BLACK WIDOW 1954

Today to get the public to attend a picture show,

It’s not enough to advertise a famous star they know.

If you want to get the crowds to come around...

You’ve got to have Glorious Technicolor,

Breathtaking CinemaScope,

And Stereophonic Sound.

Cole Porter -1955 Broadway musical "Silk Stockings"

“The first big murder-mystery in CinemaScope!” “The first crime-of-passion story in CinemaScope!" Thus screamed the poster and newspaper ads heralding the 1954 release of 20th Century-Fox’s all-star, all-color, widescreen film noir, Black Widow. Well, seeing as I somehow managed to never even hear of this movie until just last year, I’m going to have to take them at their word that Black Widow represents a series of "firsts" in the annals of CinemaScope. What I can attest to is that by combining the backstage bitchery of All About Eve (1950) with the murder-mystery-told-in-flashback structure of Laura (1944), and burnishing it all to a garish, high-gloss color palette reminiscent of How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Black Widow succeeds in being a pleasingly campy goulash of disparate genre tropes and style conventions in search of a unifying tone.

Ginger Rogers as overbearing diva of the New York stage Carlotta Marin

Van Heflin as slow-witted theatrical producer Peter Denver

Gene Tierney as patrician stage star Iris Denver

George Raft as the Beau Brummel of the NYPD, Detective Lt. C.A. Bruce

Peggy Ann Garner as  Southern-fried "purpose girl" Nancy Ordway

Reginald Gardiner as lapdog househusband Brian Mullen

Given the big push by 20th Century-Fox in order to compete with the escalating popularity of television, CinemaScope, like today’s mania for 3-D (that ship has struck dry-dock by now, hasn't it?), is a technological advancement devised to enhance the moviegoing experience that doesn't necessarily translate to enhancing the quality of the film itself. In its time CinemaScope was a spectacle-based invention which proved ideal for epics (The Robe – 1953), musicals (There's  No Business Like Show Business – 1954), and scenic adventure films (Beneath the 12-Mile Reef – 1953). Black Widow, a murder mystery based on the novel Fatal Woman by Hugh Wheeler (of A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd fame) was an early experiment by Fox to try out its widescreen process (with blistering color by Deluxe) on a less visual, more narrative-driven genre.

Set in the glamorous world of the New York theater (although no one in the film ever sets foot on a stage), Black Widow feels more like Americanized Agatha Christie than full-blown noir. It throws together a colorful assortment of cliché Broadway luminaries, bigwigs, hangers-on, and bohemian Greenwich Village types, then stands back as this close-knit group of professional pretenders grows progressively unraveled by the inconvenient intrusion of a murder into their cloistered enclave. 

Virginia Leith as Claire Amberly
Although I always associate Leith with Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying (1956), fans of MST3K will recognize Leith as the disembodied talking head in 1962s The Brain that Wouldn't Die

While Black Widow is built around the noir staple of an innocent person having their life spiral out of control due to being falsely accused of a crime, missing-in-action is the hard-boiled dialogue and requisite climate of fatalism necessary to make this overlit whodunit feel like the real thing. Not helping matters is the fact that time which would have been better spent fleshing out character motivations and plot twists is given over to draggy amateur sleuthing that leans heavily on coincidence and relies too often on slow-witted police work.

Skip Homeier as John Amberly

Plot: Naive to the point of thick-headed Broadway producer Peter Denver (Heflin) befriends guileless 20-year-old wannabe writer Nancy Ordway (Garner) while his stage star wife (Tierney) is out of town. Although their friendship is platonic nature, it nevertheless raises the manicured eyebrows of Denver's neighbor, Great Lady of the Stage and all-around busybody Carlotta Marin (Rogers), despite the demurred assertions of her cowed husband, Brian (Gardiner), Denver's best pal.

At the periphery of this innocent but potentially combustible situation are: well-heeled sister and brother, Claire and John Amberly (Virginia Leith and Skip Homeier)--she a slumming Greenwich Village artist, he a law student; Nancy’s uncle Gordon (Otto Kruger), a low-tier stage actor; Anne (Hilda Simms), Nancy's sharp-as-a-tack co-worker; Lucia Colletti (Cathleen Nesbitt), the Denver's loose-lipped maid; and, once things take a nasty turn, Lt. Bruce (Raft), the steel-eyed, near-immobile detective.

