John Schlesinger (1971)

It’s rather startling to read contemporary reviews of Sunday Bloody Sunday that perceive a shift in John Schlesinger’s film-making style and praise his new-found restraint.  Jan Dawson in Sight and Sound felt that Schlesinger had ‘at last discovered the virtues of understatement’, Pauline Kael in the New Yorker that he had ‘lost his stridency’.  Sunday Bloody Sunday may seem gentle compared with Schlesinger’s previous movie, Midnight Cowboy (1969), but his direction is less subtle than in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967).  Jan Dawson presumably meant what she wrote – I’m less sure that Pauline Kael did.  You sense that her interesting, ambivalent review of Sunday Bloody Sunday is a rare instance of Kael herself under restraint.  In those days, she shared reviewing duties on the New Yorker with Penelope Gilliatt.  Kael covered ‘The Current Cinema’ from October through to the following March.  Gilliatt, who reviewed from April to September inclusive, also wrote the screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Set in London in 1970, the film spans ten days (starting on a Friday, ending a week on Sunday) in the lives of one woman and two men.  The woman is Alex Greville (mid-thirties, divorced, no kids, works in personnel management).  The men are Daniel Hirsh (fiftyish, a doctor and a bachelor) and Bob Elkin (twenty-something, a kinetic sculptor).  Alex (Glenda Jackson) is heterosexual.  Daniel (Peter Finch) is homosexual.  Bob (Murray Head) is bisexual and in relationships with both Alex and Daniel.  He divides his time between them – an arrangement with which he’s entirely comfortable but which presents his two older lovers with various difficulties and varying degrees of anxiety.   By the end of the film, Bob has gone to work in New York.  Both relationships are over, at least for the time being.

The longer Pauline Kael’s review of the film goes on, the more she struggles to find good things to say.  By the time she’s in the home straight, she is more candid, and accurate, about Sunday Bloody Sunday.  The scenes, she eventually says, ‘are so tight and utilitarian’ that, when Daniel goes to his nephew’s bar-mitzvah and ‘the movie lingers on the episode’, Kael feels after it’s over that it ‘was richer in meaning than anything else in the film, because I didn’t know exactly why I was seeing it‘.  In her last paragraph, Kael accuses Schlesinger of using ‘his technique so that it’s just about impossible for you to have any reaction … that he hasn’t decreed you should’.  She’s right:  the direction is seriously over-emphatic.

Things that start off in the margins of a scene, and which might be interesting if that’s where they stayed, are pushed into the foreground and at the audience.  On the first Saturday evening, Daniel (Peter Finch) goes into an all-night chemist’s in Piccadilly.  The pharmacy is filled with drug addicts:  Schlesinger keeps the camera on them, and stresses Daniel’s sad compassion for their plight, for too long.  The unhelpful dispensing chemist is played by an actor (Ellis Dale) whose creepy, forbidding appearance contributes to a sequence that’s nightmarish in a glib, heavy-handed way.  A few days later, a marital row among guests at a party at Daniel’s home becomes the focus of attention in order to make clear that a drunken, bellyaching wife (Caroline Blakiston) is grotesque and pathetic.

There are incidental bits other (and, thankfully, shorter) than the bar-mitzvah that are emotionally complex and work well.  Daniel’s conversation in his surgery with a woman patient (June Brown) is one such.  Another involves Alex and one of her clients, a middle-aged business executive who’s lost his job.  After his appointment with Alex at her office, they go back to her flat and sleep together.  Tony Britton is good in the role – he gives the man a convincing blend of civility and what-the-hell neediness – but the episode would be stronger if Schlesinger spent less time in Alex’s office, making clear that the night is young.

Pauline Kael, throughout her review, takes care to blame the director rather than the writer for the shortcomings of Sunday Bloody Sunday but Gilliatt’s screenplay was seriously overrated.  The praise for it was due largely to what sometimes gets described as ‘novelistic’ qualities – a posh way of saying there’s more dialogue than you often get in a film and that it’s spoken by intellectually bright people.  The dialogue leaves you in no doubt that Penelope Gilliatt is smart too but there’s an awareness of that in her writing which I don’t like.  The first weekend in the story involves Alex and Bob looking after the children and dog of Alex’s friends, Alva and Bill Hodson (Vivian Pickles and Frank Windsor), while they’re away at a conference with an academic friend (Thomas Baptiste), who’s also part of the Hodsons’ singular ménage.  Alva and Bill are cartoon liberal intellectuals.  They let their brood of small children smoke pot.  The milk in the fridge is Alva’s breast milk for feeding the youngest child.  The professor-in-residence is black.  He’s a kind of exotic house pet – and the family dog is called Kenyatta.

As social satire, this is poor stuff (the breast milk joke is especially obvious) but the ill-fated weekend at the Hodsons exposes larger weaknesses in the screenplay, and its conception of Alex in particular.   On the Saturday morning, Bob goes off to spend part of the day with Daniel.  Alex is surprised and (after Bob has gone) upset.  The viewer too is surprised:  we understand it’s what Bob usually does but is this a usual weekend?  Alex doesn’t accuse him of breaking a promise so it seems she didn’t insist to him beforehand that, having to look after several children, she would need him there continuously.  Yet we’ve already got the message that her uneasy, demanding nature is a source of tension between her and Bob.  She clearly has little experience or confidence with kids:  she would never have assumed, without asking beforehand, that Bob would do what she needed him to do.

