The Torso Has a Life of its Own.

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D. H. Lawrence's tale of class distinctions and nature versus culture turned into soft porn, but pretty good soft porn as these things go.

Sylvia Krystel is Constance Chatterly whose wealthy, titled husband, Shane Briant, returns to their vast estate from World War I only half a man, confined to a wheelchair, but cheerful enough about it. Krystel spends her time taking care of him until Briant brings in a tough-minded elderly nurse. This leaves Krystel out in the cold and terribly bored.

Briant is insensitive to her needs but he does want an heir, a future baronet, and the couple more or less agree that she can take a lover who will impregnate her. So she does. But she picks the wrong guy.

It takes no more than a glimpse of Mellors, Nicholas Clay, the caretaker, washing himself in the nude to put her in a lather and soon they're rolling around in the hay. Briant figures out that something is either up or in the offing and becomes petulant. Mellors is declasse. I mean, the man is some kind of GARDENER or something, always needing a shave, dirt under his fingernails. Not the proper father of a future baronet. He humiliates Mellors by ordering him around and making him undertake unpleasant tasks.

Anyway, the wind up: Krystal becomes pregnant and runs away to Canada with the caretaker, while, under the tutelage of the nurse, Briant becomes strong enough to walk on crutches and the pair of them live happily together in their mansion.

Lawrence's novel was something of a cause celebre when first published in the USA. All that sex. The movie has captured all that sex, including a notorious purple passage involving wildflowers and pubic hair. It's the equal of "the earth moved" as a description of orgasm in Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." It's quite a laugh getter today. I don't know exactly how realistic the sex scenes in the film are. One instance of simulated coitus involves Krystel sitting on the rough bark of a fallen elm, which I can't imagine to be anyone's idea of a good time.

It's not a junky movie, though. The photography and the location shooting are well done, and a good deal of attention is paid to wardrobe and makeup. You won't find any fashion statement here, unlike the pastel splendor of Robert Redford's "The Great Gatsby." My God, these clothes are ugly here, right down to the underwear. People wrap themselves up like mummies. And Krystel doesn't wear dainty slippers like Daisy. She wears these ruddy great black shoes that lace halfway up the calves.

I guess the director, Just Jaekin, is best known for other soft-core porn like "Emanuelle" and "The Story of O," but he's efficient enough here. Sylvia Krystel looks the part of the frustrated wife, though her voice is dubbed. Clay is bluntly masculine as the ithyphallic male. Maybe the best performance is given by Shane Briant as the crippled husband. He has strangely neotenous features, as if he'd never quite outgrown his infancy -- large eyes, prominent forehead, and generous lips, with an overall resemblance to a ventriloquist's dummy. Yet he's able to do wonders with those features. They're required to change in the course of the story from brave and resigned to bitter and superior -- and they do. His is the toughest role in the story and he carries it off pretty well.

I couldn't remember all of the novel but I remember being impressed by Lawrence's sharp eye for detail, along the lines of John Updyke. Who, for instance, can better capture the crunch of gravel beneath shoes? With only one or two sentences Lawrence was able to project volumes of information about a place or person. The class distinctions that obsessed Lawrence and the people in his story were roughly the same as those that captivated F. Scott Fitzgerald in "The Great Gatsby." They don't mean as much to us today. (Or if they do, the worry is hidden away somewhere in the upper reaches of the status-sphere.) Of course we are still occasionally treated to scandals in which the teen-aged heiress runs off with the smooth-talking chauffeur.

The theme of nature and culture runs through the story too. (Somebody call Claude Levi-Strauss, quick.) I particularly enjoyed the regional accents of the local nobodies, in which "up" becomes "oop". And those wildflowers -- some heavy duty symbolism there. And I suppose that Briant's going to war and being horribly wounded was a cultural act, while stringing wildflowers in your lover's pundendum was a natural one, but the fact is that all through the movie I kept thinking about how much Briant's character had sacrificed for his country, while Mellors was petting his doves in the gamekeeper's cottage. Life's not fair.

score 6/10

rmax304823 25 March 2009

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2044946/