TCM 's Saturday night double bill, selected by Todd Haynes, showed Joseph Losey's The Go-Between back to back with John Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Both films were released around 1970. The Go-Between is tedious and somewhat pretentious. Much better is Sunday, Bloody Sunday, a movie that is very strange, off-center, and not at all what the viewer expects. Haynes was asked to curate these films and introduce them with Ben Mankiewicz, apparently on the basis of his recent picture May-December in which the music for The Go-Between, a celebrated score by Michel LeGrand is lifted wholesale from the fifty-year old picture and inserted to great effect into Hayne's excellent movie. Mankiewicz wanted Haynes to focus on the homosexual elements in the Sunday, Bloody Sunday film, an emphasis that Haynes rejected rather bluntly, correctly I think directing the viewer's attention to other, more idiosyncratic, features of Schlesinger's movie. Both pictures are worth watching and make an interesting double-feature; however Losey's film is primarily of historical interest while the Schlesinger picture feels much more current and compelling.
The Go-Between involves a 12-year old boy seduced into carrying messages between a wealthy well-bred heiress and her plebian lover. The movie explores aspects and gradations of the British class system circa 1910 that were of almost no interest to me. (I don't know why Losey, the scion of a "Magnificent Amberson's" family in Lacrosse, Wisconsin would care about this material either -- he was, I expect, seduced by Harold Pinter's laconic and elliptical screenplay.) Leo is a 12 year old boy, remarkably innocent, who has been sent by his widowed mother to a lavish country estate. The nobility on the estate treat Leo with condescension -- he's sort of a mascot for the vicious aristocrats assembled in the enormous house with its grand spaces decorated with Elizabethan era portraits. It's extremely hot and Leo has garments that are too warm. So Marian (Julie Christie), a kind young woman, takes the boy into town to buy him a "Lincoln green" suit (it doesn't look any cooler than what he's already wearing) that makes him appear as either a lackey in livery or an organ grinder's monkey depending on how you see the thing. Leo's buddy, Max, who is the baby of the family, roughhouses with Leo and repeatedly insults him, again demonstrating the nasty noblesse oblige (or lack thereof) of these cartoonish aristocrats. In town, Marian vanishes, apparently spending time with the brooding, hunky tenant farmer, Ted Burgess, a sort of plebian stand-in for the gardener in Lady Chatterly's Lover. Burgess is played by Oliver Bates who dashes around shirtless (it's very hot) for much of the movie. After Max gets measles and is sidelined for few weeks, Leo is left to his own devices. Wandering around the edges of the vast estate, he trespasses on Burgess' farm, gets injured there when he jumps of a hay-rick, and, then, agrees to deliver notes back and forth between the handsome youthful farmer and the beautiful heiress. Leo's motive is that he wants to understand what adults do behind closed doors -- he's desperate for someone to tell him about sex and, of course, gets a first-hand education at the climax of the film. Leo has doubts about his role as messenger ("Mercury" someone calls him) and tries to back-out of his go-between function on several occasion, but Marian, in particular, uses her social status to bully the boy into continuing to deliver her assignation notes. Marian is betrothed to an upper crust gent with a nasty scar on his face, but, of course, her heart belongs to Ted. Little Leo tries to wriggle out of the situation which is becoming increasingly untenable, but his mother insists that he stay longer on the country estate. Of course, the inevitable occurs including a pointless and implausible suicide. This slender narrative, mercilessly padded, is really more of a slight anecdote than anything else, although it's tricked-out with a confusingly filmed (intentionally so) frame story set fifty years after the catastrophe in 1910. A crucial and lengthy scene involves a cricket match. This episode will be wholly impenetrable to American viewers. People play croquet, herds of deer roam the vast estate, and Ted Burgess sings a song at a gathering to accompaniment by his secret lover, Marian. The acting is very good and the photography redolent of suffocating summer heat -- a thermometer shows temps above 98, reminding us that even in the pre-climate-change past there were notable heat waves. Julie Christie is radiantly beautiful, something announced in an early scene in which Max remarks "my sister is remarkably beautiful." The movie heaps one tired cliche on top of another; people have plummy names like "Lady Trimingham." This picture is probably better than it seems but I found it, more or less, insufferable. The movie begins with a familiar quote: "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." These are lines from the source material, L. P. Hartley's 1953 novel of the same name.