On the Sunday morning, Bob and Alex take the children and the dog to Hampstead Heath.  It’s the most relaxed part of the weekend until Lucy (Kimi Tallmadge), the eldest child, scampers away with Kenyatta, who’s off the lead.  Lucy runs out into the road and narrowly avoids being knocked down by a lorry.  The dog isn’t so lucky and is killed instantly.  The sudden irruption of death is shocking and upsetting but the aftermath, both immediate and later in the day, is remarkably unconvincing.  Alex, horrified and thrown off balance by what’s occurred, yells at Lucy.   Schlesinger’s staging of this outburst is bizarrely artificial:  he has the woman stand on the opposite side of the road from the child to rail at her stupidity.   Only once she’s begun to calm down do we see Alex hugging and comforting the weeping little girl.

Back at home that afternoon, the children draw pictures and Lucy’s represents Kenyatta’s death.  One of her siblings says regretfully but calmly that they won’t see the dog again.  When the parents return that evening, Alex apologises to Alva and Bill.  Alva says kindly, ‘It must have been awful for you’.  Bill adds complacently that they’ll get another dog for Lucy’s birthday.  That’s a cheap shot on Penelope Gilliatt’s part but even if the parents can be matter of fact about Kenyatta, it’s incredible that their children shed no further tears that day.  It may be part of their daily routine, as Lucy explains to Alex and Bob, to watch their avant-garde parents having a bath together.  The sudden, harrowing loss of a pet animal is not something the kids are used to.

This evasion vitiates the film’s presentation of the Hodsons’ children.  It’s a pity because this, in other respects, is one of the most acute elements of Sunday Bloody Sunday.  A combination of precocity and the liberty hall regime of their family life makes these kids intimidating when they’re sniggering at an adult’s expense.  Lucy is particularly interesting.  As the eldest, she’s expected to keep an eye on her younger siblings – to behave like an assistant adult.  Kimi Tallmadge, under Schlesinger’s sensitive direction, conveys a good sense of how this role conflicts with Lucy’s childishness – especially when she feels she’s not being paid sufficient attention or when actual grown-ups have taken over the job of supervising her brothers and sister.   (It’s this that prompts her running off with the dog.)  When Bob disappears to see Daniel, Lucy shows a credible heartless fascination with Alex’s unsuccessful attempts to conceal her tears.

The affair between the two men in Sunday Bloody Sunday was praised in 1971 for its lack of guilt-ridden angst – for seeming easier and more natural than the relationship between the woman and the man.  It has to be, of course:  Daniel is a less assertive, more accepting individual than Alex.  Even so, the praise was fair enough at a time when a gay relationship on the screen, however sympathetically treated, was liable to be a tortured business.  This is still the most striking element of the film – perhaps the only aspect of its modernity that doesn’t look dated now.   But the strength of the Daniel part of the story comes at the expense of the Alex part:  her character is constructed in terms of her dissimilarities from Daniel.  One episode is particularly baffling.  Alex, on one of the weekday evenings, goes to her parents’ place for dinner.  Her father (Maurice Denham) leaves the dining table to deal with a business matter.  Alex, after delivering a cup of coffee to him in another room, returns to her mother (Peggy Ashcroft) and angrily asks how she puts up with her husband’s cavalier treatment.  Mrs Greville defends her marriage:  ‘You think it’s nothing – but it’s not nothing’.  She accuses Alex of expecting too much.  Referring to her divorce and her love life, Mrs Greville tells her daughter, ‘You keep throwing in your hand because you haven’t got the whole thing.  There is no whole thing – you have to make it work’.

There’s no doubting the weight given to this pronouncement.  Schlesinger subsequently said it was the most important line in a film in which compromise is a central theme.  Yet it doesn’t make sense.  It’s not clear whether her mother is aware of the nature of Alex’s relationship with Bob.  In any case, since the survival of that relationship depends on sharing him with someone else, it’s a bit much for Schlesinger and Gilliatt, through Mrs Greville, to accuse Alex of unreasonable expectations:  Daniel is a much more unusual lover in that he’s more or less satisfied with his share of Bob.  (This works out at less than fifty per cent, given how much Bob seems to keep for himself.)  ‘There is no whole thing’ clearly refers to the mother’s own marriage and perhaps her daughter’s failed marriage – Mrs Greville surely can’t be talking about Alex’s current affair.  The main effect of this maternal advice is to remind you how puzzling it is that the supposedly uncompromising Alex would have been willing to enter into the arrangement she has with Bob.

