Just perfect...

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

After the production code ended and before political correctness started there was an era of almost complete cinematic freedom. This film is of that time. Glenda Jackson and Jennie Linden play Gudrun and Ursula, a pair of sisters in 1920s England with unconventional views on love. One day while rubbernecking at a wedding, the see the brother of the bride (Oliver Reed) and his best friend (Alan Bates) and after another meeting or two begin torrid relationships. The two couples fornicate their way through life, spouting philosophical nonsense, until another man shows up on a ski trip in Switzerland. I think the scene that summed it all up for me was when Gudrun and Ursula wandered off at a garden party. Ursula is singing, and a herd of cattle show up, frightening her. Gudrun confronts that cattle -- with interpretive dance. The cattle, suitably baffled, wander off, realizing that the film already has enough BS and doesn't need theirs.. Oh, and the couple that got married at the beginning drown themselves at the garden party to get out of this turkey. Jackson won an Oscar in a weak year for actresses. I can't blame her; she does the best she can with the leaden material. I give this one a 5/10 for cinematography and for the historical value of being what passed for sexual shock value in 1969.

I am sort of ashamed to admit that I am not that familiar with Glenda Jackson's work. In fact, I've only seen two of her films, Women in Love and A Touch of Class – the two films for which she won Oscars – and while I (obviously) liked her work in the first, I did not like her much in the second. In Women in Love she is intelligent and sexually free without keeping us at arm's length but in A Touch of Class she is sexually free but grates on my nerves.Yet in Ken Russell's film, she has an endearing spark as the unfortunately named Gudrud Brangwen (pronounced Goo-Drud), a woman in 1920s British high society who spends her days with her sister Ursula (the wonderful Jennie Linden) discussing the promises and the qualities of love. Watching the wedding of a naval officer, their eyes lock on two good-looking chaps in the wedding party. Jennie spots the free-wheeling Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) while Gudrud focuses on the stiff but handsome Gerald Critch (Oliver Reed). Soon they are locked in passionate love affairs with their respective men but their personalities bring about different results.Gerald loves Gudrud's fiery passion but she admits that he really doesn't know how to love her. He is full of anger and frustration and doesn't really understand her. Gudrud is a woman with personality and intelligence whose sexuality is surprisingly frank, but she is also sexually liberated in the head. Not content to just be taken, she wants to be made love to mentally as well as physically. She's very smart, her mind is open where Gerald's is not. She penetrates right to his inner weakness and it is a trait he cannot deal with. He can't give her a proper kind of passionate love (there are minor indications that Gerald is privately in love with Rupert).Jackson is not classically beautiful. She has a bony face with an odd-shaped mouth and large teeth. I think that works in her favor because she looks like a real person rather than the cover of a magazine. She is that rare actress who is always in the moment – when she isn't speaking she's listening. She is also the best thing about Women in Love, a movie I'm not terribly passionate about. Director Russell experiments with weird visual styles, as in several sex scenes involving Ursula and Rupert; one of which he films sideways and the other he intercuts with the dead bodies of a couple who have drowned. For these reason, and for the film's often deadening pace, Women in Love is more or less forgotten. It isn't a bad film but were it not for the performances, especially by Glenda Jackson, it would have completely faded into obscurity.All through the 70s, a new kind of woman would emerge, born from the women's movement. There would be a great many actresses who would find a new kind of voice in film. If you look carefully at the women who won the Oscar as Best Actress (and a great deal who were nominated), you will find that nearly all of them – Glenda Jackson, Jane Fonda, Liza Minnelli, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, and Sally Field (Louise Fletcher doesn't really count), played women either struggling to find their own voice or who were expressing themselves intellectually and sexually. None did a better job then Jackson who managed to play a character who is intelligent, liberated but doesn't keep us at arms length. She was a new kind of character, one whose life goal isn't to land in the arms of a man because she has to, but simply because she wants to.

I do not usually like Ken Russell films but this one is excellent.There are many good scenes but the one I always recall is when Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed)is stood in the graveyard just after his father's funeral and digs his hand into the soil squeezing the earth into his fist and then making his way to see Gudrun (Glenda Jackson). This part of the film creates an eerily strange atmosphere helped by an excellent soundtrack. I was very impressed with all the actors but particularly by Oliver Reed who in the early part of the film is very Oliver Reed like, but later becomes a very vulnerable character. Well done Ken Russell you made a great picture to be proud of.

At first glance, Ken Russell's "Women in Love" may look like one of the many movies exploring the new permissiveness of the silver screen (and in fact it got released around the same time as "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"). But it is also important to pay attention to its focus on England's class system. In my opinion, probably the most effective scene is during the opening credits, as Gudrun (Glenda Jackson) and Ursula Brangwen (Jennie Lind) - both dressed in fancy aristocratic clothes - walk through an economically depressed neighborhood, barely if at all moved by the poverty surrounding them. Of course, it's hard not to remember Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) and Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) fighting each other. That scene probably goes to show the falsity of the rich English lifestyle: they act like these refined individuals, but the whole time they're ready to explode. Back when D.H. Lawrence wrote the novel, he probably never guessed that the movie would look like this.All in all, this is certainly one that I recommend. I often say that the period from about 1967 to 1973 saw some of the greatest movies released, and this backs that up. Also starring Eleanor Bron (the woman in "Help!") and Michael Gough (Alfred in the Batman movies from 1989 to 1997).I've never heard of people cutting open figs and eating only the inside. I've always just eaten the whole fig.