Priest of Love

I've seen many films of D. H. Lawrence's works including "Sons and Lovers," "Women in Love," "The Virgin and the Gypsy," "The Rainbow" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and enjoyed all of them. I was surprised and disappointed by this one.

Christopher Miles did a wonderful adaptation of "The Virgin and the Gypsy" 10 years before he made this film. He certainly is a scholar of Lawrence and a talented filmmaker, so why was this film so charmless and seem so shallow.

I will give a couple of reasons: First, I saw the 99 minute recut of the film. I imagine/hope that the apparently lost original 125 minutes was less choppy and jumpy.

Second, Ian McKellan was a terrible choice for the lead. He simply was too much of a stage actor at this point of his career and he plays most scenes for the the benefit of the baloney.

Third, the beginning shows Lawrence having a nude swim with a homosexual lover. The rest of the movie is about his love affair with his German wife. It is just confusing and undercuts the rest of the movie as we expect him to run off and leave his wife for a man at some point.

Fourth, the movie portrays Lawrence as a one dimensional lone victim of censorship, surely there were other writers being censored at the time and many powerful people supporting his rights to freedom of speech. Making the censor a buffoon (played dully by John Gielgud) doesn't help, but seems to trivialize the issue.

Fifth, Miles may have been to close to the material. He wants to give us a lot of factual information about Lawrence, but the history lesson feels like a history lesson, and there is little dramatic tension. Janet Suzman as Frieda Lawrence seems to carry the weight of whatever dramatic tension there is.

The movie does have nice cinematography. However all the movies adapted from Lawrence's work also have great cinematography and much better characters and stories.

"Priest of Love" is a filmed biography of the novelist D. H. Lawrence, and concentrates on the latter part of his life. It opens during the First World War, which was not the easiest period for Lawrence. He was unpopular with the British public because of his opposition to the war and his marriage to a German. It didn't help matters that his wife Frieda's maiden name had been von Richthofen, the same as that of the air ace who was one of Germany's greatest war heroes, although the two were only distantly related. The couple moved to a remote part of Cornwall but came under suspicion from local people who believed them to be German spies; ironically before the war Lawrence had been arrested in Germany on suspicion of being a British spy. To make matters worse, his latest novel "The Rainbow" was banned by the censors on the grounds of alleged obscenity.

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that after the war Lawrence and Frieda decided to leave Britain and to lead a peripatetic existence wandering around the world, a journey that would take them to France, Italy, Australia, Mexico and the USA. They did so partly because Lawrence needed a warmer climate for the sake of his health- he was suffering from the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him- but the way in which he had been treated in the UK must also have been a factor. The film follows them on their journey and also deals with the writing of Lawrence's last and most controversial novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover", compared to which "The Rainbow" is about as racy as a children's nursery rhyme.

Although the film features some major names of the British cinema and a bona fide Hollywood goddess in the shape of Ava Gardner, it seems to have aroused little attention. It was not a success on its release in 1981, and I had never heard of it before I recently caught it on television. I note that mine is only the third review of it on this site which suggests that few other people had heard of it either.

And the reason nobody seems to have heard of it is that, frankly, it is not very good. Probably the best acting comes from John Gielgud in a cameo as the pompous Herbert G. Muskett, the reactionary functionary charged with protecting the British people from exposure to literature and who seemed to take a particular delight in persecuting Lawrence. None of the other cast members, however, stand out. Although the title hints at Lawrence's passionate nature, you get little idea of this from Ian McKellen's surprisingly passionless performance. Janet Suzman's Frieda seems too unsympathetic, with the sort of cinematic German accent more normally associated with Nazis barking "ve haff vays und means". Both these performances came as a disappointment to me, because both McKellen and Suzman have been much better in other films.

The screenplay was based upon a non-fiction biography of Lawrence, not always the best source to use when making a fictionalised biopic. The resulting film is just a tedious drawn-out chronicle of two people, one of them seriously ill, journeying around the world, with various artistic and literary celebs from the 1920s occasionally popping up. ("Oh look! Is that Aldous Huxley over there? And could that be Katherine Mansfield? Quick, or else you'll miss her"). Screenwriter Alan Plater and director Christopher Miles might just as well have tried to film the entry on Lawrence from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Had they done so the result could hardly have been duller than what they actually came up with. 4/10

This concentrates on the last few years of D.H. Lawrence's life and, in particular, on his relationship with his wife Frieda. Lawrence's book "The Rainbow" was banned in 1915 for obscenity. That and the fact that Frieda was a German aristocrat exacerbated the scrutiny the Lawrences experienced in WWI Britain, ultimately having them being accused of spying for the Germans. After suffering the harassment in England the Lawrences left the country to began a self-imposed exile that took them to about a dozen countries. The movie collapses their peripatetic lifestyle to sojourns in the United States, Mexico, Italy, England, and France.

After leaving England the movie has the Lawrences landing in Taos, New Mexico where they were closely associated with the wealthy patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan and the artist Dorothy Brett. In exchange for the original text of "Sons and Lovers" Dodge gave them a 160 acre ranch outside of Taos--a ranch that is now known as the Lawrence Ranch. The British artist Dorothy Brett lived on the ranch with the Lawrences, in a separate dwelling. Here is where the weakness of the movie started to become apparent to me and that is the lack of motivation for behavior. What was the basis of the Lawrence's relationship with Brett that resulted in their being close enough to come to the United States together and live on the same ranch.

