Sunday Bloody Sunday

After reading about John Schlesinger's death I felt the need to revisit some of his considerable opus. I couldn't decide where to start, Billy Liar, Darling, Far From The Madding Crowd or Sunday Bloody Sunday. If a film could really penetrate the brain of a character, Sunday Bloody Sunday, showed it to me. I saw into Peter Finch's soul to such degree I was kind of embarrassed and compelled at the same time. Murray Head, personifies what Finch's character longs for and is kind of horrified by. Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch play the imperfect angles of this painfully human triangle. The charming shallowness of Murray Head's character made me understand the complexity of knowing and accepting all of our darkest contradictions. John Schlesinger was a great artist.

I first saw this at 17 in 1971 and was of course struck by the frankness in the portrayal of the relationship between Murray Head and Peter Finch. People in the suburban audience where I saw it SCREAMED when the two men first kissed. (Someone screamed at a director's screening of the film, much to Schlesinger's consternation. It turned out to be Finch's wife.) One of the reviewers complained about Head's acting, but he is playing a very shallow character whose youth and beauty attract Glenda Jackson and Finch. The film holds up really well today with its complex characters and lack of stereotypes and simple judgments about people. There is also enormous charm and humor in the film, especially in the supporting players. The imagery in the film stays with me--the dog killed by a car, the Mummy's milk in the fridge, the inner workings of telephone switching, driving through the rain in London, men and women making love, precocious children smoking dope, and so much more. It feels like life. It also made me a lifelong fan of Finch, who went on to win a posthumous Oscar for "Network," and Jackson, a two-time Oscar winner, who represents Hampstead in Parliament now. Probably my favorite film of all time.

This is the story of a love triangle between Dr. Hirsh (Peter Finch), Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson), and Bob Elkin (Murray Head). Hirsh is a dignified Jewish doctor, Alex is a frustrated office worker, and Elkin is an artist specializing in kinetic sculpture. Both Hirsh and Alex are in love with Elkin and he reciprocates in turn to each of them individually.

If being dated is judged by the physical environment of the early 1970s (dial land-line phones, 33 rpm records, antiquated fuse boxes, dated hair styles, and so forth), then, yes, this is dated. But the movie is not dated in terms of its themes. I think this could play out now pretty much as presented here, even in our somewhat more enlightened times. It would not be out of the ordinary for a dignified middle-aged doctor to withhold public advertisement of his sexual orientation, but none-the-less privately engage in a homosexual relationship. In fact it would not be all that unusual for such a person to remain in the closet. Consider that sodomy was a crime in fourteen U.S. states until a Supreme Court decision invalidated such laws in 2003, in a 5-4 vote no less. Homosexual acts had been decriminalized in England but a few years before this movie was made. And we have a current justice on the U.S. Supreme Court who even now, in 2012, makes such statements as, "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?"

Where the movie is perhaps even ahead of its time is in presenting all three participants as accepting themselves for what they are and honestly dealing with their situation without serious guilt or dramatic jealousies. The difficulties of sustaining such a ménage à trois are realistically detailed.

I thought the beautifully filmed Bar Mitzvah was crucial to the story. Until that event I was viewing Hirsh as an essentially lonely person, but seeing that he had a community of relatives and associates who respected him disabused me of that notion. And Hirsh did not view himself in an unfavorable light. The scene that had Finch talking directly to the audience at the end was a great piece of acting; when he so simply and sincerely said, "We had something," I really felt for the guy. Glenda Jackson fans will not be disappointed with her performance. She has a wonderful way of saying things without speaking a word.

I rather like how the story begins in the middle of things--it takes very little imagination to see how this situation could have evolved. What did Alex and Hirsh see in the shallow and ambitious Elkin? You don't have to have lived too long before the questions about romantic relations, "What does he see in her," or, "What does she see in him," occur. In this case, I suppose the question of "What does he see in him," should be added. Questions of love and sex are not easily explained.

The way we get to know each person in increments, with some limited use of flashbacks, I found to be effective.

You spend your time flitting from one nest to another, you kind of toss a coin, follow your nose, to find what you discover, could be Alex for a while, then might be Daniel's time to smile, the best of both worlds if you get time to recover. Alas, both partners find it trickier than you, as you leap from pad to pad one feels eschewed, because they want you to themselves, want you to put back on the shelves, the other copy, and close the door, as you withdraw.

A little bit dated but three fine performances that are as engaging as they were back then, although you may have a stronger connection if there are similarities in the characters plights that link to your own tale.

Perhaps due to the global discontent brought on by the Viet Nam War and then the Russian-Afgan War, the early 1970' saw the end of a period of idealism and the dawn of an age of realism, far too real in many instances. Movies were no exception to this general social trend in American and European society.

When "Sunday Bloody Sunday" was released in 1971, it was a major jolt to the "film world." There, in all its wide screen splendor and glory was a major production with a major league cast and state of the are writing, direction, and production that flaunted as comonplace the unspoken trio of adult sexual taboo: Homosexuality, Bisexuality and Insest. And this was all presented in an apparently normal setting with apparently normal persons who could be, God forbid, us.

This was no British working class low budget avant guard "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" about the people who we had too often become and through familiarity learned to despised. This was the Upper middle class world where we all imagined ourselves eventually destined to live. And the real shock of it was that we weren't repulsed or appalled. We were if anything, drawn to it. The characters are intelligent, educated, sympathetic, honest to a reasonable degree, at least with each other and very pretty to look at. The situations are all too real. The problem is that "Sunday Bloody Sunday is "life as you find it" and not "life as you'd wish it to be."

Today the shock is gone. It is a beautifully smooth and taught production to be sure, but no longer anything new. Still, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is one of the movies that changed the movies, as well as American and European Society in the middle of the second half of the Twentieth century. Don't miss a chance to see it.