Women in Love (1970) Queer Film B-

Women in Love
DIRECTOR: Ken Russel
Larry Kramer—future gay‑rights firebrand and founder of both GMHC and ACT UP—adapted D. H. Lawrence’s 1920 novel into an enormous critical and commercial success, earning four Oscar nominations:

  • Best Actress: Glenda Jackson (won)
  • Best Director: Ken Russell (nominated)
  • Best Adapted Screenplay: Larry Kramer (nominated)
  • Best Cinematography: Billy Williams (nominated)

The end result, is one of director Ken Russell’s better films.
Set in 1920 in the Midlands mining town of Beldover, the film opens with sisters Ursula (Jennie Linden) and Gudrun (Glenda Jackson) discussing marriage on their way to the wedding of Laura Crich, daughter of the local mine-owner. At the church, each sister becomes transfixed by a different member of the wedding party: Gudrun by Laura’s brother Gerald (Oliver Reed), and Ursula by Gerald’s closest friend, Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates). Ursula, a schoolteacher, remembers Rupert’s earlier visit to her classroom, where he derailed her botany lesson to expound on the sexual nature of the catkin. A mutual friend later brings the four together, and as Ursula and Rupert begin a tentative romance, Gudrun and Gerald embark on a far more volatile one.
What makes the film unmistakably queer is the famous nude wrestling scene between Reed (Gerald) and Bates (Rupert), shot by firelight and choreographed like a pagan ritual. Rupert revels in their physical closeness and proposes that they swear to love each other. Gerald, bound by his own rigid masculinity, cannot fathom Rupert’s desire for an emotional union with a man alongside a physical and emotional union with a woman. The scene is both erotic and philosophical—a moment when Lawrence’s ideas about male intimacy, sublimated desire, and the limits of heterosexual partnership burst into full view.
The film’s other queer axis is Gudrun’s intense, ultimately destructive fascination with the gay German sculptor Loerke, played with icy precision by gay Polish character actor (and future Bond villain) Vladek Sheybal. Loerke’s uncompromising ideas about art and freedom captivate her, driving a wedge between her and Gerald that leads, inevitably, to tragedy.
Oliver Reed would spend the next thirty years recounting the wrestling scene—his cinematic apotheosis—on every drunken talk‑show appearance on both sides of the Atlantic.
With Eleanor Bron.
The film was also the first release from director Walter Hill’s Brandywine Productions, an odd but intriguing footnote in its long afterlife.

NOT AVAILABLE FOR STREAMING. THE DVD IS CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON.

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