This is a partly beautiful film with partly great lighting, fully fine interior design and scene making , perfectionist costuming, good rain, good miners shots in appropriately charred visages, a very appealing Lady Chatterly, a fairly convincing gamesman, fine secondary cast, a social fabric badly stitched in from time to time, with enough bad stuff to spray around on everybody from the too intense DH Lawrence to the muddled and too ambitious to cover the whole bloody waterfront script, to continuity missteps, to the socially unconscious Hallmark ending. To quote JD Salinger's Holden, sometimes Lawrence (and his adaptors) are as sensitive as a toilet seat.
Lawrence is a writer who fits an historic niche. Not a particularly good writer but fervent and fervid and heart in the right place at some point. Good for social history classes. Adapting this passionate mess (one of three versions, mind you) is not an easy task. Perhaps a thankless one. But this Frenchman gave it a good if uncritical enough a shot.
The film is endless. It is mushy, even literally so, with the ground giving out from under the poor Lord's industrial machine which then requires "manpower" and even woman power in this version, to get the poor cuckolded fellow back to the house. Rains and flowers and that awful gamboling together in the rain... kind of makes me think of commercials for antihistamines...
The performances are generally good. Hard to not like Lady Chatterly as a kind of beauty- symbol, but not much of a person. After all, in the end it is about lust, not mind. She is easy to lust after. The noble savage does a good job. Good jaw line, good build. Lord Chatterly is a bit of a mess of a character though I would not fault the actor but the director/script. As said before, the subsidiary parts are all very well played.
Beautifully composed interior shots in the first third or so of the film the interiors in particular. Very effective lighting. Then things sort of flatten out with all that Hallmark stuff and endless marches through the wood and field.
Why this has gotten raves from so many writers eludes me. Chaque un a son gout.
Lawrence is a writer who fits an historic niche. Not a particularly good writer but fervent and fervid and heart in the right place at some point. Good for social history classes. Adapting this passionate mess (one of three versions, mind you) is not an easy task. Perhaps a thankless one. But this Frenchman gave it a good if uncritical enough a shot.
The film is endless. It is mushy, even literally so, with the ground giving out from under the poor Lord's industrial machine which then requires "manpower" and even woman power in this version, to get the poor cuckolded fellow back to the house. Rains and flowers and that awful gamboling together in the rain... kind of makes me think of commercials for antihistamines...
The performances are generally good. Hard to not like Lady Chatterly as a kind of beauty- symbol, but not much of a person. After all, in the end it is about lust, not mind. She is easy to lust after. The noble savage does a good job. Good jaw line, good build. Lord Chatterly is a bit of a mess of a character though I would not fault the actor but the director/script. As said before, the subsidiary parts are all very well played.
Beautifully composed interior shots in the first third or so of the film the interiors in particular. Very effective lighting. Then things sort of flatten out with all that Hallmark stuff and endless marches through the wood and field.
Why this has gotten raves from so many writers eludes me. Chaque un a son gout.