The naked pleasures of Women in Love – why Ken Russell’s misunderstood film is a masterpiece

A newly restored version of the romantic drama that was issued with an X certificate in 1969 arrives at the BFI this week. Geoffrey Macnab looks back at a film that was as profound as it was provocative, by a maverick director who was never given his due...

‘Women in Love’ stars left to right: Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Jennie Linden and Eleanor Bron (United Artists/Kobal/Shutterstock)

It’s hard to tell what’s most subversive about Women in Love, Ken Russell’s landmark 1969 DH Lawrence adaptation. Was it the homoerotic naked wrestling? Or those many quieter moments when the characters talk so earnestly about love, sex and the meaning of life?

“You seem to be reaching for the void but then you realise you’re a void yourself,” the ruthless industrialist Gerald (Oliver Reed) muses, in an effort to explain his innermost angst to his lover Gudrun (Glenda Jackson). That’s not the kind of remark you’ll ever hear in any mainstream release this summer.

Women in Love, screening in a restored version at the BFI Southbank this week, remains famous for its full frontal male nudity: Reed and Alan Bates grappling in front of a blazing fire and then vowing undying friendship. Reed admitted in his autobiography that he and Bates had drunk a bottle of vodka each before filming the scene. Even with the alcohol fortifying him, the hell-raising actor still felt acutely self-conscious. The film’s cinematographer Billy Williams later told the BBC that after the two men stripped off, Reed “looked at Alan Bates and said, ‘He has got a bigger dong than me’”, before he “went into the corner to try to improve matters”.