Peter Viney's Blog

By D.H. Lawrence

Screenplay by David Magee

Directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnere

Music by Isabella Summers

Cinemas from 25 November 2022
NETFLIX from 2 December 2022

CAST:

Emma Corrin – Connie Reid (Lady Chatterley)
Jack O’Connell – Oliver Mellors
Matthew Duckett – Sir Clifford Chatterley
Joely Richardson – Mrs Bolton
Faye Marsay – Hilda, Connie’s sister
Ella Hunt- Mrs Flint
Anthony Brophy – Sir Malcolm Reid
Nicholas Bishop- Ned, new partner of Mellor’s wife

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles first LP

Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis

This is just out on Netflix, and was pick of the week for last weekend’s newspapers. We’ve been there before … BBC did a significant film version in 2015. Ken Russell did a four episode BBC TV series in 1993, starring Joely Richardson (who is Mrs Bolton in this version) and Sean Bean.

The basic story is well-known. Connie Reid marries aristocrat Clifford Chatterley during World War One. He returns from the war crippled and unable to walk, with apparently his genitals useless or missing. He says that he needs an heir, and she should discreetly create one with a suitable fellow, but he wants to know nothing about it. Instead she embarks on a wildly passionate affair with Mellors, her husband’s gamekeeper.

The trial over Penguin’s publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a major cultural event in Britain. During the trial we got the quote which split the 1960s from all that had gone before, when the prosecuting counsel asked the jury a question:

Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?

Mervyn Griffith-Jones

Or schoolboys. While we were set St Mawr / The Virgin & The Gypsy in English for exams, no one ever suggested we read Lady C as it was generally called.

The book had been available in an expensive hardback edition. The issue was Penguin were publishing it at 3/6d (17.5p) making it available to all. It did in our school playground, where grubby (let’s not go into how grubby) copies were passed around with whispers of Look at page 185!

I just wrote that, looked at p185 and my subliminal memory is clearly better than I thought. Here it is. I’ll use a photo rather than type it out, as doing so might attract the wrong sort of Search Engine. It is a bit rude.

On the language, Mellors, the gamekeeper refers to their respective genitals as John Thomas and Lady Jane, which must have inspired Mick Jagger to write the lyric of Lady Jane for The Rolling Stones. We knew. The very last line of the book is from a letter from Mellors to Connie:

John Thomas says good night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart –

Mention of John Thomas and Lady Jane is not in the current film. Lawrence’s dialect writing can be a trial in the other sense:

Tha mun goo …

It was easy to lampoon. Private Eye mentioned that the Irish aristocrat Connie Lingus was starring in Lady Lovely’s Chatter.

I was unable to resist the Penguin Classics De Luxe edition in 2006 with its wrap around cartoon sleeve. There is so much heavy-handed writing on class and accent that unfortunately provokes a laugh at times. The cover captured it.

The jury’s out on his reproduction of Mellor’s Nottinghamshire accent. I wouldn’t know. Try him on Sir Clifford talking about Mellors:

“That scum! That bumptious lout! That miserable cad! And carrying on with him all the time, while you were here and he was one of my servants! My God, my God, is there any end to the beastly lowness of women!”

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, p 296, 2006 edition.

To be fair, that speech never made it into the film, though the four exclamation marks did. It’s certainly not D.H. Lawrence’s best work. Merely his best-selling.

The 2022 version

The film opens with Connie and Clifford’s wartime wedding photo against a painted backdrop of a Venice they never got to visit together:

There are considerable plot changes. The “suitable fellow” to father a child, Duncan Forbes, has been removed from the story altogether. A later Venice episode with Connie and Hilda (but without Clifford) allows some nice cinematography.

The major thing is the casting of Emma Corrin as Connie, or Lady Chatterley. Yes, she’s a fine actor, and fully merits a major role, but it is screamingly obvious that she was cast because she had just played Princess Diana in Netflix’s The Crown and the Diana / Dodi and Connie / Mellors parallels are there in her distinctive face.

In one of these pictures she is Lady Diana Spencer. In the other she is Lady Connie Chatterley. You could mix ‘n’ match.

