Mabel Munoz Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Martin Bradley Ken Russell's overly precious screen version of the D H Lawrence novel "Women in Love" is all tactile sensuality and much naked abandonment, not to mention a hell of a lot of high flautin' dialogue courtesy of producer Larry Kramer. It was a huge hit when it came out, (the nudity may have helped sell it), and won the then unknown Glenda Jackson an Oscar as Best Actress. The problem I have with her, and indeed everyone else for that matter, is they aren't playing flesh and blood people but just aspects of Lawrence. There are several great set-pieces that might convince you that you are watching a real film and it's superbly photographed by Billy Williams but ultimately it's a very patchy piece of work that just doesn't live up to its reputation.

disinterested_spectator This is one of those movies that under normal circumstances I would have quit watching after about twenty minutes. But since it was based on a novel by D.H. Lawrence, I persuaded myself that it must be important somehow, and since I had not read the book, I thought maybe I could get myself a little culture on the cheap.Eleanor Bron as Hermione does her usually marvelous job of playing a woman you could not stand to be around even if she were rich, which she is. This is important, because the other characters in the movie are the sort you would not want to be around either, but compared to Hermione, they seem fairly tolerable.But not very. In addition to being an all-round unpleasant fellow, Gerald enjoys being cruel to his horse, whipping him furiously and digging his spurs deep into the animal's flesh, simply because the terrified creature refuses the cross the railroad tracks while a freight train speeds by. Gerald has a bisexual friend named Rupert with whom he wrestles, all naked and sweaty, but Gerald is not quite ready to put Rupert in that special hold Rupert longs for. Rupert does not do mean things like torment horses, but he does have some irritating personality traits, such as acting as if anything he does is justified because it is spontaneous.Central to the movie are two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. They witness Gerald's mistreatment of his horse and seem horrified at the time, but they continue to socialize with him as if nothing is wrong, and so it is hard to like these women after that, especially Gudrun, who ends up having sex with him. Ursula takes up with Rupert, and she has the naïve idea that marriage should simply be based on the love between a man and a woman, and she never does quite understand why Rupert thinks it should involve other people as well, especially men.The four of them take a vacation to Switzerland, where Gudrun meets a German artist. The artist tells of how he brutally beat a woman to make her pose properly for the picture he was painting. Women are like horses in this movie: you have to beat them until they submit to your will, which is what turns Gudrun on, because she soon decides to go live with him. This makes Gerald homicidal, and then suicidal, wandering off into the snow so he will freeze to death. Rupert's thoughts upon looking at his dead friend was how Rupert had offered himself but never had a chance to have that special experience with him. Ursula still does not quite know what to make of Rupert's strange ideas.

