Word: gudrun
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Essentially, Women in love, the novel, is a partially dramatized dialectic on the meaning of sex, love, and marriage, Lawrence's characters-Gerald, a machine-driven industrialist (played by Oliver Reed in the movie); Gudrun (Glenda Jackson), a willful, aspiring artist; Ursula (Jennie Linden), her simpler, more sensual, sister; and, of course, Birken-tramp about their country homes in the English countryside circa 1910 while strenuously debating the finer points of their relationships. Eventually they pair off and work out their respective destinies. For the movie version, Kramer has saved great chunks of their conversation in an almost suicidal attempt...
...dominance with other men. The novel's sexual encounters are the arena on which this complex of issues is unraveled. Russell, though, only shows us the physical side of sex, not its psychological or spiritual dimensions. He does so with an intensity that is often quite unsettling, Every time Gudrun begins to bare a breast, the soundtrack pours it on as it to invite us to spend a Night on Bald Mountain. And once the sex begins the camera tumbles about so that one can only assume the cameraman himself is joining the two lovers-in-some kind of kinky...
...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...
...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...