I have the Criterion Collection edition of Sunday Bloody Sunday. It's in letterbox (very important here), since the film wasn't shot 1:1.33. Good color and sound. Somewhat funky whenever the scene turns dark or dim. Much of Billy Williams' photography is contrasty enough to look good on television.

Directed by John Schlesinger / Starring Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murray Head / Vectia Films LTD., United Artists / 1971 / 1:1.85

This one, I suppose, all depends on who you are. Sunday Bloody Sunday has become a cause célèbre over the years — but not for the same reasons it was controversial when it was released. In some ways, it showed people at the time where we were heading, and now, it can show us how we were back then. I have always admired the film not only for its agility in catching the details of life in early 70s Britain, but also because of the puzzle of the characters and the world that they live in.

The creators of Sunday Bloody Sunday have been fairly circumspect about revealing their motivations for making it. The writer of the script, Penelope Gilliatt, went to her grave without saying much about it. In her opening remarks of the published edition of her script, she merely states that while John Schlesinger, the director of the film, was shooting Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), she was asked to meet and listen to an idea he had. She says that it strangely paralleled a novel she had just written called A State of Change. The meeting went so well that she was asked to write the script.

© 1971 Vectia Films LTD.

The late 60s were a heady time for Schlesinger. He had emerged from relative obscurity to become one of the best-known directors working in Britain. His Billy Liar (1963) had put him on the map (in Britain), Darling (1965) was an international success, Far From the Madding Crowd seemed to be an attempt to fuse "art house" cinematic styles with the road-show "big film" requirements of the time — which flopped.

Perhaps in preparation for this, Schlesinger kept his head down by next adapting a strange contemporary American novel called Midnight Cowboy (1969). The mystery of Schlesinger was in full force at the time. I recall watching the Academy Award broadcast, and being surprised that Schlesinger wasn't there. He won for best director, and whoever accepted for him told the audience that he was in England prepping a film called Bloody Sunday, and some people in the audience laughing nervously . . . maybe they thought it was a horror film.

Traditionally, a director who had bagged an Oscar for directing the Best Picture winner would get to do pretty much whatever they wanted. There would be some studio who would lust after some of that Oscar gold, and would give the director a free ticket; look what happen after Michael Cimino did the same thing in the late 70s: Heaven's Gate (1980).

But for Schlesinger, Bloody Sunday (the first "Sunday" was added to the title by the marketing department after it was finished) was a dream project, totally in keeping with his temperament and inclinations. It is a small story, told without manipulation, but skillfully detailed. There are damn few films that attempt to capture the atmosphere of a typical weekend babysitting another family on the screen — it's very difficult stuff to do. But is it interesting? This, I think is both the key to its success and also its undoing, and why it is argued over today.

Writers are sometimes plagued with the desire to write stories having to do with epic, dramatic conflicts. Kazuo Ishiguro put it this way:

"I wanted to write the big novels of the day. It was difficult to write that kind of 'big novel' by just describing the life that I knew immediately around me. (My) life in London in the 1980s as it was then. Because this was safe, quiet, whatever. Surely for the big themes, you had to go to places like Eastern Europe, Africa. To some extent, we, in a very decedent way, felt envious towards writers who lived in oppressive regimes because they could just describe their everyday life, and it was immediately big and significant."

But there remains the niggling suspicion that the events and undercurrents of everyday life are dramatic — if one could only look close enough to discover what it is. The trouble is, when you are describing the kind of events which take place in Sunday Bloody Sunday, you are not talking about following Yuri and Lara through the Russian revolution in the film David Lean made of Doctor Zhivago (1965), you are talking about something else. It is tremendously risky to do the former — which is why hardly anyone ever does — because it runs counter to the mandate of "films as entertainment."

And this is what makes Sunday Bloody Sunday a bit of a conversation piece. Some find it a profound masterpiece, while others think it's the dullest and most dismissable film ever made. Even people who admire the film have trouble pinpointing what the film is about. Gays? Straights? Telephones?

I think that every good film has a reason for being. There is something that a given creative team is trying to accomplish in a film. What they want to say in a picture is sometimes pretty obvious, but most of the time, it is an ambition or a concept that is never really mentioned per se, but is there none the less. I have always felt that the underlying reason for Sunday Bloody Sunday is to tell a story where a gay man can be presented as a central character, show him as a gay man, doing the things a gay man would do. To do this in such an offhand manner, that this gay character would be demystified if not actually accepted by the audience (which is assumed to consist of a mixture of people).

© 1971 Vectia Films LTD.

I could be way off on this. Certainly no one from the film is going to read the above statement and say, "Yes! That is exactly what we were trying to do!" But I have always felt that this was the central idea behind the film.

Without stopping to look into film reference works, can you think of a gay character truthfully depicted in a movie prior to Sunday Bloody Sunday? One could say that the operative word here is truthfully. Personally, I think the most realistic gay character in film prior to this was one which was typically masked as being something else: Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins in George Cukor's film of My Fair Lady (1964).

But by 1970, things were beginning to change. The "now" cinema, a cinema which demanded challenging audience's expectations regarding almost everything, had almost taken over. In Arthur Penn's film of Little Big Man (1970), the hero is chased in the beginning of the story by an effeminate Indian who has a limp wrist, a lisp, and is presented initially as a comic figure. Later in the story, his character, without having to modify any of these characteristics, becomes one of the most sympathetic in the film.

