Women in Love Movie Review

Ken Russell's Women in Love is alternately heralded and dismissed by viewers. I stand somewhere in the middle: It's a definite mess, though the titular women out-act the men they're ostensibly in love with. Russell's at his pervy best here (and Glenda Jackson was the first actress to win an Oscar in a movie featuring a nude scene; in this case her own plus a notorious all-male, all-nude, fireside wrestling sequence), and his interpretation of D.H. Lawrence's book is on the liberal side. But ultimately the film is so confusing and meandering that its perversity is shuffled under the rug of its own pretensions. Still, it's memorable for both its era-specific shock value and for Jackson's alternately sweet and vicious performance.