"The Chatterley Affair" (Acorn Media) is a very smart BBC drama that takes us back to 1960's landmark obscenity trial regarding D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

The TV film opens with a few sarcastic lines from poet Philip Larkin, who once wrote that sex began in England sometime between the "Chatterley" trial and the emergence of the Beatles a few years later.

Andrew Davies' very clever script mixes fact and fiction, showing us two jurors (Louise Delamere and Rafe Spall) who begin to rethink their own sex lives as they listen to the courtroom testimony.

Although Lawrence was widely considered one of the greatest novelists of the century, "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was banned for 30 years in England due to its sexual content.

Foreign versions of the text were snuck into the country, but Penguin Books was determined to publish a paperback edition that would be available to the general public at a reasonable price.

A 1959 ruling that exempted books with redeeming artistic elements from existing obscenity statutes pushed Penguin to test the waters with the Lawrence novel.

The novel was still banned in the United States at that time. The Penguin victory opened the doors to the much franker treatment of sex in the novels and films that followed.

At one point in "The Chatterley Affair," a juror asks, "Is this how we want to start the 1960s?" and, of course, we know now that the ruling would prove to be a key element in the wave of adult material

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that followed. Through the use of the fictional juror couple, Davies is able to explore the personal impact of challenging literature on a reader.

The divorced woman and the married man must decide if "Lady Chatterley's Lover" might "deprave and corrupt" the average reader and if reading the book in the jury room is having that impact on them.

"The Chatterley Affair" includes frank treatment of sex which is in keeping with the content of Lawrence's revolutionary novel.

The film presents both sides of the obscenity debate and shows that the issues in that 1960 court are still being grappled with, but on a much larger canvas that includes instant worldwide distribution of words and images. ("The Chatterley Affair" has not been rated but would probably receive an R for nudity and profanity.) New on video:

HEADING SOUTH (Netflix Video) — The most provocative movie of last summer — a French-English drama that deals with sex tourism in Third World countries.

What gives the film its extra punch is the fact that the tourists are women from the United States and Europe who spend their summers at a beach resort in Haiti with paid male companions.

Charlotte Rampling stars as Ellen, a French professor from Boston, who has spent many summers at the Haitian resort and seems to have no hang-ups about the double-life she leads.

The movie never turns sentimental but we can see in Rampling's intense and multi-layered performance that Ellen is not as tough a cookie as she claims to be.

Director Laurent Cantet respects his audience by laying out lots of characters and material and leaving judgments to the viewer.

(Rated R for partial nudity, sexual situations.)

"The Chatterley Affair" is now available on DVD. "Heading South" will be released on Tuesday.