Priest of Love is a 1981 British biographical film about D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda (née Von Richthofen) played by Ian McKellen and Janet Suzman.
[2][3][4][5] The film was then re-cut in 1985 by the director for the centenary of D.H.Lawrence’s birth, and was re-released in cinemas by Enterprise Pictures to greater commercial and critical success.
The extras on both DVDs include interviews with Ian McKellen and Christopher Miles, and Penelope Keith narrates "The Way We Got It Together", on the making of the film.
A year later on 13 November 1915, 1,011 copies of his book The Rainbow were seized for obscenity by the censor Herbert G. Muskett and burnt in front of the Royal Exchange in the city of London.
At the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan, an American art patroness, Lawrence and Frieda accompanied by their loyal friend the Hon.
Although Frieda is from an old German aristocratic family and has left her husband and children behind in England in order to elope with Lawrence, she firmly believes she is the right woman for the man she considers a literary giant.
The couple move to Tuscany where they rent the top floors of an old villa, and Lawrence, who has been suffering from a long and tormented fallow period as a writer, finds inspiration once more.
It is to become Lawrence's final period of great creativity, and in between writing he also finds time to paint using the canvasses Aldous and Maria Huxley left behind.
Lawrence finds an Italian printer for Lady Chattersley's Lover who lives nearby in Florence and, predictably when the finished book arrives in London, it is considered obscene, and is banned by the authorities.
The exhibition draws huge crowds, but Lawrence’s old nemesis Herbert G. Muskett, the public censor who has been responsible for the banning and burning of so much of his works, steps in and has the gallery raided by the police.
Miles decided from then on to cast actors who resembled the real people in the script, as there were too many portraits and photographs of the main protagonists and their friends to ignore the public’s expectations.
Dorothy Brett, and John Gielgud, who had worked with Miles previously, to play Herbert G. Muskett, the formidable British censor, who loathed Lawrence and all he stood for.
[19][20] The present - and now only - cut of 98 minutes has gone down better, and as Miles told Phillip Bergson in a ‘What’s On’ Cinema Interview: “It was good to come back to the film after the dust had settled and re-edit this version for Lawrence’s centenary.
it certainly has happened now... with some new material by Mr Miles to give a shorter, sharper, more chronological account... as a result the emphasis falls strongly on the relations between Frieda and Lawrence, so illustrating what he tried to convey in his major works”[23] and The Times thought the film was “Honourable and absorbing, with vivid, rounded, warty characterisations of Lawrence and Frieda by Ian McKellen and Janet Suzman, and creditable support by Ava Gardner, John Gielgud and Penelope Keith".
Alan Plater’s fine screenplay presents Lawrence as a temperamental man with little patience for conventional people, even the eccentric Mabel Luhan (One of the few Ava Gardner late-career roles that are worth seeing)...
[25] Peter Martin of Twitch reviewed: "It feels like being tossed into the deep end of a man’s soul, but McKellen proves to be a solid anchor and has made a smooth transition to a leading role in this film.
Miles conducts a relaxed informal interview with McKellen filled with fond remembrances and even telling the director which scenes he didn’t like in the finished film, and why.