Otto Kruger as Gordon Ling

The mystery at the core of Black Widow is handled fairly effectively, what with some throw-us-off-the-scent casting and a perhaps unintended lightness of touch helping to generate a few genuinely unexpected twists along the way. Also working in the film's favor is how the duplicitous and ruthless world of show business turns out to be a mystery-friendly environment rife with the potential for homicide.
And I certainly can't find fault with the production itself, it being a veritable cavalcade of stagy sets, overdone fashions, and rife with what was apparently a '50s hair vogue: The poodle cut - those unflatteringly short perms resembling gold-hued bathing caps made of tense, lambswool curls.

But in the end, neither the dark promise of the film's title, nor the camp excesses suggested by its gaudy visuals are ever realized in sufficient force to make Black Widow more than a handsomely mounted, slightly overdressed crime thriller.

Cathleen Nesbitt as Lucia Colletti

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It isn't common for a film’s greatest strengths to be found in its weaknesses, but Black Widow is frequently at its most persuasive when serving up a brand of moviemaking so glossily old-fashioned, its patently theatrical artificiality begins to take on the characteristic of something resembling a style.

From the outset, Black Widow embarks on a narrative course endorsing a mode of dress (the crisp, stiff clothes look like costumes), setting (95% soundstage, 5% NYC locations), and performance (all indication, little believable emotion), all supporting the theory of a concentrated effort on the film’s part to bear as little resemblance to real life as possible.
There's an alien "otherness" to the look of the film created by the lighting and composition requirements of the CinemaScope process. A process that turns New York into a sterile and oddly spacious environment (a basement Greenwich Village coffeehouse looks to be roughly the size of an airplane hangar) which puts it at direct odds with the kind of shadowy claustrophobia one associates with film noir.

The sort of natural, laid-back blocking CinemaScope made necessary

I sound like I'm complaining, but honestly (and this may be mere perversion on my part) I found the discordant visual tone to actually work to Black Widow’s advantage. Based on its initial scenes and not knowing anything about the film before I saw it, I thought Black Widow was going to be a light romantic drama. One of those '50s “woman’s pictures” combining elements of All About Eve (Tallulah Bankhead was first approached for the Ginger Rogers role), The Moon is Blue (that film’s star, Maggie McNamara, was first choice for the Peggy Ann Garner role), or a continuation of Rogers’ own Forever Female (1953) - another age-centric rivalry set in the world of theater.

That these posh surroundings, pretty people, and harmlessly waggish conversations are setting the stage for a murder mystery took me totally by surprise. And so it remained throughout: Black Widow's key lit, musical comedy sheen works at such amusing variance with what one has come to expect from noirish suspense thrillers that it inadvertently serves as a device to keep the audience off balance.

Mabel Albertson (left), known to scores of classic TV fans as the smothering mother figure on Bewitched, That Girl, and The Andy Griffith Show, gets a chance to let her hair down (and, by the looks of it, her bosom) as Sylvia, the tough-broad proprietress of a Greenwich Village hangout

PERFORMANCES

Beyond the musicals she made with Fred Astaire, I’m not enough of a fan of top-billed Ginger Rogers to know if the divinely catty character she plays in Black Widow is as much a departure from type as it seems. She has always displayed a charming brassiness in films like Stage Door and Golddiggers of 1933, so perhaps this isn't that much of a stretch, but with Van Heflin’s one-note performance and the obvious fragility of Gene Tierney (the actress was in the early throes of a mental breakdown during filming), Ginger Rogers' flamboyant energy is a godsend. Plus, she gets all the best lines.

In a role that amounts to little more than a bit part, Broadway actress Hilda Simms
gives the most natural, convincing performance in the entire film

For former child star Peggy Ann Garner (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), Black Widow was a a bid for adult legitimacy on par with Patty Duke's Valley of the Dolls...and it proved to  be just about as successful. Given grief by critics at the time for not being a believable "type," I think she succeeds in the role chiefly for that reason. Garner's Nancy Ordway is a far more convincing babe-in-the-woods on the make than, say, Anne Baxter's brazenly transparent Eve Harrington in All About Eve.

Pretty much the entire arc of Van Heflin's character

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

To convey the grand style of the New York theater folk at the center of Black Widow, 20^th Century-Fox designer William Travilla whips up a drag queen's wet dream of ostentatious outfits for Ginger Rogers to parade around in. Happily, the longtime dancer is physically up to the task.

Carlotta - "To put the kindest face possible on it, the girl was a little horror. A transparent, syrupy little phony with about as much to offer a man as 'cuckoo the bird girl.' Not even Peter with all of his radiant innocence about women could have been stirred for one instant by that dingy little creep."

Peter - "Lottie, the girl is dead!"