Glenda Jackson is very good in Alex’s tearful exchange with Lucy and, on the whole, registers most effectively when Alex shows a softer side.  This is partly because Alex relatively rarely does so, partly because these moments contrast also with the trademark compelling asperity of the actress playing her.  Sunday Bloody Sunday is undoubtedly Peter Finch’s film.  He gives Daniel warmth and a gentle melancholy; he’s also easily believable as a GP.  The movie ends with Daniel breaking off from his teach-yourself-Italian lesson (for a trip to Italy which he now knows won’t be with Bob) and speaking to camera:

‘When you’re at school and you want to quit, people say ‘You’re going to hate it out in the world.’ Well, I didn’t believe them and I was right.  When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to be grown up, and they said, ‘Childhood is the best time of your life.’   Well, it wasn’t.   And now, I want his company and they say, ‘What’s half a loaf? You’re well shot of him’; and I say, ‘I know that… but I miss him, that’s all’ and they say, ‘He never made you happy’ and I say, ‘But I am happy, apart from missing him’ …’

It’s an indication of how Finch subtly dominates the film that we quickly accept the sudden breaking of the fourth wall.  Once Daniel’s begun to speak to us, it seems natural:  we feel that the story has been all about him all along.  (It helps too that the above is one of Penelope Gilliatt’s best bits of writing.)

Finch and Jackson have only scene together.  It turns out that Daniel is also a friend of the Hodsons.  When Alex arrives at their house on the second Sunday, she realises Daniel is there.   Although Bob has left both of them by now, Alex marks time outside the house until Daniel leaves.  They catch sight of each other as he does so.  She knows who he is.  He realises who she must be.   This brief meeting is finely played:  when Alex approaches Daniel to say hello, Glenda Jackson’s manner is just right – sheepish, rueful, amused.  As for Bob, he’s little more than young and good-looking (though it’s an effective touch that one or two of his kinetic sculptures are surprisingly beautiful).  Perhaps these qualities are meant to be sufficient explanation of why Alex and Daniel are mad about the boy but it’s not persuasive, especially as Murray Head is charmless.  On the other hand, his weakness as an actor probably helps:  a stronger presence than Head might have turned Bob’s careless selfishness into a harsher, more troubling element than it actually is.

In spite of Peter Finch’s and Glenda Jackson’s great skill, you’re always aware that the characters of Daniel and Alex have been put together for us to compare and contrast.  Jan Dawson recognises ‘the script’s main flaw, a tendency to schematism’.  She cites by way of example ‘the meticulously tidy bachelor listening to classical music in his Georgian house, while the untidy divorcée scatters cigarette ash over her disordered studio’.  But she finds that the flaw is redeemed ‘by [the] constant virtue of never spelling anything out’.   I don’t understand how Dawson could think this.  Gilliatt and/or Schlesinger spell out these domestic contrasts in capital letters.  The squalor of Alex’s apartment is crudely overdone; at one point, she uses her heel to grind the contents of an overturned ashtray into the carpet.   Even the flashbacks experienced by the two characters are mechanically complementary.  On the first Sunday afternoon, Alex’s mind drifts into a traumatic childhood memory – the terror she experienced, during the war, when her father left for work one day without his gas mask.  These images in her head are mixed up with the morning’s events involving Lucy and Kenyatta and the combination is all too convenient.   When Daniel, during his nephew’s ceremony, recalls his own bar-mitzvah, the flashback is virtually unnecessary.  The memory contains nothing dramatic.  Besides, Peter Finch’s face has already made clear that Daniel is reflecting on the persistence of Jewish religious tradition in his life.

In Midnight Cowboy, the sympathetic treatment of the two principals contrasts starkly with the garish presentation of a New York teeming with people who are physically repulsive or morally hideous or both.  There is, though, a rationale for Schlesinger’s misanthropy in that film:  the unlovely people are part of the nightmare being experienced by Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo.  The look of the all-night chemist recalls faces from Midnight Cowboy but Sunday Bloody Sunday‘s tendency to make minor characters one-dimensionally nasty, ridiculous or pitiable is usually more feebly unpleasant.  Examples include a busybody telephone answering-service operator (Bessie Love) and the posh retired military chap (George Belbin) who lives next door to Daniel and, like a vicar in a Carry On film, takes the News of the World.  Schlesinger’s sure touch as a director of actors deserts him in the case of a young man, played by Jon Finch, who accosts Daniel in central London, claiming to recognise him from (it’s implied) a previous sexual encounter.  The character appears in the credits as ‘Scotsman’ but Jon Finch can’t do a Scottish accent to save his life.   It’s a mystery why Schlesinger let him persist in trying.  It’s only a cameo:  the man doesn’t need to be Scottish.

Early on in the film, we hear, playing in taxis and cars, snippets of radio news bulletins with a common theme:  emergency meetings called by the prime minister to discuss the worsening economic situation etc.  Schlesinger sensibly drops this weak and smug state-of-the-nation commentary after a while – although Sunday Bloody Sunday could now be seen as prescient in anticipating successive British economic crises later in the decade.  The film’s striking title is forward-looking in a different way.  The words ‘Bloody Sunday’ were well and truly hijacked, within a few months of the film’s release, by the events in Northern Ireland on 30 January 1972.  Final point on things to come:  a fourteen-year-old Daniel Day Lewis makes a brief appearance – his first on screen – as one of a trio of teenage boys vandalising a car.

25 November 2015