This is Oliver Reed (facing) and Alan Bates in the famous wrestling scene from Women in Love.
The movie was in color, so I don't know why this shot is in black and white.
Perhaps is was made during a rehearsal or as a production aid of some sort.
Supposedly they were both drunk when they wrestled. A stunning, and quite touching sequence.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Years later, Oliver Reed got drunk on a chat show (imagine that) and said that he suggested to a horrified (and closeted) Alan Bates that they "have a fiddle" off camera to enhance the sexual tension between their characters. It supposedly didn't happen, though.
DeleteSaw that movie. It was a great scene.
ReplyDeleteOne of the best ever.
DeleteThe novel of the same name by D H Lawrence was in fact a sequel to a 1915 precursor, The Rainbow, which, after an obscenity trial, was banned for 11 years in the UK . The film (1969) caused an equal sensation and then another one, four years later, when it was shown, uncensored, on the BBC on no less than a Sunday evening. It was that provocation, inter alia, that sowed the seeds of the the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, fronted by the po-faced, holier-than-thou Mary Whitehouse, a social conservative and all-purpose harridan, and through which she led a longstanding campaign against the BBC. (She complained about the decision to repeat Richard Dimbleby's documentary on the liberation of Bergen Belsen, protesting that this "filth" being allowed on air "was bound to shock and offend". She it was who successfully prosecuted Gay News in 1977 over the publication of a poem entitled "The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name" under England's blasphemy laws, causing the weekly to fold. The Evangelical Festival of Light followed. Assembled in Trafalgar Square, the Gay Liberation Front invaded and interrupted proceedings with slow hand-clapping. Whitehouse initially looked like a bewildered beatitude and the intellectually overwrought Malcolm Muggeridge, journalist, commentator and reformed Communist, gurned for Britain, while the assembled crowd physically attacked the gays, kicking, punching and even biting, while the Salvation Army band played on even louder to stifle the noise. The critic Harold Bloom listed the novel Women in Love in his The Western Canon (1994) as one of the books that have been important and influential in Western culture. He was not wrong. The blasphemy laws have been repealed and the churches have to be very careful in the language they use and albeit that they are exempted from certain clauses in the Equality Act, that does not cover the provision of services. They chose to fight and they lost. Boo-hoo.
ReplyDeleteInteresting story. D.H. Lawrence was married to a German and was made to live in a remote area of Cornwall during World War I due to some perceived disloyalty. While there, he had a love affair with a Cornish farmer.
DeleteI knew there was some speculation as to his sexuality, but I had never heard that little tidbit of gossip. How delightful. Perhaps more revealing about Cornish farmers than he himself.
DeleteBased on personal experience in my single days with Cornish farmers, I'd say you're onto something.
Delete...too bad that all of it is about to backfire soon on gays worldwide.
DeleteI've seen the 2011 remake with Rory Kinnear and Joseph Mawle and it didn't have the sexual tension that the original had.
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine anyone else managing that tension. Plus, Ken Russell was the only director who could have pulled it off. Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson both gave him immense credit for getting the most from the story.
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