Lady Chatterley's Lover Movie
Storyline
TAGLINES
She was beautiful and sensual, trapped in a loveless marriage. He was her husband's servant. Born into worlds as far apart, they found a passionate world of their own.
The most notorious novel of the century.
She was trapped in a loveless marriage. He was her husband's servant.
A film adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's novel. After a crippling injury leaves her husband impotent, Lady Chatterly is torn between her love for her husband and her physical desires. With her husband's consent, she seeks out other means of fulfilling her needs.
| Sylvia Kristel | Lady Constance Chatterley |
| Shane Briant | Sir Clifford Chatterley |
| Nicholas Clay | Oliver Mellors |
| Ann Mitchell | Ivy Bolton |
| Elizabeth Spriggs | Lady Eva |
| Pascale Rivault | Hilda |
| Peter Bennett | The Butler |
| Anthony Head | Anton |
| Frank Moorey | The Priest |
| Bessie Love | Flora |
| John Tynan | Roberts |
| Michael Huston | Footman |
| Fran Hunter | Maid |
| Mark Colleano | Gigolo |
| Just Jaeckin |
5.00 out of 10 (603 votes)
Visitor Reviews
Typical Golan & Globus
posted on 11 Aug 2007Pretty typical Golan & Globus production with better than average art direction and cinematography. The estate is beautiful--as is Sylvia Kristel--but the adaptation is flat and whole thing feels flabby.A bit of sex goes with the story, of course, and it's done well enough; but it's nothing like Kristel's soft core films. The acting is competent thruout, and the filmmakers take pains to maintain the essence of the English class struggle. But some of the jealousy and social indignation feels contrived.I loved Lord Chatterly's gas-powered wheelchair for zipping around the grounds, altho why he didn't install an elevator in the mansion is a mystery.
Patched-together B-movie is more interested in lust than passion...
posted on 12 Jun 2007From the makers of "Emmanuelle: The Joys Of A Woman"...not exactly D. H. Lawrence territory, is it? Still in all, this low-budget sexcapade has decent locales and very steamy leads (Sylvia Kristel and Nicholas Clay), neither of whom are shy about appearing in the buff. It is noteworthy that this is one of the few R-rated movies from this period to show the man undressed as well as the woman, and their sex in the forest has animal heat to it. But those looking for an adept cinematic translation of the famous novel will be embarrassed...and perhaps even slightly amused. The weakest link is the editing, which darts around leaving scenes unfinished, such as the finale (which is really just a bushel of footage posing as an ending). However, on a soft-core/harlequin level, "Lady Chatterly's Lover" isn't too bad. **1/2 from ****
Lady Chatterley's Lover
posted on 23 Jan 2005I love this film. I own it on DVD. The reason I give it ten points out of ten is that it has the incredibly sexy and talented Nicholas Clay in it. He plays Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper of an estate, that is having an affair with the lady of the house. She is married but her husband cannot do his husbandly duties because he came back from World War 1 in a wheelchair. She is an upper class rich woman while he is considered low class and poor. She doesn't work and in the beginning tends to her husband until he decides to get a caretaker for himself. This leaves her with time on her hands to wander the grounds of her estate where she comes upon Mellors nude and bathing himself by the chicken coop. She lusts after him and they strike up a relationship although rocky at first. The have a passionate affair. I won't reveal the ending. I truly believe this is Nicholas Clay's finest work although he is probably known best as his role of Sir Lancelot in Excalibur (he is naked in that movie too). I think this version is best. Lady Chatterley was made into another film in 1993 starring Joely Richardson and Sean Bean but no one compares to British hottie Nicholas Clay.
British Bourgeoisie Society & Double Standard for Women's Sexuality
posted on 26 Dec 20021981 VHS & 2005 DVD are based uponby British novelist D.H. Lawrence's last (1928). In it's time, "Lady Chatterley's Love" was (re)viewed as "sexually scandalous"; so much so, D.H. Lawrence suffered continuously due to charges of obscenity. Like the (1928) novel, the (2005) DVD contains direct depictions of different-gender adulterous sexual intercourse. Many 'obscene' (at least for 1928!) sexual words are part of Lawrence's novel & the screenplay. As a result, the novel upon which the movie is based wasn't fully published in Britain, though it had long been available in other countries.During the 2nd half of the 20th century, in 1960, Penguin books bought out the expurgated edition & was summarily prosecuted for violating the Obscene Publication Act of 1959! Even the trial was scandalous; though, the publishers prevailed & were acquitted. Their acquittal has been viewed by academic literary & cultural critics to this day as a catalyst for the new freedom of literature & artistic expression. Some critics have regarded Lawrence as the greatest British man novelist of the early 20th century (Virginia Woolf, the woman).On to the film: it is equal to the novel in its sexological study of a paralyzed Sir Clifford Chatterley, who strongly advises his wife, Lady Constance Chatterley, to find a lover for herself in order to satisfy what Sir Clifford cannot ever give her, or so he thought: sexual fulfillment. (That belief would seem quite naive now since a wide variety of sexually satisfying techniques do not require a man who is paralyzed to be fully functioning! What is sexual & what is sexual satisfaction & pleasure has measurably changed since 1928).Lady Constance Chatterley reluctantly takes her husband's advice, being quite young & beautiful. But, after beginning a very sexually intense affair with a proletariat man, Mellors, their butch & brawny country gamekeeper, Lady Chatterley's affair shocks her husband who suggested it & the high society in which they take part.It is definitely not a movie for children because the sexual content is steamy & blatant. By contemporary standards, it is still a story of a scandalous love affair with an interesting plot; but, certainly the movie is not pornographic or unusual ("Asylum" is somewhat similar, for example). It is as much a sexology of 1920's British social class mores as anything else. Because it is a period piece that does examine an era & the moral standards of a particular class of a society, it is a more than notorious for its history of scandal: "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is loaded with Lawrence's observations & remarks about the mixture of mores for British bourgeoisie society & its double standard for women's sexuality.
