AllMovie

It took over thirty years for D. H. Lawrence's "forbidden" novel Lady Chatterly's Lover to make it to the big screen, courtesy of director Marc Allegret. Updated to the 1950s, the film stars Danielle Darrieux as Lady Constance Chatterly, comfortably married to wealthy invalid Lord Clifford Chatterly (Leo Genn). Despite her husband's incapacitation, Lady Constance doesn't feel that anything is lacking in her life--until she meets handsome, earthy caretaker Mellors (Erno Crisa). Her sexual awakening is the nucleus of the story, though the film strives hard to avoid overt eroticism, a surprising creative decision for a French film of the mid-1950s. Even so, the dialogue in Lady Chatterly's Lover was ripe enough to be heavily bowdlerized when the film was translated into English.