Carlotta - "I know...and that’s precisely why I refuse to speak harshly of her!"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

For a movie written, produced, and directed by a single individual (Nunnally Johnson of How to Marry a Millionaire, The Grapes of Wrath, The World of Henry Orient, etc.) Black Widow distinguishes itself by being almost completely lacking in distinction. Polished, well-made, and not nearly as vulgar as one might hope given the subject matter, Black Widow looks and feels like Hollywood product, circa 1954, that could have been directed by any number of studio contract professionals.

The tall, lanky fellow holding his hat is future TV producer Aaron Spelling.
Gene Tierney's health problems while making Black Widow necessitated her being seated in virtually all of her scenes  

And perhaps that's why, for all its slick competence, Black Widow never coalesces into more than just a pleasantly diverting way to  spend 95 minutes. A crime-of-passion movie without passion is a cold affair indeed, and Black Widow, while lovely to look at and fun in a detached sort of way (imagine absent-mindedly playing a game of "Clue") is ultimately most rewarding as a time-capsule view of Hollywood in its final years before it was forced to change in the mid-1960s.

Never intended to break new ground, Black Widow - a 40s noir retrofitted with color and CinemaScope - is but an example of 1950s Hollywood trying to hold onto its audience by giving them brighter and shinier versions of what they've always given them. Sorta like today today's digital, HD, CGI, 3-D opuses.

The black widow, deadliest of all spiders, earned its dark title through its deplorable practice of devouring its mate. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

ANNIE 2014

Given that my accepted mindset on the topic of most contemporary films (remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings, in particular) is a resounding, “Bah, humbug!” I have to say, after seeing the new version of Annie starring Quvenzhané Wallis and Jamie Foxx, I feel a little like Albert Finney in the last reel of Scrooge (1970).

Certainly, what with all those negative reviews, poor boxoffice, and my own casual antipathy toward the source material itself  ‒ I love the musical score, but my very W.C. Fields-like aversion to hordes of singing children has always prevented Annie from being a huge favorite ‒ expectations couldn't have been lower. I would have been happy had this, the third screen incarnation of the 1977 Broadway musical, been made into a splashy, tolerably bad movie musical on par with Hairspray (2007) or Nine (2009); and if I’m really being honest with myself, I think I might have even secretly hoped for a so-bad-it’s-good hoot-fest, à la Lost Horizon (1973) or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978). But as it turns out, Annie: 2014 caught me completely off guard. It seems the one thing I wasn’t expecting was an utterly delightful, thoroughly enchanting musical whose thoughtful and canny updating reclaims the heart of a musical long lost to shrill children’s recitals and hollow theatrical revivals.

I’m light-years away from being the film’s preferred demographic, but as a dancer and longtime fan of movie musicals, I was wholly captivated by Annie’s old-fashioned charm and sentimentality. A sentimentality that touchingly reaffirms the musical’s simple message that everybody needs to feel loved, and family isn't only something you’re born into.

Quvenzhane Wallis as Annie Bennett

Jamie Foxx as William Stacks

Rose Byrne as Grace Farrell

Cameron Diaz as Colleen Hannigan

Bobby Cannavale as Guy

David Zayas as Lou

With two flawed Annie adaptations already committed to celluloid (the overstuffed 1982 film you can read about HERE, and the wan but more faithful-to-the-stage 1999 TV-movie), I was less than thrilled when, back in 2011, actor Will Smith announced plans to produce an Annie remake starring his daughter, Willow. Of course, now, three years later, we can all give thanks for the role growth spurts and sluggish pre-production played in averting that particular disaster, but still, who needed yet another screen incarnation of that irrepressible orphan unless in a significantly reinterpreted form?

Happily, Annie 2014 proves to be just that: a surprisingly funny, disarmingly sweet update of the Broadway musical which, through the clever repurposing of songs, characters, and situations draws amusingly apt parallels between contemporary times and the hard knock life of 1933. 

Quvenzhané Wallis’ Annie has the spirit, spunk, and boundless optimism of her comic strip namesake (not to mention the same headful of curly locks), and plot-wise, the film cleaves more to the 1982 John Huston film than the original Broadway production written by Thomas Meehan (with music composed by Charles Strouse and lyricist Martin Charnin). But in spite of the many changes, it’s still the story of a hopeful waif searching for her real parents, and how she comes to warm the capitalist heart of a lonely billionaire through pluck and a cheery outlook. Annie is no longer an orphan, but (more reasonably) a foster child in the resentful care of the embittered, frequently besotted Miss Hannigan (Diaz), a failed dance-pop singer who was unceremoniously dumped from the C + C Music Factory back in the 90s (“I was too good!”) and now has to live off the subsidy income of playing foster mom to five annoying “little girls.”

