"Priest of Love" is a filmed biography of the novelist D. H. Lawrence, and concentrates on the latter part of his life. It opens during the First World War, which was not the easiest period for Lawrence. He was unpopular with the British public because of his opposition to the war and his marriage to a German. It didn't help matters that his wife Frieda's maiden name had been von Richthofen, the same as that of the air ace who was one of Germany's greatest war heroes, although the two were only distantly related. The couple moved to a remote part of Cornwall but came under suspicion from local people who believed them to be German spies; ironically before the war Lawrence had been arrested in Germany on suspicion of being a British spy. To make matters worse, his latest novel "The Rainbow" was banned by the censors on the grounds of alleged obscenity.
It is therefore perhaps not surprising that after the war Lawrence and Frieda decided to leave Britain and to lead a peripatetic existence wandering around the world, a journey that would take them to France, Italy, Australia, Mexico and the USA. They did so partly because Lawrence needed a warmer climate for the sake of his health- he was suffering from the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him- but the way in which he had been treated in the UK must also have been a factor. The film follows them on their journey and also deals with the writing of Lawrence's last and most controversial novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover", compared to which "The Rainbow" is about as racy as a children's nursery rhyme.
Although the film features some major names of the British cinema and a bona fide Hollywood goddess in the shape of Ava Gardner, it seems to have aroused little attention. It was not a success on its release in 1981, and I had never heard of it before I recently caught it on television. I note that mine is only the third review of it on this site which suggests that few other people had heard of it either.
And the reason nobody seems to have heard of it is that, frankly, it is not very good. Probably the best acting comes from John Gielgud in a cameo as the pompous Herbert G. Muskett, the reactionary functionary charged with protecting the British people from exposure to literature and who seemed to take a particular delight in persecuting Lawrence. None of the other cast members, however, stand out. Although the title hints at Lawrence's passionate nature, you get little idea of this from Ian McKellen's surprisingly passionless performance. Janet Suzman's Frieda seems too unsympathetic, with the sort of cinematic German accent more normally associated with Nazis barking "ve haff vays und means". Both these performances came as a disappointment to me, because both McKellen and Suzman have been much better in other films.
The screenplay was based upon a non-fiction biography of Lawrence, not always the best source to use when making a fictionalised biopic. The resulting film is just a tedious drawn-out chronicle of two people, one of them seriously ill, journeying around the world, with various artistic and literary celebs from the 1920s occasionally popping up. ("Oh look! Is that Aldous Huxley over there? And could that be Katherine Mansfield? Quick, or else you'll miss her"). Screenwriter Alan Plater and director Christopher Miles might just as well have tried to film the entry on Lawrence from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Had they done so the result could hardly have been duller than what they actually came up with. 4/10
