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In 1969 Ken Russell released his celebrated film version of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love. As a matter of fact, Lawrence's novel was actually the sequel to his earlier book, The Rainbow; and hence it was not surprising that Russell eventually got around to filming The Rainbow (1989). Indeed, he had kept the idea of filming The Rainbow on the back burner for a long time, until he found a producer who was interested in the project. It would be appropriate, therefore, to consider Russell's two Lawrence films together, since the two movies are companion pieces, in the same way that the two Lawrence novels are.
Lawrence himself never had much respect for the cinema, and criticized the romantic and unrealistic way that the early films of his time often portrayed the love relationship, both in and out of marriage. Film historian Joseph Gomez notes that Lawrence intensely disliked films and claimed that the desire of frustrated housewives for the matinee idols of the silver screen illustrated what he called "sex in the head" (143).1
In Lawrence's view the only way that an individual could break out of his own sphere of isolation was to become totally involved with another human being in a love relationship which culminated in the sexual experience, but was not limited to it. His two novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, then, are basically about the pursuit of personal fulfillment in a love relationship, and about the sacrifices which one must make in achieving that fulfillment.
For the record, Lawrence's two novels originally were conceived as a single work, The Sisters; but the novelist eventually realized that he had too much material for one book and decided to expand the work into two interrelated novels. The Rainbow depicts the lives of three generations of the Brangwens, a farming family, with all of the social and personal conflicts they encounter along the way. In the later chapters of the book, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the two sisters of the original title, emerge as key characters; they go on to become the title characters of the sequel, Women in Love.
When Russell came to film The Rainbow, he noted in a letter to this writer that he had opted to concentrate...