Daddy Warbucks is now William Stacks (Foxx), a New York mayoral candidate whose standoffish public image is in dire need of the kind of PR rebranding and instant photo-op warmth temporarily taking in a foster kid can provide. Stacks is looked after by Grace Farrell (Byrne), the super-efficient VP of his mobile phone empire, and Guy (Cannavale), his pitbull of a political adviser. Beyond the narrative tweaks necessary to usher what is essentially a 90-year-old character into the 21st Century, Annie follows along the same fairy-tale path as its Broadway-inspired predecessors, retaining just enough of the familiar to evoke nostalgia, yet delivering plenty of (welcome) surprises to make the entire enterprise feel like something entirely fresh and new.

Granted, Annie is not a perfect film and not without its problems. Cameron Diaz’s over-caffeinated approach to the character of Miss Hannigan takes some getting used to (maybe small children will find her funny), events occasionally feel rushed (I know I'm alone in this, but I could have stood a longer running time), and like many musicals that strive to be “of the moment” (Xanadu, anyone?), Annie is in grave danger of looking dated by the time I post this. But in all, I found Annie to be a an fun, enjoyably tuneful re-imagining of Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie (“Foster kid...” as the certain-her-parents-are-still-alive Annie has to keep reminding everyone) which, thanks in large part to the engaging performance of its adorable 10-year-old star, had me feeling (to quote Scrooge in Dickens' A Christmas Carol) "...as merry as a schoolboy."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In this day of Disney animation and Muppets, live-action movie musicals are hard to come by. Rarer still is the screen adaptation of a beloved Broadway musical that avoids succumbing to the curse of having too keen a sense of its own legacy. Camelot, My Fair Lady, and Hello, Dolly!, and Mame were all perfectly fun, lighthearted Broadway shows which arrived on the big screen ponderously weighed-down by big-for-big-sake elephantitis and an overdetermined sense of  their own “greatness.”

As a fan of cinematic bloat, I adore Annie’s visual sweep and glossy sumptuousness (it’s like a shiny, jewel-box vision of New York), and I like a large-scale musical number as much as the next guy (OK, probably more). But if I had to choose between the two, I much prefer an adaptation that pokes fun of itself with wry, self-aware humor, and which doesn't allow its heart to be smothered by all the production razzle-dazzle.

It's to the latter point where I think Annie succeeds most admirably. This is the first Annie I've ever seen scaled down to a size appropriate to the perspective of its heroine. And whether motivated by budgetary constraints or the dancing limitations of its cast, Annie sidesteps big production numbers at every turn (“It’s a Hard Knock Life” is almost modest) and in doing so, proves that less is consistently more. 

With intimacy intensified by the New York locations, the actors all doing their own singing, and the “dancing” consisting more of spontaneous movement inspired by the nature of the characters themselves; this Annie is the first one that I ever found to be really funny, and definitely the only Annie that has ever moved me to waterworks.

I thought by now I'd had my fill of the song, Tomorrow, until I heard Quvenzhane Wallis sing it. The staging of the number is very moving and her performance is outstanding. What a sweet voice she has!

PERFORMANCES

Impressive adaptation choices aside (I love the comically self-referential opening sequence that cleverly addresses the remake elephant in the room), Annie’s major asset is Academy Award-nominee Quvenzhané Wallis (and Golden Globe nominee for this) who is fast proving herself a child actress force to be reckoned with. There’s nothing comic book about the astonishing level of nuance she’s able to bring to a character usually summed up with a few glib adjectives built around the word, "spunky."

As realized by Wallis, Annie's belief that her parents will one day return for her is as movingly and realistically conveyed as her self-protective resilience is poignant. to bring this to a musical in which she also shines in the most engaging fashion in the comedy and musical sequences is something of a marvel. Having never Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild, the film that made her the youngest Best Actress nominee in history (she was nine), I can only say that I was fairly blown away by her display of talent here. Easily the best performance in the film, she’s an Annie for the ages.