Another approach was demonstrated in William Friedkin's film of The Boys in the Band (1970): Show the audience a whole range of gays characters from the flamboyant to the somnambulant, and focus the audience's attention around something they can relate to: in this case the examination of whether a "straight" man is denying his homosexuality.

So here is the trap. I have been tempted to say that Peter Finch's stratagem was to play Daniel Hirsh as just a "normal" guy. Let's just say that his portrayal is more "realistic." It's interesting to read in Finch's biography that the incredibly talented and relentlessly odd actor took over the role on almost no notice at all. Scotch actor Ian Bannen was originally cast and filming had begun, when Bannen took ill (or walked off, opinions on this vary). Finch was called by his agent, Olive Harding, who told him that the Janni/Schlesinger team was in a frightful jam, he flew to London, read the script, told them that it was "fabulous" and was shooting the next week. Finch just walked into the role with no preparation whatsoever.

It is typical of filmmaking techniques of the time that when Finch had trouble with the first scene they filmed, his objections were aired and catered to. They began shooting the film fairly much in sequence, beginning with demonstrating Doctor Hirsh and how he functions in this role. It was the scene where he is seated across his desk from a distraught woman (June Brown) who seems to be suffering from a terrible sex life with her husband. She is in tears, and when the Doctor tries to console her, she refuses his advice, saying, "What do you know about it? You're not married." The scene plays along in Daniel's consulting room on the ground floor of his house, while in the corridor, Bob (Murray Head) is entering. It is supposed to show us that Daniel is a responsible, sympathetic doctor.

But it didn't show him off in a very good light. The Woman, still in tears, has been lead ever so gently to the door and is about to leave, when Daniel says to her, "Try to hang on." How veddy English. Not the good Doctor's most shining moment.

Finch had trouble with the scene with the woman patient. Bannen had been having a great deal of trouble with it as well. But Finch suggested that this wasn't the place to begin. That Hirsh should be provided with a scene showing him in a better, more commanding situation. So Gilliatt wrote the scene which now opens the film, where he is examining an older gentleman (Richard Pearson) who is worried about a pain. The phone keeps ringing during this cloistered, personal scene, and Hirsh has to deal with it. Finch handles this scene so well, the embarrassment of having to beg for your lover to call back in a minute or two and all that this implies. I think it's just great. The compassion and sincerity written all over Finch's face as he tells the patient that he doesn't have cancer simply radiates from the screen.

And this is either something you have an interest in or you don't. The characters and situations displayed in the film aren't the most scintillating. There is a very definite feeling that when Daniel and Glenda Jackson's Alex character meet briefly at the end of the film, you get the sense that these two should get together somehow. This feeling has more to do with our expectations as to how films should normally play out than from anything else. Gilliatt has suggested that these two really belong together because they are the opposite of one another.

Alex complains to Bob that she cannot accept his flighty attentions to her. Like any modern hetro woman, she wants it all, saying that there are times when "Nothing is better than something." While Daniel, who has been somewhat inured to the loneliness of his life as a gay man, says that having Bob intermittently in his life, was fine, because "Something is better than nothing."

© 1971 Vectia Films LTD.

But despite this "meet cute" ending in view, the film ends with Bob obliquely committing to Alex (you have to look closely for it), and Daniel learning to speak Italian by himself. It's a sad ending, but truthful. The filmmakers aren't looking to say, "Consider the futility of this gay character's fulfillment, it's society's fault." They're just saying that this is a love affair that didn't work out.

So the film determinedly charts its own course, eschewing conventional cinematic formula to reach for something more complex. The only scene where they even remotely play to the gallery is the scene where Alex and Bob have taken the family they are babysitting for the weekend to the park. On the way home, the eldest girl is running after their dog, who runs out into the street and is hit by a truck. It's a very intense scene. The girl begins crying, Alex is yelling at her from across the road, the driver of the truck is yelling at the girl, Bob is yelling at the truck driver, and the whole scene modulates very quickly into something else. That Alex is utterly thankful that the girl hadn't been killed, Bob and the truck driver begin to look after the dog, while Alex leads the children home.

I especially admire the following scene. Bob puts Alex to bed for a rest, and he begins to draw with all of the kids gathered around at the kitchen table. In Alex's sleepy haze she imagines the girl having been struck by the car, and this leads her to think of an occasion when her father left the house during the blitz without his gas mask. . . All of this staged with the utmost brilliance and commitment from every department.

There are so many scenes I admire and find interesting in this film. All of the scenes with the chaotic family Alex and Bob are stuck with. Daniel's run-in with the Scottish one night stand (Jon Finch) and all of the drugged out casualties at the all night chemist's. The return of Alex to her apartment with all the mess she left behind still there just as she had left it. The list goes on and on.

To me, Sunday Bloody Sunday is a great film because it is the best of this type of filmmaking, where you are concerned with conveying people and what they are like and the atmospheres and the textures of their lives. I like this kind of filmmaking. There used to be a big market for this type of thing. United Artists' released the film in what they called the "class" situations in all the major cities, then hyped it to the Motion Picture Academy membership like mad, and the film got nominations for Finch, Jackson, Schlesinger and Gilliatt. The film ran for months and months and months at a theatre in Beverly Hills. It was good business.

This film is somewhat of a litmus test for me to gauge what a person's taste in films is. If they like or admire it, then we have something in common. If they think it "sucked" because they thought it was boring or had no story, then, uhh, that certainly tells me something about them. They don't make 'em like Sunday Bloody Sunday anymore. They never did, really. But it continues to serve as an inspiration to those of us who would rather see this kind of thing when we go to see a film.

6.08.02