bar-roberts Review of Lady Chatterley

Lady Chatterley (1993)

Nearly there but Russell's self indulgence gets in the way of perfection

[7/10 · 24 March 2006]

I agree Bean was excellent but so was Richardson ( and very beautiful she was, too) I did not find Shirley Ann Field convincing at all. She was far too burnished and her accent was so forced that she came out as a caricature of a Northern woman. Her class was really not worked out, and as the film was about class above everything else we needed to know where Field was on the scale. She was too intimate at times, yet her strident Northern voice would have been more at home in a butcher's shop. The photography of the wood was perfect and echoed the out-of-this- world love story, so that the scenes in the village and forge were memorably upsetting. I didn't realise this was based on three books so found the end confusing. Lawrence would not have liked it so this is not a film for Lawrence fans, perhaps.