“Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971)

ABOVE: John Schlesinger directs Glenda Jackson (Alex Greville) and Murray Head (Bob Elkin) in Sunday Bloody Sunday, 1971, UK.
I'm surprised I'd never seen this before. I watched it last night on a DVD from the Criterion Collection.

This is a descriptive review, way more than four sentences, but with no actual spoilers.
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Sunday Bloody Sunday: "Is something better than nothing?"

Strip away Sunday Bloody Sunday's place in the history of film and sexuality––
–– director John Schlesinger's triumph with Midnight Cowboy (1969) had earned him, a gay man, the freedom to film a man being sexual in a natural, everyday way with both of his male and female lovers (kissing them, holding them naked in bed);
––just four years after the UK decriminalized sex between men; the camera operator couldn't stand to look and turned away from the two men kissing*--
set aside this important social history and there remains a story that asks a question for the ages:
Should I stay or should I go?

Two Londoners are knowingly both sleeping with a younger man, Bob (Murray Head). More, they are both in love with him, a charming, affectionate, talented artist who expects he's on the cusp of a career breakthrough.

"We're free to do what we want", Bob says to his woman lover.
"A lot of people do things they don't want to do," she replies.
Not Bob.
Not because he has a superior personality, liberated from bourgeois silliness, though it's implied he might think so, but because he doesn't have to. He controls a limited commodity––access to his own young and sexy self.

Bob's aboveboard, free-spirited approach to what we'd now call polyamory is an emotional pyramid scheme--it pays off most for the person at the apex––him––and everyone lower down gets less.
Maybe they're fine with it, maybe they're not. He's never intentionally unkind, he simply considers other people not his problem.

Below: Bob (left) and Daniel hold each other.
Bob is loving but refuses commitment and walks away from conflict.

The middle-aged man can accept the limitations of loving Bob with some equanimity. He, Dr. Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch), is shown to have a full life as a medical doctor, with friends and an extended family. He attends and is deeply moved by his nephew's bar mitzvah, and he celebrates afterward in a large, warm gathering.

The woman, Alex (Glenda Jackson), suffers more from the limitations of her lover––and her life. We hear repeatedly that England is in an economic crisis, and in Alex's work at a job-placement service she's unable to help an older man who's been laid off. When she visits her upper class parents, they sit far apart at a long, polished table, and her mother (Peggy Ashcroft) suggests, kindly, that Alex should invite her divorced husband over.

The only friends we meet of Alex's are a family of leftists, for whom she house sits. Their moral compass, like Bob's, bobs on good luck. 
SBS is not a judgmental film--usually. It presents the characters fondly, even Bob. But these are exposed as hypocrites. The camera focuses on a famine-relief poster that hangs above their fridge (below), for instance, and inside the well-stocked fridge we see the "two pounds of raw meat" the wife has instructed Alex to feed their dog.

The set design and set dressing is fantastic, a real pleasure (production designer Lucian Arrighi talks about the pleasure of doing them, on the Criterion DVD). (Clothes too.) I wanted close-ups of all the fabrics (the paisley draped over the couch, above), wallpaper, crockery, books, and art all over...

The telephone is a key link, and we see the internal workings of London's telephone system. Alex and Daniel share not only a lover but a telephone answering service, with messages taken by a woman at a switchboard (silent film star Bessie Love**), whom they converse with. "How's the traffic?")

BELOW: Dr Hirsh in cool grays--his desk with telephone and Japanese netsuke:

Exterior London scenes feature too--you can see screenshots with locations identified at Reelstreets.

And food. On the lonely weekend, Daniel eats candied fruit from a Harrods box; Alex makes fudge and eats it while she cries.

My favorite--in her slovenly studio apartment (gorgeous! more books! carpets!), Alex spoons instant coffee into a blue-and-white china cup, fills it with hot water from the kitchen tap, and drinks some in a rush.


Do we ever see Bob eat or drink?
Oh, yes--he drinks a glass of milk.
But not alone.

Gay love onscreen isn't generally considered scandalous anymore; with the Internet and remote work, Sundays aren't the "bloody" wasteland of the week anymore; but people (we) are still vulnerable to loneliness and still asking, How little can I live with? How much can I take?

Is something better than nothing?
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* Story of the cameraman from a good article on the Criterion channel: "Sunday Bloody Sunday: Something Better" (2012), by Ian Buruma (JS's nephew, as it happens).

**Some other small parts include a patient played by June Brown--famous as Dot Cotton in Eastenders; Vivian Pickles (the mother in Harold & Maude), as the leftist friend with the dog;
and Daniel Day Lewis in his first screen appearance (of a few seconds) as a boy who scratches a car with a broken bottle, below.

I guess I'd give Sunday Bloody Sunday 4 out of 5 stars.
It's very well done--the acting, the visuals--it's a pleasure to watch, maybe that's my favorite thing (the interiors, but also exteriors of London). The screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt is good--but... it's all a little cold, a little remote. I suppose it's supposed to be, but that left me not caring much about anyone.

And it's hard when the object of desire gives you an unpleasant feeling. I believe Alex and Daniel were really into Bob--sex with him looked like it'd be great--but we the viewers aren't getting it, so it's an intellectual assent on our part, which isn't going to be as strong as if we fell in love (with any of the characters, actually).

But definitely I recommend the film--for the history of England, sexuality in film, and the things--like the curtains. I want those curtains!