Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/29/18

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971)

Murray Head and Glenda Jackson in Sunday Bloody Sunday

Daniel Hirsh: Peter Finch
Alex Greville: Glenda Jackson
Bob Elkin: Murray Head
Mrs. Greville: Peggy Ashcroft
Mr. Harding: Tony Britton
Mr. Greville: Maurice Denham
Answering Service Lady: Bessie Love
Alva Hodson: Vivian Pickles
Bill Hodson: Frank Windsor

Director: John Schlesinger
Screenplay: Penelope Gilliatt
Cinematography: Billy Williams
Production design: Luciana Arrighi
Film editing: Richard Marden
Music: Ron Geesen

Seeing John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday so soon after Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017) made me question how far we have really come in the 46 years that separate the two films. In writing about the later film, I noted the compromises that filmmakers still feel constrained to make in mainstream movies that deal with same-sex relationships. But Schlesinger's film is blithely nonchalant about the fact that one of its protagonists is a gay man sleeping with a bisexual man who is also sleeping with a woman. I remember seeing Sunday Bloody Sunday when it first came out, and there were no ripples of shock running through the Dallas theater when Daniel kissed Bob. This was, after all, the early 1970s, when the full effect of the sexual revolution was making itself known; Stonewall was two years behind us, and even in Dallas being openly gay was possible if not always practical. So Sunday Bloody Sunday engendered little talk other than about the fine quality of the acting -- with some expressing reservations about Murray Head ("I don't know what either of them saw in him," said one mostly closeted gay friend) -- and the general feeling that it was a satisfying entertainment for grownups. I think the film has grown in stature over the years, as few of Schlesinger's movies have: Darling (1965) and Midnight Cowboy (1969) have dated badly. Much of the credit for Sunday Bloody Sunday must go to Penelope Gilliatt's screenplay, which seems to have held in check some of the sourness that afflicts those earlier films. Even in the scenes that satirize the chaotic permissiveness of the Hodson household, in which among other things the unruly children are allowed to smoke pot, the point of view is provided by Alex and Bob, who are babysitting these little monsters, providing them with the affection and attention they so clearly need. Granted, some of the maturity in the film's portrayal of then-unconventional sexuality may lie in the fact that it was made before AIDS tested the straight world's tolerance for nonconforming behavior. But having weathered that long crisis, we can now see Sunday Bloody Sunday for what it is: a film about love and lust and loneliness, and a very good and moving one at that.