boyan-denizov I must say that I both like and dislike this film. First the good things about it: the cinematography is excellent and obviously, the cameramen have done their work very well. Most people tend to consider the nude wrestling scene as the most important one but my own preference is for the scene when Gudrun dances in front of the cattle and her talk with Gerald afterwards for its mysticism and symbolic significance. I think this scene is perhaps the key for understanding the whole film. The plot develops quickly and there is always something happening, so I was not bored as with other films. The actors are very good especially Glenda Jackson in her very demanding role. Unfortunately, there are too many drawbacks as well. First of all: almost everything in the film is horribly exaggerated. The emotions, the conflicts, the dialogues, the love of the two couples etc etc. Everything is brought to some extremity which makes everything improbable and overdone. I simply fail to identify with such people and with their behavior—it borders on madness. I know very well that one of the main topics of Lawrence is the need for spontaneity but he has brought it to extremes. Especially Birkin ( he is a self-portrait of Lawrence) is pathetic with his endless and empty philosophizing. He was supposed to be a tragic figure perhaps but I am not persuaded in this. There is nothing tragic in this film because even when there are tragedies, the characters do not respond to them in the way that most people would. The irony is that D H Lawrence, who was so much against the mechanical civilization, himself treats his characters as if they were inanimate objects. Maybe this was considered bold and innovative in 1920 ( when the book was published and Freudism started to be fashionable) but this attitude of his inevitably led him to artistic failure. The desire to shock, to create scandal for its own sake kills the artistic sophistication of a work of art. This is the illness of our culture nowadays: artists do not try to explain and understand, they try to shock. And Lawrence was one of the artists who established this ( deeply wrong in my opinion) attitude to art. And how can you shock the public? The easiest way is to portray as much sadism, nudity and sex as possible. And Lawrence and Russell have done exactly this. There is an intoxication with violence in Lawrence that goes into sadism. And an author should never be sadistic. I think Lawrence fails to understand the true nature and meaning of love, which for a writer who had chosen the title of his book to be "Women in love" is a serious artistic failure. There is sex, there is battle for dominance, there is artistic attraction ( Loercke) but love there is not. Ursula believes in love and longs for it ( even desperately begging for it) but Rupert is unable to give love to her precisely because he himself is incapable of feeling it ( except perhaps to Gerald). But then why ( I ask myself) are these two, Ursula and Rupert, a couple? What is it that attracts them to each other? They are so different people after all. But Lawrence fails to answer this and to go deeper into their relationship. And this makes their "love" unconvincing and artificial. Gudrun and Gerald are the more realistic couple. But with them things are clear: this is not love but a life-and-death struggle for dominance, a titanic clash of two strong egos. I also think that their story is the best and the most valuable part of the book. What I miss in this book and this film is the depth. Lawrence is not a deep author, he is rather superficial. He tries to be deep but he cannot achieve this. Serious problems are just touched without going deeper into them. There is not a coherent set of values and ideas forming a single whole in Lawrence. This chaos is reflected in the book. Good insights and then some stupid and improbable event! Wise words together with flamboyant nonsense! Serious things mixed with trivial and petty details.! All this creates a terrible confusion! He sends contradictory messages to readers and leaves them confused and uncertain which is a serious weakness for an author, trying to be philosophical and psychological. I have the feeling that D H Lawrence was himself confused and tortured by his inner demons. Maybe that is why he had become a writer. But just describing your fears and doubts is not enough! You should try to overcome them, to give answers. His ideas ( expressed via Birkin) cannot be taken seriously. I think that D H Lawrence is an outdated author. His passions and subjects which might have been attractive and original in the 1920s and 30s have lost all their significance now. It is the same with the film ( shown 1969 at the height of the sexual revolution) . Yes, Lawrence was bold to speak about the taboos of his age and we should give him the credit for this. But great art is much more than that! Lawrence's greatest fault was that he subordinated art to depicting such phenomena but failing to go deeper into their contents and meaning. The result was that his works aged very quickly once the scandals passed. What was scandalous then is mainstream now. Sadly, because of their exaggerations and because Lawrence failed to contextualize these problems and dramas, they cannot be accepted as a correct and deep portrait of their age either. So, their historic significance is not very big either. Maybe someone would accuse me of being too harsh to Lawrence. But I do believe that great art does not age! Take Shakespeare! He lived in a much more distant age but his works generally do not age!

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU The title is revealing but probably misguiding. One woman who is drowning will drown her own husband who is trying to rescue her: possessiveness in death. She took him to paradise. The second wants total submission in the two partners and she castrates her husband of his desire to have a friend, a male friend. The third one wants to absolutely possess her partner but she also wants to be able to flutter around. Her man will end up killing himself in the mountain since he could not get over her the complete possession she had over him. In other words it is a bleak world and even a sad world. There is no hope for love, real love. Love is nothing but a trap in which the human rats we are accept to survive in order to have a social dimension and a domestic comfort we would not have otherwise. With age this film that used to be a cult film when it came out has become a rather trite story. I remember watching it in 1973 or so in Davis, California. It was on campus a film appreciated by women in the name of a certain vision of women's liberation, and by gays for the vision of male friendship between two men. I am quite disappointed today with the feeling I have just watched a piece of ancient anthropological discovery.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID