Sunday Bloody Sunday is a 1971 film written by John Schlesinger which stars Peter Finch and tells the story of a free-spirited young bisexual artist, played by Murray Head.
Little is heard these days about the great John Schlesinger, who made not only many a memorable British film, but a few memorable American ones too. The heavyweight hitters in the Schlesinger canon are all moving, highly dramatic, well shot and feature great actors at their best; cf A Kind of Loving (1962); Billy Liar (1963); Midnight Cowboy (1969); and Marathon Man (1976).
Coming afresh to a film called Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), some of us would expect at the very least some British troops shooting and killing unarmed civil rights protesters and bystanders in Derry in 1972; but in 1971, the phrase ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ still referred to, as it does here, the enormous ennui as felt by a typically existentially minded bourgeois, as they stare out of the window at the closed shops and dread thoughts of work on Monday crosses their mind. And well, therefore, they might they say to themselves: ‘Sunday! Bloody Sunday!’
Schlesinger made a few films featuring homosexuality and this one, with Peter Finch, is understated and realistic in a way that few films now are. Everything is very real, and it looks like Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch and the others spent a lot of time perfecting this, making the film almost embarrassing the way you move in on these bed-hoppers and tired middle class souls.
The realism builds and builds in fact, and stays with you — the dog killed by a car, the mother’s milk in the fridge, London in the rain and the precocious wee children smoking dope — all of it seeming to conjure up childhood fears both in ourselves and in the characters.
The focal actor in Sunday Bloody Sunday is however Murray Head (‘One Night in Bangkok’ anybody?) who you don’t really see much of these days unless you watch Doctors, Holby, Heartbeat and the like. And there is also Peggy Ashcroft, who for me will always be the crofter’s wife in the 1935 film of The Thirty-nine Steps.
Murray Head in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)
Schlesinger makes unusual use of telephone exchanges and telephone conversations in Sunday Bloody Sunday, and it seems to suggest the disconnected nature of the characters — today you might think of everybody at their computer terminals or on their mobile phones.
It seems that the world has become almost unrecognisable in terms of attitudes towards sex since this was shot — I have heard that people actually screamed in British cinemas when the homosexual kiss was shown in 1971 — but there appears very little passion in the film, bringing to light as it does the British reserve with which people often accept their less than perfect situations.
