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84 | Sight&Sound | May 2020SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY
John Schlesinger; UK 1971; BFI; Region B Blu-ray; Certificate
15; 110 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras: The Starfish (1950, 45
minutes); Sunday in the Park (1956, 15 minutes): new
interviews with star Murray Head, cinematographer Billy
Williams; on-set interview with Glenda Jackson; 1981 appeal
for blood donors by Jackson and Ernie Wise; 1977 audio
interview with Schlesinger; commentary by critic Amy
Simmons; on-set photos, promotional and press stills.
Reviewed by Nick James
What do we make of an enigmatic love-triangle
drama whose opening line is “Now tell me if you
feel anything at all?” It’s like a challenge to the
viewer. The speaker is Daniel Hirsch, a gay GP,
played to imperturbable perfection by Peter Finch.
He’s examining a comfortably-off middle-aged
male patient who’s convinced he’s holding back
bad news. They’re interrupted by a telephone
call which energises Daniel; but the clue to the
film’s dominant quizzical tone is not the call, it’s
the patient’s deep scepticism about his future.
On the line is Daniel’s lover Bob Elkin (Murray
Head) who – we quickly discover, in the film’snaturally passionate as any can be. As Simon
McCallum puts it in his excellent booklet
essay: “What a galvanising affirmation to
queer viewers unused to seeing themselves on
screen in any recognisable form.” The mood
of the capital seeped in through the six-month
shoot. Locations – a big house on Wandsworth
Common, a doctor’s surgery in Kensington, a
synagogue in Hendon (where secular Jew Daniel
attends a bar mitzvah blessing) and the environs
of Greenwich Park – all add to this feeling of
celebrating and commiserating with the joys
and sorrows of a particular time and place.
Working from a script by the novelist and
critic Penelope Gilliatt that probes for the
sore spots, Schlesinger cares as much about
unblinking portraiture as about politics. In a film
of wary outsiders, Jackson’s Alex is a privileged
but unmoored soul, thrown by the way Bob’s
loving nature switches to indifference on a
dime. She ponders him as if he’s an intellectual
problem, which – given that he represents sex (as
Schlesinger is reported to have said on set), givenmatter-of-fact way – is also the lover of Alex
Greville (Glenda Jackson), an upper-middle-
class divorcee. These are both real, affectionate
relationships but they also encompass illusory
ideas projected on to Bob by his lovers, which he
dispels with his deliberately wilful behaviour.
When they’re gazing at this free spirit – a youth
with a Botticelli Venus smile, who lives each
day as it comes, with no thought for the future
and with a tendency to disappear the minute
any real difficulty rears its head – you can see
scepticism and adoration mingle in their eyes.
Clearly, Bob has some kinship to Terence
Stamp’s house guest in Pasolini’s Theorem (1968),
who seduces every member of a bourgeois
household, including the father. But unlike
Pasolini, John Schlesinger isn’t looking to make
a parable of Marxist agency. Rather, Bob is the
desirable bisexual Other created by the zeitgeist
of London in 1970. Sunday Bloody Sunday
strives to reflect a pivotal moment of cultural
change in a city in the grip of economic crisis,
with strife between government and unions,
‘Swinging London’ on the wane, and city gents
still wearing bowler hats. It is captured by the
by, in newspapers and radio reports and in
brilliant short scenes of London nightlife.
The change is crystallised in an unprecedented
moment for mainstream British cinema, when
Daniel greets Bob at his house with a kiss asJackson’s dilemma: Glenda Jackson as the privileged but unmoored Alex in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)John Schlesinger’s drama about
a bisexual love triangle is both
a post-Swinging London period
piece and curiously modernLONDON PARTICULARS
The nature of love and
aloneness, how we navigate
between these poles, are the
unsentimental mysteries here
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