We weren’t positive about Mellors, not Jack O’Connell’s fault at all, but the part was under-written. He was cast as strong / silent, though not looking as rugged or as silent or as Northern as Sean Bean last time around.

Back to the book:

Her tormented modern woman’s brain still had no rest? Was it real? … The man lay in mysterious stillness. What was he feeling? What was he thinking?

The Mellor backstory needed fleshing out. So he was from a mining family, went to the Great War and ended up as a lieutenant. That’s crashing through a ceiling that’s stainless steel rather than glass. In 1914 to 1918, he would have had to be an extraordinary character to move from the ranks to officer. Generally, his best possibility was Sergeant Major. That was still true in World War II in the army for conscripts … my dad ended as a Staff Sergeant, my Uncle Jack as a Sergeant Major. This Mellors is a man who reads James Joyce- Ulysses I suppose.

Then we know he was married to Bertha who had ‘gone off with men’ during the war and is now partnered with Ned, who will betray the secret. We don’t get to explore that. He seems more a convenient and available penis. The accent was kept light … in the original book Mellors could code switch between Over the Top Nottinghamshire, and lightly local accented. So why is this Lieutenant, perhaps of equal army status with Sir Clifford, now his gamekeeper living in a stone hovel with draughty doors?

They bond when Connie goes to look at the pheasant chicks he’s rearing. No mention that when they’re grown up peasants pheasants, Sir Cliffordwill shoot them for fun.

Sir Clifford is played by Matthew Duckett. He seemed perfect for the role, especially his irascibility when his motorised wheelchair gets stuck on a muddy hillside. The film captures how Connie’s disappointment grows into dislike as Clifford becomes increasingly petulant, needy and demanding.

Mrs Bolton is an important role, especially in the film. She’s an ex-housekeeper / nurse, widowed after her husband died in a mine disaster twenty-five years earlier. Sir Clifford is a mine owner. She sympathizes with Connie and is prepared both to defend her and help her … see above, Joey Richardson comes to the role from playing Connie in the 1993 version.

The reason for the trial in 1961, the reason why it’s D.H. Lawrence’s best known book title, the reason for its ongoing popularity is sex. It’s not the inequities of wealthy mine owners. It’s not class warfare. It’s not even developing Lawrence’s long-held view that Working Class blokes like himself had bigger dicks than effete aristocrats.

So sex is central. It doesn’t go as far as the book (what does?) – Mellors tickles Connie’s naked tummy with a small flower, but does not suggest an unusual receptacle for placing flowers. There are a lot of flower images in the novel. Here is a milder one:

The fine flower of their intimacy was to her rather like an orchid , a bulb stuck parasitic to the tree of life, and producing in her eyes, a rather shabby flower.

Connie on her relationship with Clifford.

Apart from the standard coupling camera angles, they have to cavort naked in the rain revealing pubic hair which is normally an eternal triangular area avoided. The bonking is “Outlander lite” though I would say heavily Outlander influenced. Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan have bonked endlessly through six long seasons of the TV series and by Series Six still manage to look as if it’s authentic. They have had an awful lot of practice, and I suppose these two haven’t. It doesn’t look as passionate here.

I would class Amanda Platell’s comment in The Mail as cruel:

Despite non-stop explicit sex scenes, it is just not sexy. There’s Jack with his convincingly wooden acting. And Emma is so painfully thin that it’s as erotic as watching a man making love to a flesh-coloured ironing board.

Daily Mail, 10 December 2022

While that’s over the top, she’s correct that the sex scenes are really is not sexy. Emma Corrin is having a good year. She co-stars in the Michel Grandage-directed My Policeman also on Netflix (we thought she was very good), and on stage as Orlando in Michael Grandage’s current production of Orlando.

The ending is more romantic (sugary?) than the novel.

The story receives reasonable justice here, and the old four part TV series was too long for the basic plot. This is about right (2 hours 7 minutes). The original soundtrack music is particularly good, worthy of a listen on its own. It’s a good evening’s viewing on Netflix and considerably less socio-political than it might have been.