The motivations for the various moves from country to country are not well established and the transitions are confusingly abrupt. Maybe what prompted the moves were no more than whims, but without any notice the Lawrences were all of the sudden in some place in Mexico, or some place in Italy, or some other place in Italy, on in Capri, or France. The same goes for the people in their lives. How did they ever get to know Mabel Dodge, or any of the other famous people that drifted in and out of their lives? There was no identification of these people beyond sometimes being given their names. For example, while in England we see the Lawrences socializing with John Middleton Murry and his paramour Katherine Mansfield, the latter not even being identified. People would suddenly appear, taking me some time to figure out who they were, like Lawrence's sister Ada. There were scenes that had Aldous Huxley visiting the Lawrences in Italy with the primary interaction between Huxley and Lawrence being over Huxley's painting an external wall lamp. Surely some relevant dialog could have been inserted there.

Ian McKellen gives a good performance as Lawrence, but even at that we get only a hint of an understanding of this complex man--I think I came away with a better understanding of Frieda than of her husband. We get only a hint of Lawrence's homosexual tendencies from an early scene that has him frolicking naked on the beach with a young friend. Dorothy Brett is portrayed as being a grinning simpleton. For her to have been a close friend to the Lawrences, surely there was more to the woman than what we see here.

Of course time is devoted to the writing and publication of "Lady Chatterley's Lover." The music accompanying these scenes is so irritatingly over the top, I suppose to emphasize the significance, that it would be more suitable for Henry's victory at Agincourt.

Some time is spent on Lawrence's efforts at painting in his last years, with the paintings in his exhibition in London being seized and the show closed down. Some of these paintings can now be seen at the La Fonda hotel in Taos. If you ever have a chance to see them, you will be convinced that it was best for Lawrence to devote his talents to writing. To call them erotic paintings, at least at this late date, is more than an overstatement.

I suppose this movie broke some ground as being a major commercial movie that had full frontal male nudity and, as McKellen notes with pleasure in his interview on the extras, it is the first commercial movie to portray an erect penis, albeit as a shadow on a wall.

I saw this in its original release in 1981 and have looked forward to seeing it again on DVD. The "director's cut" now on DVD has been edited from the original 125 minutes to 99 minutes. My memory is not good enough to remember exactly what was cut (I do remember a scene involving Lawrence's ashes that is no longer there), but what remains on the DVD I think is more disjointed and confusing than what was in the original. The cutting is puzzling, getting at an understanding of this complicated man demands a longer movie rather than shorter.

Perhaps the most positive result of seeing this movie would be to encourage you to read Lawrence's writings.

Looks at the later part of DH Lawrence's life with his beloved wife Frieda and their frequent movement from one country to another against a background of controversy and book banning / burning back in his native country.

The lead performances are believable and interesting and the second half is more accessible and enlightening than the first as you get closer to the couple's lives and Lawrence's vigorous self belief. The first half though is played out too fast, moving very quickly across the globe with the man having hissy fits with little explanation. Nice support from Penelope Keith.

Probably needs watching more than once.

I must say, this poignant drama about one of the greatest authors/poets, filled with wonderful, top shelf actors rmade my movie night. POL is an engaging if engrossing drama, which recounts the banning of DH Lawrence's books, and paintings, which at the time, went against what was acceptable, where Lawrence's work was sort of pushing, pornographic boundaries, which today, would be seen in a much more normal light. It's opening sees the grand trashing of one of his awesome sellers, by authority. DH Lawrence was the guy responsible for the notorious and raunchy Lady Chatterly's lover, which Lawrence based on his older wife, who on impulse, just took off with him, leaving her three children and hubby. The story is a little bit patchy, but really, it's the awesome actors which take away from that, and the story is an interesting journey of a liternary geniius. There are some wonderfully shot locations, villa's where Lawrence spent time, while his cancerous health deteriorated, where on occassions he was coughing up phlegm and blood, one scene, quite alertiing. You can't go wrong when you have actors of McKellen's, Suzman's, Gardener's, Keith's stature. Their all A1, there's actually no real competition, as they're just all perfect here, as is the less shown Gielgud, a police seargeant, who banished and seized Lawrence's works, where one gets the impression, there's a more personal attack, grudge. I actually found it hard to believe Gielgud's character's earlier profession, as he seemed much different. Keith, who once was the ambassador for the Continental soup ads in the 80's, as was the great Robert Morley, is just a delight as a sort of, floozie tag along wirth DH Lawrence and wifie. Her character was probably my favorite, in some ways, sad, and pitiful. I really liked this close trio, living for today, not tomorrow. Lawrence had some pretty violent moodswings, his anger exploding out of nowhere, where mostly, it was physically transferred on older wifie, Suzman. Some scenes, which you can see in the prieview, use that special atmospheric which truly gives meaning to the scenes. Trivia note- another of Lawrence's trashed books, Kangaroo, which we see as another hit for the author here, became an Aussie film, with Colin Friels, but sadly cinema wise, made more of a thud. Great period piece film for 1981, I suggest, you see POL. It might just entice you.