have left themselves few avenues allowing for the expression of male affection. In lieu of this, they have contrived a network of female-excluding, male-bonding rituals so convoluted and complex (sports culture, strip clubs, ass slapping, "bros before hoes" guy codes, homophobic locker room humor, bromance comedies, misogyny masked as promiscuity [the Romeo syndrome], etc.) you sometimes wish they'd just have sex with each other and get it over with. One can't help but feel that the world would be a less aggressive, insecure place if they did.

In Women in Love, Rupert and Gerald's friendship is really the most intimate, passionate, and loving relationship in the film, but Rupert uses words and lofty theories to mask his inability to fully confront his own sexual confusion, while Gerald is too emotionally remote to allow himself to address the issue at all. On the heels of the death of Gerald's sister and following Rupert's less-than-fulfilling consummation of his affair with Ursula, the two friends find themselves at a loss for how to "appropriately" comfort one another. So, as is the wont of repressed heterosexual males the world over, Rupert and Gerald resort to displays of physical aggression as a heterosexual means of expressing homosexual intimacy.

As the friendly combat gives way to a physical exhaustion matching their physical closeness, it's clear to Rupert that Gerald feels "something" akin to his own feelings. But before that ultimate intimacy can be broached, Gerald, in an act of willful misunderstanding, finds it necessary to break off what has been established between them before things have a chance of preceding any further. (Wrestling by firelight, the very natural state of their nudity is made vulgar and shameful by the intrusion of the modern electric light he abruptly switches on.)

As a fan of '70s movies, what makes this sequence particularly compelling for me is how it symbolically evokes the unaddressed subtext in all those post-feminism, male-centric buddy pictures of the decade. Films like Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider—films in which women are shunted off to the sidelines—are all essentially male romances. In each film, women are present, even loved, but there's no getting past the fact that the deepest, most profoundly spiritual love occurs between the male characters. Women in Love's wrestling scene dramatizes the struggle men face when affection for another man is felt, and (at least in this instance), the societal and morality-imposed roles of "friend" are found to be inadequate.

It's an outstandingly courageous sequence whose confrontational frankness wrests Women in Love out of the past and centers it far and above what most mainstream filmmakers are willing to do even today. Who knew? A sequence I only expected to be a feast for the eyes proved to be food for thought as well.

Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, and Jennie Linden in a clip from "Women in Love" (1969)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Women in Love was promoted with the tagline—“The relationship between four sensual people is limited: They must find a new way.” And while this might sound more like the tagline for 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, it does at least touch upon the theme of the inadequacy of classically “romantic” notions of love in a modern world, and the need for a kind of sexual evolution.

The Proper Way to Eat a Fig
Almost as scandalous as Women in Love's nudity was the inclusion of a scene (not in the book) where Rupert compares a fig to female genitalia. The words are taken from D.H. Lawrence's 1923 erotic poem, Figs, which can be read in its entirety, HERE

None of the characters in Women in Love are able to fully align what they presuppose about love (nor what is true to their natures) with their present realities. In an earlier post about Mike Nichols’ Closer, I wrote:
“The four protagonists fumble about blindly seeking love without knowing how to return it, demanding love without earning it, and giving love without committing to it.”

The same can be said for the characters in Women in Love. And although more than 70 years separate the creation of the two works (Patrick Marber's play, Closer, was written in 1997, D.H. Lawrence's novel was published in 1920) it intrigues me that after so many years and so much human progress, the basic cosmic riddle that is love remains essentially and eternally unanswered.

Undomesticated
Rupert - "But I wanted a man friend eternal...as you are eternal."
Ursula - "You can't have it because it's impossible."
Rupert - "I don't believe that."

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2014