Wallis' performance of the original song, "Opportunity" was a real goosebump moment for me. Wonderful to hear a child sing in a voice that actually sounds like that of a child, not a pint-sized Ethel Merman 

Cognizant perhaps of the indomitable juggernaut posed by the pairing of an absurdly charismatic child and a dog, Jamie Foxx wisely underplays as Stacks and comes off the all better for it (although one wonders what he thought when, rather prophetically, his big solo, "Something Was Missing" did just that in the release print). Rose Byrne is a standout and singularly appealing as Grace, the lonely-little-girl-as-grown-up spin given her character making for a nice subtextural trifecta (with Hannigan) about women/girls accepting themselves as individuals worthy of love by first learning to love themselves. Bobby Cannavale, so wonderful in last years's Blue Jasmine adds considerable comic verve to his role, David Zayas is solid as a local bodega owner harboring a love-has-20/20-eyesight crush on Hannigan, and Stephanie Kurtzuba as a wealth-struck social services worker is a scene-stealing highlight.

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Oz, Pompeii) as Nash, Stacks' driver/bodyguard

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I don't consider myself a big admirer of most of today's music (I think Miss Hannigan and I share similar musical tastes) but I was immediately taken with like the ingenious way the songs from Annie were reworked. I even like the new stuff (save for Moonquake Lake, which is a tad trying). I've read critics calling out the film for its Autotune sweetening of the vocals (a staple of every Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus song I've ever heard, and evident in 2010s Burlesque with little comment), but I'd rather have the "assisted" vocals of the real actors than the kind of rampant dubbing that occurred throughout the 60s.
And what is a musical without a favorite number? Annie has several standouts for me but my fave rave and the one number I can watch again and again is "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here." 

Grace & Annie make like Mick Jagger and David Bowie in the infectiously upbeat, 
"I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As much as I absolutely fell in love with this film (flaws, bad reviews, and all) and think Annie batted it out of the ballpark in a way I never would have anticipated given my general distaste for remakes; I've become an even bigger fan of the film after the daughters of a friend of mine told me what it felt like to see a little girl who looked like them starring in her own bigscreen musical adventure.
Hearing how excited they were about Quvenzhané Wallis’ singing and dancing, how much they liked her hair, her mode of dress, and how it made them cry at the end....
It just got me to thinking about what a difference a film like this would have made to my sisters when we were growing up. I have four sisters and we went to the movies nearly every weekend when we were kids, yet in all the dozens of movies we saw, they never got the chance to see themselves represented onscreen. Certainly not front and center.

In researching this post, I came across a press junket video interview for Annie in which actor Bobby Cannavale had this to say on the topic: “It’s for a new generation of kids who wouldn't necessarily see themselves in those old productions, be it the movies or the play. I recently saw the play and I still didn't see anybody of color up there. So I think it’s an important thing for kids to be able to go to the movies and see themselves.”

I've always felt that dreams are what movies are for. And as Xanadu proved in my life, a movie doesn't have to be a critic's darling to inspire a person and speak to their spirit. So my hat is off to Annie for giving a lot of kids who aren't always afforded the chance, an opportunity to dream.

Black pearl, precious little girl
Let me put you up where you belong.

Black pearl, pretty little girl
You’ve been in the background much too long.

Black Pearl-1969 (Spector, Wine, Levine)

BONUS MATERIAL

As in the 1982 film (not the show), Annie is taken to the movies. In this instance, an intentionally silly-looking Twilight parody titled MoonQuake Lake, whose fake trailer can be seen (complete with surprise cameos) HERE. Sadly, as with all good parodies, it actually looks very much like a film that would be greenlit by Hollywood today.

Clip of the "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here" number on YouTube.

I read that Annie director, Will Gluck, placed 30 tributes to past versions of Annie in this film. I haven't found a site which lists them all, but here's a start:
1. The spunky, red-haired "Annie A." who opens the film giving a class report on Herbert Hoover (the Depression era President who's the topic of a sarcastic song in the Broadway show). 2. "Annie B." follows with a oral report on FDR and his New Deal (President referenced in song in the Broadway show). 3. A mayoral candidate is given the name Harold Gray, the creator of Little Orphan Annie comic strip. 4. Will Stacks is bald. 5. A band called "The Leaping Lizards" plays in a nightclub (it's the famous catchphrase of the comic strip Annie). 6. Annie rescues Sandy from a  bunch of bullies. 7. The song "N.Y.C" from the Broadway show, is played in the background of a scene. 8. The names of the actors in the fake film, MoonQuake Lake (Andrea Alvin & Simon Goodspeed) reference Annie history (original Annie, Andrea McArdle, The Alvin Theater, now the Neil Simon Theater, and The Goodspeed Theater in Connecticut where Annie premiered in 1976). 8. The red jacket, white leggings, and Mary Jane-style shoes Annie wears in the finale is a contemporary update of the classic Little Orphan Annie outfit.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

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.
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.


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.

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