Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)

Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie in Billy Liar

Cast: Tom Courtenay, Wilfred Pickles, Mona Washbourne, Ethel Griffies, Finlay Currie, Gwendolyn Watts, Helen Fraser, Julie Christie, Leonard Rossiter, Rodney Bewes, George Innes, Leslie Randall. Screenplay: Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall, based on a novel by Waterhouse and a play by Waterhouse and Hall. Cinematography: Denys N. Coop. Art direction: Ray Simm. Film editing: Roger Cherrill. Music: Richard Rodney Bennett. 

Tom Courtenay's performance as a Yorkshire Baron Munchausen and Julie Christie's smallish role as the former girlfriend who almost rescues him from a life of boredom and mendacity went a long way toward establishing them as major British stars of the 1960s. Courtenay's about-face from the seriousness of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) to the comedy of Billy Liar singled him out as an actor of great versatility. Christie would follow her role as the devil-may-care Liz by winning an Oscar for another John Schlesinger film, Darling (1965), in which she revealed the unhappy emptiness behind the façade of celebrity. But they're hardly the only fine performances in this exploration of the consequences of tedium in a provincial town where London looms like Moscow in Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Mona Washbourne and Wilfred Pickles are Billy Fisher's exasperated parents, Ethel Griffies his garrulous grandmother, and Gwendolyn Watts and Helen Fraser are the highly contrasting young women Billy has managed to get himself engaged to -- one of his less disastrous escapes into his fantasy world. It's a comedy with an edge, but it never lets that edginess overwhelm the comedy, keeping a nice balance of both. I'm not a big fan of Schlesinger's more celebrated films Darling and Midnight Cowboy (1969), in which I think he loses control of the tone too often, but Billy Liar seems to me to get it just right.

A Kind of Loving (John Schlesinger, 1962)

June Ritchie and Alan Bates in A Kind of Loving

Cast: Alan Bates, June Ritchie, Thora Hird, Bert Palmer, Pat Keen, James Bolam, Jack Smethurst, Gwen Nelson, John Ronane, David Mahlowe, Patsy Rowlands. Screenplay: Willis Hall, Keith Waterhouse, based on a novel by Stan Barstow. Cinematography: Denys N. Coop. Art direction: Ray Simm. Film editing: Roger Cherrill. Music: Ron Grainer.

What we call "the Fifties" -- including the sexual naïveté and conformity to societal norms -- lasted well into the 1960s, as John Schlesinger's first feature film, A Kind of Loving, demonstrates. It also features Alan Bates in his first starring role as Vic Brown, a young man who lets his hormones and adherence to the values of his working-class family and dreary factory town trap him into a marriage to Ingrid Rothwell, a young woman he quickly falls out of love with. Bates is still a bit green as a film actor -- he hasn't yet developed the sexy bravura that would make him a star in films like Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts (1966), Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969), Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1971), or Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman (1968) -- but he gives a convincing performance. June Ritchie, who plays the tempting but essentially innocent Ingrid in what was also her debut film, never made it as a big star in an era dominated by the likes of Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, and Glenda Jackson. The film's villain is Thora Hird as Ingrid's sour, shrewish, widowed mother, who dooms whatever chances the marriage had. The film is a bit slow to start -- it spends too much time on establishing Vic's family and work milieu before settling down to the business of the ill-fated relationship of Vic and Ingrid -- and it's less successful in its portrayal of the postwar British working class than such films as Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).

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.

Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965)

Diana Scott: Julie Christie
Robert Gold: Dirk Bogarde
Miles Brand: Laurence Harvey
Prince Cesare della Romita: José Luis de Vilallonga
Malcolm: Roland Curram

Director: John Schlesinger
Screenplay: Frederic Raphael
Cinematography: Kenneth Higgins
Art direction: Ray Simm
Film editing: Jim Clark
Costume design: Julie Harris
Music: John Dankworth

When Darling was first released, the marriage of its protagonist, Diana Scott, to a minor European royal was taken to be a sly reference to the marriage of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. Today, it looks a lot more like a strikingly prophetic vision of the future awaiting Diana Spencer, then only 4 years old, who would find that marrying a prince entails not only a lot of unwelcome attention but also a good deal of boredom. Boredom is the keynote of Darling, as well as its undoing. There were filmmakers like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Alain Resnais who could portray the existential ennui of the glamorous upper classes without boring their audiences as well, but John Schlesinger wasn't one of them. Julie Christie gives her considerable all as Diana Scott, a pretty young model whose lack of inner substance is her undoing, and she won an Oscar for her pains. But her performance isn't enough to save the film from tedium. As written by Frederic Raphael, who also won an Oscar, there's not enough to Diana to keep us interested in her fate. Instead, the filmmakers fall back on thudding irony, like Diana's being hyped as "The Happiness Girl" when we know that she's cruelly unhappy. The blame falls on the media exploiters, of course, the producers and journalists and ad-men who could hardly care less about the person they're exploiting. But they're an easy target, and for the blame to land we need to feel that there's more to Diana than meets the eye, that she's a victim of something more than her own aimlessness. Unfortunately, we never get a sense that there's unexplored potential to the character.

Far From the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967)

People always complain about the way movies change the stories of their favorite novels, but screenwriter Frederic Raphael's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel shows why such changes are necessary. Raphael remains faithful to the plot, with the result that characters become far more enigmatic than Hardy intended them to be. We need more of the backstories of Bathsheba Everdeen (Julie Christie), Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates), William Boldwood (Peter Finch), and Frank Troy (Terence Stamp) than the highly capable actors who play them can give us, even in a movie that runs for three hours -- including an overture, an intermission, and an "entr'acte." These trimmings are signs that the producers wanted a prestige blockbuster like Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), which had also starred Christie. But Hardy's works, with their characters dogged by fate and chance, don't much lend themselves to epic treatment. John Schlesinger, a director very much at home in the cynical milieus of London in Darling (1965) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and New York in Midnight Cowboy (1969), doesn't show much feeling for Hardy's rural, isolated Wessex, where the weight of tradition and the indifference of nature play substantial roles. What atmosphere the film has comes from cinematographer Nicolas Roeg's images of the Dorset and Wiltshire countryside and from Richard Rodney Bennett's score, which received the film's only Oscar nomination.