Ken Russell died this week, and I find it sad to think he'll be remembered as the self indulgent madman who made the film version of "Tommy" and crazy over-the-top fiascos like "The Music Lovers" and "The Devils." He did make some hysterically bad films, but early in his career he directed some very fine and nuanced documentries for the BBC, and somewhere between those two phases of his hectic career he gave us what may be the best adaptation of a great novel ever made.  If he winds up being remembered for the 1969 film version of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love,  a great artist will have received his due.

The film's genesis started with a ruthlessly faithful script by Larry Kramer (The Normal Heart, Faggots) that kept everything essential in the book,  and cut everything else. The story of school teacher Rupert Birkin (an obvious stand-in forLawrence, played by Lawrence look-alike Alan Bates) and his friendship with coal magnate Gerald Critch, the book told the story of their love affairs with the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gerald’s destructive lust for the passionate and destructive Gudrun ("Try to love me a,little more and want me a little less") runs parallel to the ideal vision of romance enacted by  her sister Ursula andRupert Birkin. Though the struggle for power finally tears Gerald and Gudrun apart, and eventually pushes Gerald to suicide, the only problems facing Rupert and Ursula are his lingering feelings for wealthy wack-job Hermione Riddice and his insistence on the equality of friendship and love. Ursula finds the woman vile and the idea preposterous. These relationships are made vivid by the sheer florid power of Lawrence’s prose. For example, one of the first moments when the girls see Gerald Critch. He’s on horseback,  at a train- crossing, goading his horse at the train as it roars past:

 “The Fool,” cried Ursula loudly, “Why doesn’t he ride away until it’s gone by?”
Gudrun was looking at him with black-dilated, spellbound eyes. But he sat glistening and obstinate, forcing the wheeling mare, which spun and swerved like a wind, and yet could not get out of the grasp of his will, nor escape from the mad clamour of terror that resounded through her as the trucks thumped slowly, heavily, horrifying, one after the other, one pursuing the other, over the rails of the crossing.

The locomotive, as if wanting to see what could be done, put on the brakes, and back came the trucks, rebounding on the iron buffers, striking like horrible cymbals, clashing nearer and nearer in frightful strident concussions. The mare opened her mouth and rose slowly, as if lifted up on a wind of terror. Then suddenly her forefeet struck out, as she convulsed herself utterly away from the horror. Back she went, and the two girls clung to each other, feeling she must fall backwards on top of him. But he leaned forward, his face shining with fixed amusement, and at last he brought her down, sank her down, and was bearing her back to the mark. But as strong as the pressure of his compulsion was the repulsion of her utter terror, throwing her back away from the railway, so that she spun round and round on two legs, as if she were in the centre of some whirlwind. It made Gudrun faint with poignant dizziness, which seemed to penetrate her heart.

 How could you translate this wildly over-wrought scene to film?

Hire Ken Russell.

This director, later known for voluptuous extravaganzas like The Devils and Tommy was a perfect match for Lawrence: just as inspired, just crazy, and in his own visual, cinematic terms, just as talented. So that may be the secret: pull two mad geniuses of excess and spectacle together with a rigorous screenplay that brings out the best in both of them. And then you need some luck. Luck with casting – Glenda Jackson, Jenny Linden and Oliver Reed were equal to Alan Bates (Glenda Jackson won the Oscar for her role);  and luck with locations. Many of the places they filmed simply don’t exist any more, loughed under for housing subdivisions and shopping plazas. But forty years ago the early twentieth century was still alive and well in Northern England. They found a closed, but working coal mine, and reactivated it for the sequences set there. For a scene that required a great house with a pond you could drain, they found one, complete with the nineteenth century mechanisms for pumping out the water. Hermione’s ‘summer cottage’ – in fact one of the great manor houses of England – was loaned out to the company for the exterior shoot. But the elderly owners enjoyed the film-makers so much they let them film inside, whose lavish décor could never be duplicated by the finest production design or the most elaborate CGI, no matter what the cost.

 It doesn’t have to be amicable – Kramer and Russell fought all the time, and some scenes in the movie wound up there over Kramer’s howls of protest. But the only person he had to fight with was Russell: he owned the script and produced it himself. There were no ‘notes; or suggestions (“Does Gerald have to die?” “Gudrun is so unlikable – can we give her a puppy?”) from studio executives. The script remained intact and it kept the whole movie under control. You can read the book with the script at your side and see the exact moment when Kramer cuts into a ten-page dialogue, using the perfect kernel of Lawrence’s text to evoke the full meaning of the scene. It’s surgery and poetry at once. Every word in the script comes from Lawrence … but shaped and pruned to fit the narrow confines of a two hour film. Kramer had his own moments of ecstatic inspiration. One of the most famous scenes in the movie -- the al fresco luncheon where Birkin compares the fig to the vagina is taken from another source –  one ofLawrence’s poems. Here’s a sample:

 And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.
So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.
And the fig is finished, the year is over.

That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through purple slit
Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.
Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That's how women die too.

 Here, too you can see the steely precision of Kramer’s editing. The poem is perhaps five times longer than Birkin’s speech, but, as delivered by the incomparable Alan Bates, no less powerful or disturbing.

 So that’s how it’s done: find a great novel that suits itself to the screen as Women in Love does, write a rigorously faithful script with full understanding of the novel’s complexity, hire a lunatic visual artist whose mad vision harmonizes pitch-perfectly with the author’s, cast it with the greatest actors of your time and film it in spectacular locations with no interference from businessmen and fools. Then you’ll have a film whose images of a snow-white Rolls Royce parting a coal-dark sea of mineworkers, or two men wrestling naked by firelight, or a drowned couple entwined at the bottom of a drained lake in the exact pose of the living lovers nearby, will stay with you forever.

 Maybe it’s impossible. Maybe too many variables have to line up perfectly, some bizarre artistic trifecta. Maybe you’d be insanely arrogant to even to try it.As I write those words I can hear Hermione’s sardonic drawl: “It sounds like megalomania, Rupert.”

Maybe, but when it works, there’s nothing better. And the third or fourth time through Women in Love you start to think, maybe Ken Russell deserved his megalomania, after all.  Don’t take my word for it, buy the book, find the DVD, toast both of the departed masters and enjoy this ferocious bludgeoning awkward word-drunk image-soaked masterpiece in both its forms.

 You might just get inspired, yourself. I can;t think of any better way to honor Ken Russell's memory; and I have a feeling D.H. Lawrence himself might agree.