Ken Russell's film version of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love is a love's labor's lost: much attention is paid to the letter and spirit of the original, yet the film accentuates the novel's weaknesses and doesn't suggest many of its (admittedly linear) riches and strengths. This film is a serious attempt at "art," for no exchange of dialogue is free from the burden of love, death, sex, or interpersonal relationships….

Women in Love, as a film, achieves a gritty documentary-like authenticity when it explores the social milieu of the lower classes. The envious glances of bedraggled coalgathers at the clothing of the Brangwen sisters; the grimy-faced occupants of the street car, who form a silent defeated backdrop to the dialogue capture in sheerly plastic terms Lawrence's quality of felt life. (p. 1)

The wealth of Lawrencian natural symbols, which serves more than anything else to vivify theme in the novel, is treated ambiguously by Russell and Larry Kramer, his producer and scenarist. The sexual content of the conversations about figs and catkins are blatantly illustrated in biology textbook fashion, while the use of chalice-like cups to stress the sacramental quality of nature in Birkin's concepts is handled almost unobtrusively.

The animal imagery employed indicates better the seemingly random selection of symbols from the novel. Gerald comes thundering up to a railroad crossing on horseback and lashes his beast repeatedly as it rears up against a bypassing train. The Brangwen sisters are witnesses to Gerald's brutality, yet, while Ursula cringes in revulsion, Gudrun's appetite for Gerald is literally whet. The sequence works well on the purely naturalistic and pictorial levels; furthermore, it is a forceful visualization of Gerald's attempting to subjugate nature, both in himself and in the horse, to the machine. In Lawrencian sexual terms, Gerald is both flaunting his phallus before Gudrun and also revealing his emasculation. (pp. 3-4)

Every symbol obviously cannot be translated in a cinematic treatment of a novel, but Russell and Kramer's choice of visual illustration makes obvious the more ludicrous purple passages of Lawrence's novel. The lush, even overripe, pastel tones used for Gudrun's encounter with the primeval cattle the Rite of Spring echoes in Georges Delerue's score, serve only to emphasize the absurdity of the scene. (p. 4)

Crosscutting from Rupert and Ursula in post-coital exhaustion to Gerald's drowned sister and her husband in a twisted death embrace, Russell reinforces a life/death struggle motif which he had utilized earlier in the film in a love soliloquy of Gudrun's while she is lying on a tombstone. While such is the antithetical tension of the novel, the filmic visualizations are rather flat and unimaginative. (p. 5)

The climactic episodes of the film and novel occur in the Alps, and once again the sheer technical accomplishment of the cinematography becomes a visual cliché. England, metaphor for fecundity and life, the natural environment of the lovers Rupert and Ursula, is facilely opposed to the Alps, a landscape of white death. It is in this environment that Gudrun fittingly destroys Gerald and accentuates the sexually ambivalent aspects of her personality by her involvement with the homosexual artist. (pp. 5-6)

The Lawrencian novel of psychic development is perhaps best understood in mystical terms: neither words nor images can do more than suggest the nature of the tangled relationships, particularly between Gerald and Rupert. As a desire for wholeness and completeness beyond, or in addition to, heterosexual love, the theory of Lawrence/Rupert can be seen by Ursula as a perversity, something unattainable. Open ended film and open ended novel leave the quest unfulfilled.

Russell's film must, however, be reckoned only a partial and sporadic success at best; his attempt is uneven in conception, casting, and recognition of the uniquely linear qualities of Lawrence's work. (p. 6)