**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murray Hedd, Peggy Ashcroft
screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt
directed by John Schlesinger
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "Are you bourgeois?" asks a child in Sunday Bloody Sunday, hoping to catch an adult in an awkward moment, and the question is crucial to your enjoyment of the film. If you are well-off enough to have good taste and fine things, and are somewhat guilty about the freedom and power that entails, then it will seem a sober and mature work about life and love in the post-hippie '70s. If, on the other hand, you are just scraping by and worrying about where your next meal is coming from, the film will seem a self-piteous soap opera in love with the idea of defeat. There's no denying the skill and professionalism at work here–it's what mid-period Woody Allen wishes it were, but it never quite licks the question of what to do with bourgie liberal guilt, and thus waffles towards an underwhelming conclusion.
Bourgeois number one is Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson), a professional woman who loves young artist Bob Elkin (Murray Head). But Elkin is given to capricious whims, and has also set up romantic shop with bourgeois number two, Dr. Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch). Things haven't been going so well lately: not only does the radio report on an "economic crisis" (though we don't see a single riot or homeless person), but people are pushing the flower-child's dictum of "do your own thing" to an intense degree, which somehow leads to shots of happy roller-skaters taking the streets. Elkin is clearly on the vanguard of this social dissolution: he has no real emotional ties to either of his older lovers. The suggestion is that the world is his, leaving his more traditional inamoratas to yearn for an emotional connection that will not come.
Sunday Bloody Sunday is professionally and "tastefully" mounted. Penelope Gilliatt's screenplay is crisp and pointed, and John Schlesinger's direction is subtle and unforced; together, they arrive at something watchable and almost pull off some of the script's more dubious ideas. The film is also remarkably frank about the characters' homo- and bisexuality: while the picture unfortunately perpetuates the stereotype of the feckless bisexual, and succumbs to what Vito Russo attacked as Hollywood's inability to show a happy gay relationship, it's also unapologetic about Hirsh and Elkin's orientation and is, in fact, a great improvement on the evasions of something like the later Philadelphia. So perhaps I should just count my blessings and let everything slide.
The movie, however, ultimately dodges too many issues to be a success. Even its moral observations are bound up in an upper-middle-class idea of propriety that it suggests has been lost: not only is morality at stake, but class standing–the ability to hold one's head up and face the world on one's plot of land and possessions. So instead of casting off what its dollar-book Marx sees as an unacceptable lifestyle, Sunday Bloody Sunday wears this scarlet letter as a badge of honour, at once acknowledging its protagonists' position and disavowing it. The heroes castigate themselves and keep on going, swaddled in the satisfaction that comes with being good sufferers, a condition that somehow pays the way for one's self-described oppressions. Although I have nothing against people leading a comfortable lifestyle, I do have problems with people living in denial, and that's all that's on offer in this film–though the ugly picture does get a nice frame.
Sunday Bloody Sunday is showing its age on MGM's new DVD: the1.66:1 non-anamorphic widescreen transfer appears to have been mastered from a faded source. As a result, skin tones are more harshly pink than they ought to be, and shadowed whites look closer to blue. Still, definition is generally good, if slightly soft, and the damage is not so pronounced that it ruins the effects of the film's muted palette. The 1.0 mono soundmix is somewhat better: again, there's a bit of softness, but that suits the low-key nature of the drama. The classical music score comes through with great sharpness and clarity. The only extra is the film's trailer.
110 minutes; R; 1.66:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; MGM
