"The Trespasser" is a 90-minute film made for television, directed by Colin Gregg, with Pauline Moran and Dinah Stabb. An adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's second novel, it has a much simpler plot than, for example, Women in Love:
Violinist Siegmund (Alan Bates) falls in love with his pupil Helena (Pauline Moran), in part because of her big dark eyes and general Pre-Raphaelite aura, in part because at seventeen he married a wife who has, in middle age, turned into a harridan and a slob (yes--it's in the book). But he loves his children, and feels hopelessly trapped by life and fate.
Helena persuades him to come away for a few days in the sun, and they have a romantic idyll (which is actually more rapturously Laurentian in the novel) on the Isle of Wight. Siegmund was depressed to begin with, and as the time comes to return to London he is heart-sick. At home, his family, even his favorite little daughter, ignore him utterly, and the ending is a tragedy (somewhat contrived, but a tragedy nonetheless).
Gregg, in compressing the story into a short film, lost some of the gravitas that made the book compelling. My ability to be objective is compromised by familiarity with the novel, but it seems possible to miss the attempt at salvation and sexual awakening that Lawrence wrote about.
I don't dislike this film, but it leaves me unsatisfied: I want it to be more tragic, or I want the two lovers to be happier while they are together. Both seem tense and . . . neurasthenic . . . throughout.

Two minor, but amusing, points:

1) It's a mercy that Bates doesn't bring the fiddle on holiday, since he (in spite of his musical family, and unlike Pauline Moran) is unconvincing as a master string player. The camera averts its eye from time to time, in the early musical scenes.

2) To this beach-lover, it is very itchy business to watch the fully-clad Edwardians lying in the sand under a hot sun, in shoes and socks; obligatory long white dress; shirt and vest. |||

Karen Rappaport
October 1998