Women in Love Ken Russell (1970, UK) Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, Jennie Linden, Oliver Reed
viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 19 Feb 2026; ticket: £7
“Make me a sandwich…”
There’s a defining moment early in Russell’s film: sisters Gudrun and Ursula are talking by the lake close to the boathouse. Suddenly a vibrant piercing cry shatters the peace; turning round the sisters see the naked Gerald charge out the boat house run full tilt down the ramp dive into the water and swim powerfully away from them. A moment defining the expression of male energy to the female; a moment that Russell’s film following on Lawrence’s writing will develop into an intuitive probing of the interdependence of the male and the female: in love in mistrust in rejection.
I came away from Ken Russel’s realisation of D H Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’ feeling that it was an expression of pure energy, like the women in the film it danced energy: male female animal physical psychic energy charging itself on the forces of life. Ken Russell and his players effectively transpose Lawrence’s novel onto the screen understanding that to live is about the dynamics of relations with the natural world, with the opposing forces of sex and death.
Russel’s movie cuts to the quick of Lawrence’s writing and the quick for Lawrence revolves about the male and the female, their relations respective natures emotionalities and physicalities.
Perhaps it’s a cavil but Lawrences book in some senses might be better titled: Men in Love. The book and the film seem the more complete in interogating the male; but certainly the female is substantially represented. And the crux of Lawrence’s concern is through his characters to penetrate into the essence of the male and female at all levels: as cosmic archetypes of the natural world as social beings as individuals, and through their relations to explore their creative and the destructive possibilites. Lawrence’s writing condensed into Kramer and Russell’s script and scenario is a physio/mystical vision of how women and men understand both themselves and each other.
One of the defining elements in Russell’s movie is the actuality of the ‘male presence’. Bates and Reid bring to their respective roles the heft of masculinity. They’re not the pretty boys who pervade many contemporary romantic movies about relationships. In body and language Gerald and Rupert are unmistakably ‘man’. Hollywood movies such as Westerns or similar action genres are of course full of ‘men’ big men – big in presence in body in attitude. But most of these Hollywood movies in their male characterisations are little more than homilies to those Anglo-Saxon projections of virility and patriarchy that derive from the muscular Christianity ethos of 18th and 19th century Britain. Like this latter ethos, Hollywood ‘Men’ pivot about a ritualised rejection of the female. They evince a distrust of sex both as polluting and weakening; to be a real man it is necessary to reject the female and all she represents. Women are to be pushed away irrelevant to the self enclosed realm of ‘maledom’. John Wayne – Clink Eastwood – Randolph Scott – women exist to be written out of the scripts. In ‘Women in Love’ Bates and Reid celebrate the centrality of the male to the female.
These stylised Hollywood filmic representations of ‘maledom’ have today come off the screen and embedded themselves with increased toxicity on social media – persuant on what is called ‘the male identity crisis’ ( Lawrence would of course find it inconceivable that a male identity crisis could exist without it being mirrored by a female identity crisis). Influencers such as Tait have developed and sold a prepacked projection of ‘male identity’ that reduces women to the status of sex and domestic slaves: “Make me a Sandwich…”. Tait and his ilk embrace a pseudo philosophy that excludes or would exclude women from whole areas of life. Women are defined as inferior beings whose purpose is to serve the needs of the male. Tait’s customers comprise young men who feel that they are failures with women. Tait teaches that they need to understand that men are completely independent from women but to succeed with women they have to give them what they really want: subjugation.
Tait has made a lot of money peddling this quasi-ideology to young mostly unformed males. My feeling is that following Tait’s advice on the nature of manhood has probably led most of his customers up the dead end of a blind nihilistic alley, where resort to violence becomes the only solution to identity frustration. And in the USA where ‘Gun Law’ rules and every punk has access to a firearm, the recourse to the bullet becomes for some the go-to neurotic insecure assertion of masculinity. That the male exists to kill becomes the absurdist logical outcome of Tait’s sort of teaching. Bring on Hegseth.
‘Women in Love’ stands as the antithesis of these poisonous ideas.
‘Women in Love’ both novel and Russell’s film express the fundamental difference and the equality of the male and the female. In the novel ( and other writing) Lawrence developes his belief that the opposing dualities of male and female are inextricably entwined. When relations between the sexes become distorted to the degree seen in Western civilisations in relation to the primacy of the male, the result is disaster: the creation of cultures predicated on violence doomed to self destruction – much as we’ve witnessed for the last few centuries and experience today in the intensity of unending war. This socio-cultural male imbalance has a feedback loop. Oursociety society becomes more male twisted as women in their turn seek to imitate the male. The overall consequence of unconstrained unbalanced maledom has led to the increasing lethality of our weaponry outstripping our psycho-emotional ability to control our emotions and to prevent our own annihilation.
‘Women in Love’ is no girl meets boy romance. ‘Women in Love’ presents the complexities of the duad of relations represented by Ursula/Rupert, Gudrun /Gerald. It’s a vision that has mystical resonance of an ideal type. The coming togather of Ursula and Rupert is to establish a fusion of relations that moves beyond the body the mind beyond love into an interlocking of the male and female separate yet fused, and so endowed with a particular balanced being in the world. It is easy to mock Lawrence’s vision, but faced with the disaster of Western History, he is reaching out for some marriage of forces that at least suggest the possibility of another kind of development for us outside of male domination. Perhaps Russell’s film makes of Ursula, Rupert’s Wife in their marriage beyond marriage a weaker more infatuated being than she is in the novel, but nevertheless the relationship as recrafted by Kramer’s script takes the characters far beyond the usual on screen love banalities as depicted in recent movies such as Sean Baker’s ‘Anora’.
The Gerald/Gudrun explores another sort of outcome in the male/female duad as the course of the relationship runs to breakdown not fusion. The relationship is defined from its outset by inequality. Gerald’s life hangs over a meaningless void: he has status wealth and good looks but none of this can counter balance the emptiness he feels. An emptiness he believes can only be filled with completion of his being by the female. Gudrun although willing to accept Gerald does so on her own terms. She refuses to be pressurised by Gerald into a long term relationship which is driven by his need not hers. The imposition of the man upon the woman. The balance is wrong. In the setting of the Swiss Alpes Gudron decides its time to leave Gerald to take up with another man. Geralds response to being jilted isn’t a refusal to let Gudrun go or violence. He follows with s Lawrencian logic. Gerald takes the path of the lost and damned male, walking out into the snow and exposing himself to death.
Lawrence’s ideas on sexual identity and relationships as expressed by Russell’s movie are given full rein. Audiences unused to the levels of intensity in the relationships are catapulted through the scenario by Russell’s unremitting energised forces and images. The animal sequences the running the dancing the ground thewater and the air are all packed in around the ideas to give them urgency cogency and actuallity.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
