Movie · 1969 · Drama, Romance · 2h 11m · R · English
Curator score: 7.0/10 (20.6K ratings)
The relationship between four sensual people is limited: They must find a new way.
Overview
Growing up in the sheltered confines of a 1920s English coal-mining community, free-spirited sisters Gudrun and Ursula explore erotic love with a wealthy playboy and a philosophical educator, with cataclysmic results for all four.
Ratings
Curator score: 7.0/10
IMDb: 7.1/10
Letterboxd: 3.77/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 83%
TMDB: 6.6/10
Director
Ken Russell
Production
Brandywine Productions
Cast
Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, Jennie Linden, Eleanor Bron, Alan Webb, Vladek Sheybal, Catherine Willmer, Phoebe Nicholls, Sharon Gurney, Christopher Gable, Michael Gough, Norma Shebbeare, Niké Arrighi, James Laurenson, Michael Graham Cox, Richard Heffer, Michael Garratt
Curator Review
Verdict
A feverish, sexually charged adaptation that turns D.H. Lawrence into a vivid clash of desire, class, intellect, and bodily impulse. Ken Russell’s style can be outrageous, but the performances and visual invention make it a striking, singular drama-romance.
Best for
viewers who like bold, stylized British cinema
fans of psychosexual drama and literary adaptations
people interested in class conflict and gender politics
audiences open to provocative, theatrical performances
Skip if
you want a restrained period romance
you dislike heightened, confrontational filmmaking
you prefer straightforward narrative and emotional realism
you are put off by explicit sexual tension and symbolic excess
Overview
Ken Russell’s Women in Love is less a polite period drama than a volcanic argument about desire, class, and the limits of civilized behavior. Set against the industrial grit of postwar England, it treats romance as a battlefield where intellect, sexuality, and social performance collide with near-operatic force.
Worth noting
The film’s great strength is its refusal to be tasteful in any conventional sense. Russell’s imagery is lush, ironic, and often deliriously over the top, yet it keeps landing on something emotionally sharp: the way people use love to seek power, escape, or self-definition, and how often those needs remain incompatible.
Bottom line
Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, and Oliver Reed give the film its tensile core, making the relationships feel dangerous even when the movie is at its most stylized. It’s not a comfort watch, but it is a major one: a passionate, unruly work that still feels alive because it never stops testing the boundaries between art, lust, and social order.
Top Letterboxd reviews
phoebe 💫 (4.5★) · 629 likes
fellas is it gay to climax while wrestling naked with your best friend
Chris 🍉 (5★) · 483 likes
Truly so obvious yet so stunningly effective how every scene between a man and a woman (save, of course, Gudrun and the explicitly gay artist. Or the final scene in its abrupt ending) is so steeped in pretense and tradition and heteronormativity and gendered roles and established societal values that it feels impossible to reach any semblance of truth. Meanwhile the scenes of just the two sisters or the two men reach this emotional honesty with little to no effort, even as the aforementioned forces eventually drive the men apart.
russman (3.5★) · 358 likes
This movie taught me fig eating etiquette
glitchwitch.jpg (4★) · 281 likes
Oliver Reed is built like a damn refrigerator
Joe Talbot (4★) · 268 likes
“It’s strange that people can’t reconcile vulgarity and artistry,” Ken Russell told his biographer John Baxter. “They’re the same thing to me. By vulgarity I mean an exuberant, over-the-top, larger-than-life, slightly bad taste, red-blooded but ultimately human thing. And if that’s not anything to do with art, let’s have nothing to do with art.”