Quartet of Soloists

With a zealot's burning eyes and a full beard, he encouraged comparison with artistic notions of Jesus; yet he found Christianity a perversion of man's finest instincts. "My great religion," declared D.H. Lawrence, "is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect." But his books are models of calculation, the grown-up products of the scholarship boy who was a great exam taker. Although Lawrence celebrated the phallus and sang of the masculine principle, his every work is marked by an almost feminine hysteria that nags as it argues.

Why should anyone pay attention to this neurotic, preaching, overreaching relic of the '20s? Because, along with his thousand faults, Lawrence had a single saving virtue: genius. It was a quicksilver quality that the writer himself could never quite consolidate, and the adapters of Women in Love can hardly be blamed for the instability of their film. It is miraculous that they brought it off at all.

Animated Sisters. In the shadow of the Great War, four Midlanders hurtle toward a collective destiny. School Inspector Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) not only takes the author's part but is costumed and bearded to resemble him. His friend, Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed), is a mineowner who represents the century's death wish: mechanization. Their lovers are the animated Brangwen sisters, Ursula (Jennie Linden) and Gudrun (Glenda Jackson).

Of the four, the dark, hulking Reed is the most remote from the author's conception of a Nordic superman. The closest to the true Lawrentian is Glenda Jackson, who made her reputation as Charlotte Corday in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Marat-Sade. Playing the repressed, inflammable Gudrun, she is a total re-creation of the impassioned, nearly liberated woman whose yards of shapeless clothes could not conceal her unrelieved sexual longing, and whose prudish conversation was almost always alive with allusions.

Neither the book nor the film has a conventional plot. The players move from segment to segment, progressing in Ursula and Birkin's case to partial salvation, in Gudrun and Gerald's to personal destruction.

Clashing Souls. Throughout Larry Kramer's literate scenario the Lawrentian themes blaze and gutter. The sooty mind-crushing coal mines that young Lawrence knew like the back of his land are re-created in all their malignance. The annealing quality of sex is exhibited in the most erotic--and tasteful--lust scenes anywhere in contemporary film. The century's agonies are brilliantly prefigured in a series of poor and privileged characters who speak out against forces they can discern but not define.

Yet it is that very speech that damages so much of the movie. In the book it had a semblance of argument, of clashing souls seeking converts. In the film, the quartet is composed of soloists who listen only to themselves. Not without reason. Statements like "Try to love me a little more and want me a little less," or "It is better to die than to live mechanically" creak like unrepaired antiques. The book's celebrated nude wrestling scene was supposed to dramatize Lawrence's wish for a return to the presexual child-state. In the film's formal, choreographic version, Birkin makes a postfight declaration to Gerald: "We are mentally and spiritually close. Therefore we should be physically close too--it's more complete." The line may be pure Lawrence, but it now "seem little more than another cinematic plea for homosexuality.

The beauty and energy of the novel flow between the lines, around the characters. Ken Russel's direction provides wit and a pictorial opulence that belie the film's lean budget. But Women in Love oscillates too frequently from the shrill to the booming, from woman to man, from instinct to rationale, without once adapting a coherent point of view. In time, the narcissistic opus becomes like its author, who ultimately lived down to Katherine Anne Porter's summation. He gives, she said, "the nightmarish impression of the bisexual snail squeezed into its narrow house making love to itself."

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