Sex Story

I was a kid when the 1981 movie version of D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was released. Obviously I was too young to go see the movie, and had never (and still have never) read the book, but somewhere along the way I picked up on the fact that the title had become a byword for "steamy and banned for obscenity". When I picked up the documentary Electric Boogaloo about Cannon Films some time back, this was one of the "highbrow" movies that was discussed in the early part of the movie. Recently, I discovered that it's now on some of the FAST streaming services, so I've finally been able to see the movie version of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The story begins around 1914. Sir Clifford Chatterley (Shane Briant) lives at one of those great British country manors together with his wife Constance (Sylvia Kristel), where they host parties for similar nobility. That is, at least until war comes. Sir Clifford goes off to fight and, like a lot of young British men who went off (or were drafted) to fight the Germans, the war destroys him. Sir Clifford thankfully doesn't die, but he's left forced to use a wheelchair.

Worse for him is that the injuries also leave him unable to perform sexually. This is important because Sir Clifford didn't produce an heir to the title and all the lands that go with it before leaving to fight in the war. So he tells Lady Constance that if she wants, she's welcome to go out there and find a suitable man to produce an heir for the family, and he won't hold it against her. Besides, he knows that she has physical needs he can no longer fulfill. That's fairly frank stuff for any era, but in the late 1920s when the original book was written, you can see why it would be scandalous. (Of course, there would also be no IVF for 60 years after the war.)

Lady Constance is riding the grounds one day, when she comes across the hut where the gamekeeper lives. No big deal. He's washing himself, which in theory would be no big deal either. But he's doing it stark naked, and doing it outside! The gamekeeper, Oliver (Nicholas Clay), being a man who does physical labor, is reasonably fit, although not by the standards of the latter-day entertainment industry. For the 1920s, however, he looks like a man who got a reasonably fit body from doing hard farm-type work day in and day out, and that unsurprisingly turns Lady Chatterly on. So they start having an affair, in the hopes that he'll knock her up.

However, when Sir Clifford wanted Constance to produce a suitable heir, he meant that he wanted her to have a discreet affair with somebody of his class, the 1920s still being an obscenely (pun intended) class-conscious era in Britain. Doing it with the gamekeeper? Oh the horror! How can the adopted child of a commoner be suitable to take the Chatterly title?

Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus claimed that they wanted to bring highbrow cinema to the masses, having conquered the tiny Israeli market through the sort of trashy movie that always appealed to the sort of teens who especially drive the pop music market. And, watching this adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, I think they were sincere in their beliefs about going highbrow. Of course, Golan and Globus never quite figured out what made American audiences tick, so their movies are generally slightly (or more than slightly) "off" in ways that oftem make the movies a lot of fun even if not very good.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is definitely another one that fits the description. No matter what Golan and Globus said, nobody was truly going to watch this movie for reasons other than tittilation or, later, for curiosity as to what all the fuss was about. The acting is, unsurprisingly, terrible. On the other hand, some of the production values, notably the set and costume design, are quite good. But then there's the editing, which really jumped out at me, and that means it has to be spectacularly bad because I'm not the sort of person to notice something like editing in most pictures.

Lady Chatterley's Lover has a reputation for being steamy but not very good, and it's easy to see why it got that reputation.