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.

Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916)

At the New York Film Festival, Ang Lee recently premiered his new movie, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which he shot in 3D with 4k resolution at 140 frames per second -- the usual frame rate for movies is 24 frames per second. The result is said to be "hyperreal," but almost all the critics who saw it said the technology was a distraction, involving the audiences much more in the visuals than in the story. One critic commented that "the distracting unpleasantness of [Lee's] movie's highly attuned visual clarity makes for an undiscerning and artificial experience the eye just won't follow." Watching the hundred-year-old Intolerance last night, I wondered if viewers of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in 2116 might find such criticisms of its technological innovations as shortsighted as we now do those of audiences who objected to D.W. Griffith's narrative innovations in Intolerance. Griffith told four stories in his film, each set in a different era, and constantly cut between each of them. We're used to that way of finding a unity in multiple stories, having seen it in films as various as Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) and Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999), to name a couple of more recent examples, but audiences in 1916 were unready for Griffith's attempt at it, and the hugely ambitious and expensive film was a calamitous flop that the director paid for throughout the rest of his life. To some extent I sympathize with those original audiences: The constant cutting from story to story is often frustrating and annoying, but not so much because of the cutting as because half of the stories are not well-told. The scenes from the life of Jesus are too familiar and too scattershot to develop any dramatic tension, and the part that deals with the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre is muddled by a lack of involvement with the characters. (Each sequence, incidentally, features a performer who would last well into the sound era: Bessie Love, wearing an improbable pointed headdress, plays the bride of Cana, and a surprisingly slim Eugene Pallette plays Prosper, who meets his fate on St. Bartholomew's Day.) The Babylonian sequence and the "modern" story are the two that work the best. The former succeeds because of its wild spectacle, centering on probably the most famous set ever built for a movie. It was perhaps inevitable that the sequence should turn into a series of tableaus, with a cast of thousands striking what seem to us affected poses, but were really based on 19th-century historical genre paintings. (See below.)  Constance Talmadge overdoes the striding about that's meant to suggest the Mountain Girl is a liberated woman, the equal of any man, but she's fun to watch. The modern sequence is the only one with developed and interesting characters, even if some of the acting takes time to get used to. Mae Marsh jumps around goofily to suggest the Dear One's joie de vivre, but when she settles down and starts suffering, she becomes quite touching as the woman whose husband (Robert Harron) is wrongly imprisoned and who loses her baby to well-meaning but puritanical do-gooders. And Miriam Cooper gives the film's best performance -- that is to say, the one that looks most natural to contemporary eyes -- as the Friendless One. Still, the star of the show is Griffith himself, demonstrating his mastery at building suspense with the intertwined conclusions of the French, Babylonian, and modern sequences. We can laugh at the final scene of the heavenly host bringing peace to a war-torn world, but it must have had a different effect on audiences in the midst of World War I.

The Belshazzar's Feast set for Intolerance

Edwin Long, The Babylonian Marriage Market, 1875.

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (Charles Reisner, 1929)

Designed to show off the novelty of sound -- and, in two sequences, the coming novelty of Technicolor -- The Hollywood Revue of 1929 was enthusiastically received by critics and audiences, though it lost the best picture Oscar to The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929). Today, both movies are creaky antiques, despite the effort that MGM put into producing them. In fact, The Hollywood Revue often seems like an attempt to promote The Broadway Melody, which had opened three and a half months earlier, since it gives prominent spots to that film's stars, Charles King, Bessie Love, and Anita Page. The rest of it feels a lot like amateur night at MGM, as the studio's stars are trotted out for songs and skits that often feel tired and incoherent. In a few years, MGM would be boasting that it had more stars than there are in heaven, but many of the stars showcased in the Revue are forgotten today -- like King, Love, and Page -- or were on the wane -- like John Gilbert, Marion Davies, and Buster Keaton. The ones that remained stars, like Jack Benny and Joan Crawford, did so by reinventing themselves. The Revue, which modeled itself on theatrical conventions like the minstrel show and vaudeville, both of which were on the outs, failed to break ground for the Hollywood musical: It would take a few years for Warner Bros. to do that, with 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) and the unfettered imagination of Busby Berkeley taking the backstage musical formula of The Broadway Melody and some of Sammy Lee's choreographic tricks from the Revue -- including overhead kaleidoscope shots -- and improving on them. The Revue has a few highlights even today: Joan Crawford trying a little too hard to sparkle as she sings (passably) and dances (clunkily); Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their first sound film, doing a magic act with Jack Benny's intervention; Cliff Edwards and the Brox Sisters doing "Singin' in the Rain," which gets a Technicolor reprise with most of the company at the film's end; Keaton acrobatically clowning his way (silently) through an "underwater" drag routine; and Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in Technicolor performing a bit of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, first as Shakespeare wrote it and then in 1929's slang. To get to them, however, you have to sit through a lot of dud routines and dated songs like Charles King's paean to maternity, "Your Mother and Mine," which must have been aimed right at the mushy heart of Louis B. Mayer.