Because I’m going be using this blog to promote and enthuse about Plater, I reckon it’s fine to confess when one of his projects isn’t my cup of tea. Very much the passion project of its director Christopher Miles, the 1981/85 film Priest of Love is a selective biography of the writer D. H. Lawrence (Ian McKellen), focussing upon his relationship with his German wife Frieda (Janet Suzman), his travels in New Mexico and Italy, and ultimately the coincidence of his declining health and the writing of the scandalous Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Although fairly easy to access – it’s currently on Youtube and Amazon Prime, and DVDs are easy to come by – I’d say it’s one for Lawrence (or Plater) completists really.
That said, Priest of Love has an intriguing exhibition history. The director and Plater had first collaborated on another cinematic Lawrence adaptation, The Virgin and the Gypsy, released to generally decent notices in 1970. I’ve seen an interview with Plater where he talks about being embarrassed to see an advertising poster (very possibly the one I've pasted in below) in his hometown for that movie with a strapline declaring it to be one of the finest ‘sex films’ – a difficult reputation for him to live down among his nearest and dearest in Hull. The Virgin and the Gypsy, Plater's first movie to be produced, does have gratuitous female nudity, but it’s hardly Emmanuelle. In comparison, Priest of Love is franker – or rather, it devotes a lot of energy to telling you how groundbreakingly frank Lawrence was, in his relationships and in his writing. And to make sure you get the point, you get to see Ian McKellen completely starkers and enjoying a nice outdoor bathe even before the opening credits have rolled.
There’s a making-of film about Priest of Love that was included on a DVD release (and currently available on Youtube) showing the director on set, declaring that the project has been ten years in the making. Miles’s personal website has some info explaining the complex rights agreements that were thrashed out with Lawrence’s executors to eventually allow him to sculpt an adaptation out of Harry T. Moore’s Priest of Love biography (1974). According to Miles, Plater was daunted at the prospect, saying it was ‘like asking him to re-write the Bible’, which hints at the level of reverence that Miles and Plater had towards their grouchy, tempestuous subject – and which reviewers were quick to sniff out and criticise. Take, for instance, a Siskel and Ebert TV mauling, where they agree that that it’s of limited interest to anyone unfamiliar already with Lawrence’s life story.
Writing for Cineaste in 2011, Michael Joshua Rowin observed that 1981 was a bad time for a Lawrence project, given that the post-Sixties interest in the author as a signifier of experimentation and sexual liberation had now been surpassed by ‘feminist reconsiderations of the writer as a phallocentric misogynist’ (Fall 2011, p.66). Miles subsequently withdrew the film, re-releasing it in a shorter cut in 1985, the year of Lawrence’s centenary. That year also saw Plater have his third crack at Lawrence in his TV drama Coming Through – which fluctuates between biographical scenes of young Lawrence (played by Kenneth Branagh), and a fraught, sexually-charged encounter between two Lawrence enthusiasts in the present day. Plater’s ‘sideways’ approach to biographical drama in Coming Through rather suggests he had clocked the limitations of what Miles had been up to in Priest of Love.
Miles’s 1985 revision of Priest of Love is the only version in circulation today; to get hold of the 1981 cut, you’d need to splash out on an old VHS copy, although some of the deleted scenes are included on the 2012 Kino DVD release of the film. I’ve only seen the 1985 version, but the obvious question for me is whether Miles’s refocussing of the material around Lawrence’s relationship with his wife, and at the apparent expense of digressive info about the various artistic/social networks around them as they hop from place to place, makes the film any more or less Plater-esque.
The film sketches out some pretty tedious sexual and personal tensions between the Lawrences and various thinly-sketched characters: their benefactor Mabel Dodge Luhan (Ava Gardner, curiously, in one of her final roles), the Honourable Dorothy Brett (Penelope Keith), and others in the second half that come and go and don’t add much to the plot. There’s also John Gielgud playing a public censor, and the last section of the film dealing with Lady Chatterley is an unsatisfactory simplification of the whole affair.
To take a more generous view, I’d like to think that the most characterful and humane elements of Priest of Love were Plater’s doing. Whatever he cut out of his original version, Miles evidently thought there was still mileage in Penelope Keith’s gawky painter character constantly losing her ear-trumpet (called Toby for some reason), and Lawrence smashing up a nice-looking buffet simply because someone has asked him to do the tango. When a journalist turns up for a quote and finds him in a room with his buddies, Lawrence pipes up: “I’m the one with the beard”. It made me laugh, anyway.
From what I’ve read, the second version plays down Lawrence’s violent outbursts, and I’ve also seen reference to the removal of a "phallus in silhouette" moment, which I assume relates to a scene that remains where Keith’s buttoned-up aristocrat spies on a naked Lawrence through a window. I mention this because it put me in mind of a rather peculiar bit in Plater’s novel version of Oliver’s Travels (1994), where a sex scene is introduced with some foreplay involving erection shadow-play. And yes, I can’t believe I wrote that last sentence either, but the love-making in Oliver’s Travels most definitely conforms to what Plater has said a few times in interviews about sex scenes in his work being deemed palatable through the incorporation of humour. One of my problems with Priest of Love is that I’m never entirely sure whether the comedy is deliberate or not.
I’ve also not come across any commentary from Plater on the whole saga of Miles’s re-cutting of the film, which is normally the sort of thing that would have him reaching out to the Guardian to vent his spleen at the belittling of the screenwriter’s input at the expense of the director or producer’s vision. Which is what he did, rather spectacularly, in relation to the TV version of Oliver’s Travels (1995), which he saw as very much a betrayal of his intentions, in terms of casting, tone, setting, music and so forth. Plater went on record as saying that the central character in Oliver’s Travels should have been played by his old school-friend Tom Courtenay (he was eventually played by Alan Bates) and I’ve also seen mention on Christopher Miles’s website that at one point Courtenay was lined up to play Lawrence, rather than Ian McKellen, in Priest of Love.
In a 1995 interview for the British Entertainment History project, Miles made an interesting comment about Plater, saying that he was good choice of script writer as someone who understood the ‘north and Lawrence’. But he also said that Plater had experienced ‘problems in features’ because he was ‘so wrapped up in television’. I dare say I’ll be returning to this assessment, which has some credibility, in the course of this blog.
Suffice to say, Priest of Love – with its awkward release history, and air of bad luck in its timing – is emblematic of the kinds of problems that beset other Plater cinematic projects, including a few that didn’t even get off the ground. For instance, there’s the James Herriot adaptation that was thoroughly overshadowed by the well-remembered TV version, the George Orwell adaptation that came out with alternative names in different territories and generally bamboozled critics, the Swedish submarine-related thriller that you wonder how he became involved with at all, and the whole Last of the Blonde Bombshells saga that will surely deserve a future blog of its own. Thinking back to the ‘sexy’ poster of The Virgin and the Gypsy that Plater used to joke about, maybe it turned out to be a cursed object after all.
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