Michel LeGrand's score consists of an ominous sounding four note motif that is elaborated at various times into complex fugues and variations. The motif has the unusual effect of sometimes sounding like something from Beethoven but, in other cases, developing into shapely variations that sound a bit like Bach or Handel. It's an excellent score, better than the movie that it decorates.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday is ostensibly about a triangle between a woman in her thirties, Alex, played by Glenda Jackson, her lover, Bob, and an older doctor - he seems to be about 55 - named Daniel Hirsch (Peter Finch). Bob is sleeping with both the middle-aged doctor and Alex, a situation that is understood, if not exactly accepted by the two recipients of Bob's sexual favors. The movie was renowned at the time of its release for its nonchalance about the gay affair between Bob and Dr. Hirsch and, indeed, the picture's bluntly direct depiction of this romance remains impressively aloof from tendentious posturing, identity politics, or hysteria even today. Dr. Hirsch and Alex know that they are sharing Bob and, even, have a number of friends in common also aware of the situation and, apparently, Bob has qualities of some kind (mostly invisible to the viewer) that persuade them that the arrangement is worth the pain that it causes them. The movie depicts about a week in the course of this relationship, ending with Bob's departure from London to New York City -- it's pretty clear to both Alex and Dr. Hirsch that once Bob leaves town, he won't be returning any time soon. Despite his protestations that he'll soon be back, Bob is not likely to resume his love affairs with Alex and Daniel. At the end of the film, Alex and Daniel briefly encounter one another and, of course, are perfectly civil and polite but both are grief-stricken. (There's a remarkable coda in which Peter Finch talks directly to the camera, not just violating the fourth wall, but blowing it to pieces.) The film's narrative is slight and insignificant. The love triangle is treated with circumspection and, contrary to viewer expectations, is not the film's central focus -- the movie is highly civilized and eschews any elements of melodrama. The competing lovers don't really have to compete. Bob attends to both of their needs with aplomb and, then, simply exits from their lives. The movie's primary emphasis is the eccentric milieu in which the story is embedded. The script explores Alex and Daniel's families in detail and we see their friends engaged in various activities. This opens up the picture, keeps it from becoming overly sentimental, and, in fact, gives the movie the feeling of being extremely generous and expansive -- an aspect of the picture that some people might find disconcertingly diffuse and ill-defined, although it is precisely the film's broad scope that I found intriguing and, ultimately, much more compelling that the minimally developed drama involving the romantic triangle. Alex and Bob's first sex scene in the film takes place in a bedroom at a London house in the suburbs where the heroine is babysitting. The adults in the family, an unsightly man in horn-rimmed glasses, a middle-aged woman, and a Black professor of some kind (also, perhaps, some sort of love triangle) have many half-feral children and live in a house with a rhesus monkey and a huge black mastiff. There's all sorts of chaos around the edges of the love story -- Bob's friends are inventors who are working on some sort of mechanical drawing device and Bob designs sculptures with vertically oriented tubes full of colored water. Daniel's friends have drunken parties in which married couples out of Edward Albee maul one another during disorderly games of charades. A dog gets run over only to be replaced "by another." Bob plays "Exquisite corpse", the surrealist parlor game, with the little kids. Apartments are cold and drafty causing sex-scenes to be conducted under heavy blankets, lots of turbulent tossing and turning in bed, and local hoodlums march down the boulevard mutilating cars with shards of glass. The street scenes are similarly turbulent with mobs of motorcyles and lorries turning into the smog-encased sunset; in the darkness, crowds of girls on roller skates cruise by. Dr. Hirsch has a number of miserable, co-dependant patients whom we see in his clinic; he seems to be a compassionate, excellent physician but tormented by being perpetually "on-call." (Doctors worked all the time in the seventies and, even, eighties -- modern physicians aren't on-call and are like factory workers, mostly seeing patients from 9 to 5.) We meet one of Hirsch's previous "rough trade" lovers and there's a sex scene involving Alex with another older man who has lost his job. (Alex sleeps with the man who is her client -- she's an employment counselor -- and, then, hopes to make Bob jealous about the encounter; Bob, needless to say, doesn't take the bait.) Near the end of the movie, we see Daniel attending a lavish bar mitzvah complete with gorgeous Torah scrolls and, then, an expensive reception at a posh hotel. The movie is full of interesting minor characters, seemingly random encounters, and every shot teems with fascinating detail around the edges of the screen. The movie seems more akin to something like Robert Altman's Nashville than a conventional romantic melodrama, an ambitious portrait of a time and place (London 1969) and, certainly, isn't limited to merely an account of the doomed, triangular love affair, As a measure of the film's generosity, a number of scenes involve the answering service used by Alex and Dr. Hirsch -- ringing phones are a motif in the movie -- and the camera prowls along labyrinths of electrical cables and switches, dramatizing how the phone calls that form much of the basis of the story, are shifted and transferred from exchange to exchange; even the answering machine woman, someone insulted by Dr. Hirsch, gets some lines of dialogue and is sympathetically portrayed.
I've seen Sunday, Bloody Sunday before and, probably, have previously written about the film. It's the kind of picture that you can't keep in your mind because it is so wonderfully diverse and complex. I've always had a prejudice against the film because it's script is by Penelope Gilliatt. Ms. Gilliatt took over Pauline Kael's movie-reviewing duties at The New Yorker for a six-month period when Kael was working in Hollywood, attempting to put her formidable criticism to work in the real world of movie production. (It didn't work out for Kael; she was soon enough, as they say with reference to Plato, "back from Syracuse" to lick her wounds.) During the time that Kael was off-duty, I read Gilliatt's reviews and thought that they were "precious" and mannered; she certainly lacked Kael's highly sexualized and vulgar, if compelling, approach to cinema. So I have a predilection to disrespect Gilliatt's work, particularly the screenplay for Sunday, Bloody Sunday. But, in my old age, I've now come around to admiring this movie and primarily because of its rather epic treatment of not only the triangular love affair but the social landscape in which the romance occurs. (If you look up pictures of Gilliatt on the internet, you will find several images of Pauline Kael misidentified as the British critic -- objectively, Gilliatt was far more attractive than Kael so I don't know what to make of this peculiarity.)
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