The Torso Has a Life of its Own.
posted on 16 Aug 2002D. 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.
Soft focus literary eroticism
posted on 22 Jul 2001It must have seemed a high concept idea of genius to the producers, Golan and Globus of Cannon films: re-unite the director and star of the soft-porn worldwide hit Emmanuelle for a big screen version of the most famous erotic novel of them all, D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The film, for a British erotic flick of the time, has relatively high production values and a slew of classy but less well-known British character actors in the supporting roles. Director Jaekin makes his usual painstakingly beautiful but somewhat chocolate box soft focus images, and the whole film glides before the eye very pleasantly.The first part of the film is pretty good as well. The upper class life of the Chatterleys is well delineated, there's some breathtaking tracking shots around the Chatterley mansion and the war sequence is convincing. The first sighting of by Lady Chatterley of Mellors naked and soaping himself by his hut is sexy and ripe. But once the affair begins and the two of them are making love on a regular basis, the film's pace slows down and its dramatic level evens to a flat-line. There's some intriguing cutting between the lovers in each others arms and the crippled Lord Chatterley languishing in his bed, but it's all a bit too tastefully done - Lawrence's earthy eroticism isn't captured, nor is the script wise to have lost his salty filthy dialogue. What you get is a sort of motion picture version of high-class erotic prints.Some of Lawrence's diagnosis of the crippled state of the British aristocratic class after WW1 remains intact, and the film is helped by a very fine performance indeed by Shane Briant as the emasculated Lord. Kristel is never less than watchable as milady, and Nicolas Clay has the looks to suggest Mellors' virility, even though the director never lets him exercise it. The last quarter of the film seems rushed, and a promising sojourn to France only scratches the surface of what might have been a Sirk-like interlude of realisation that the protagonist's class and social circle offers nothing that a virile man can bring her.Best filed under intriguing failures, artistically and (to Cannon Films' chagrin) at the box office.
Low-brow, but oddly appealing, version of the famed novel.
posted on 31 May 2000One of literature's most controversial and secretly read novels ever is given a somewhat shallow, but surprisingly faithful and opulent, treatment in this dewy film. Kristel plays a young woman of high social standing whose husband Briant is badly wounded during WWI. He cannot walk nor, more importantly, make love, and the passionless, lonely world Kristel inhabits on their expansive, but bleak estate begins to take its toll on her. Briant encourages her to take a lover, an idea that she finds unpleasant until one day she chances upon the gamesman (Clay) giving himself a soapy wash behind his shelter. Fascinated by what she's seen, yet aware that he is of another class and manner, they embark on a tenuous friendship that eventually turns sexual. Kristel is physically reawakened and finds much solace and pleasure in Clay's company, sexually and otherwise. However, her relationship with Briant suffers when he suspects that she's done what he asked of her, but with someone far beneath them in the social strata. An overbearing nurse (Mitchell) only adds to the estrangement, taking on a maternal role with Briant and wavering between wishing happiness for Kristel while beginning to take her place at the same time. Kristel, not someone who's ever been known for her incredible acting skills, is decent here if a bit vacant at times. She's on hand primarily because of her exotic looks and her lack of modesty about performing nude. She's undeniably striking and does manage to perform several scenes with freshness and commitment. Briant overacts tremendously, not aided at all by two very obnoxious eyebrows, and plays his role with a lack of dimension. He's annoying, nasty and condescending practically all the time, taking most of the chances for compassion or empathy away. Clay is wonderful. Like Kristel, he was never one to shy away from abandoning his clothes, but he also presents a multi-faceted character, one who knows his station in life, but can't help but wish for more. His bathing scene is a real eye-opener. Mitchell is hard to read, perhaps intentionally, but certainly excels at playing the controlling and overstepping nursemaid aspects of her character. Considering the director and producers (and cast), this could have been a lot worse. A decent atmosphere is established thanks to a truly magnificent house filled with many lovely furnishings and with sizeable grounds. Considering the budget, the makers accomplished a lot with a little. Costuming leans toward the impressive too, with only an occasional misstep (Lady Chatterley in pants?!) Though the film does away with some of the supporting characters of the novel and glosses over some of the deeper aspects of it, this remains a pretty valid representation of the story and manages at least a bit of suspense for those who don't know the outcome. This was a staple of pay cable television in the early 80's, affording many folks to pore over the attractive bodies of it's stars in their extended and frank love scenes.
Average
posted on 30 Jul 1999Ken Russell should have directed this movie. DVD review.It's just after the Great War and a wealthy wife decides to have an affair with her common groundsman.Looking like a TV commercial this movie is all style over substance. The story is very short and nothing much happens until the end. But there's some impressive shots of foggy fields, country landscapes, impressive editing, and the music works. There's also some interesting scenes concerning the class differences between the characters. The love scenes are rather silly - this movie reminds me of the recent Swept Away. One good scene: the husband puts on the brakes while his love rival pushes while getting covered in mud.Lady Chatterley's Lover is an interesting but shallow movie.
Good Couples Movie
posted on 09 Jun 2008This movie is a good starter for heating up the romance in your life, especially if your female mate is a bit conservative as is my wife. We found the plot acceptable enough to keep our attention, while providing beautiful scenery and cinematography. The acting of the husband was a bit stiff and he occasionally seemed to be reading his lines. The twists along the way kept my wife intrigued and the love scenes did not offend her, as they were done in good taste. The plot is not terribly difficult to predict, but interesting to watch unfold just the same. A good movie to get the romantic fires ignited for a good evening of love making.