Difficult but Triumphant

By Stefan Kanfer

Sunday Bloody Sunday is an anomaly. Its text is sexual, but its theme is nothing less than the nature of affection. This is the province of the novel, not the cinema, and even so mature a film falters before its destination. But never has an English-language film glistened with so many social nuances. In part, the credit is due to Director John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy); he has also contributed a cluster of stylistic debits. The essential triumph of Sunday Bloody Sunday belongs to Scenarist Penelope Gilliatt, whose plot alone challenges the customary moral institutions.

A young bisexual designer, Bob (Murray Head), finds himself the fulcrum of a sexual teeterboard. On one side sits his lover, a Jewish doctor named Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch). At the opposite end is his mistress, the haggard divorcee Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson).

Doubly Desirable. Obviously, such a condition cannot long endure. No problem is too great for the artist to run away from; Bob flees to America. The amours he left behind may have been miserable with him; without him they are desolate. From this uncompromising situation, Gilliatt has drawn blood. Her dialogue is literate but not precious, unbowdlerized but not prurient. Through her characters' recognizability they become memorable.

As the doubly desired object, Head plays a narrow, unrewarding role wedged between two giants. His victim-beneficiaries are creatures of enormous complexity. Alex is an employment agent who cannot find her own vocation. Her family, her friends, her life become dark and unfathomable; all that matters are the flares of sexual consolation. Scrambling even for those few hours, she becomes ferocious or vulnerable, fearing the clock and the calendar and, eventually, all aspects of responsibility.

The recipient of an Academy Award (for Women in Love), Jackson can scarcely be called a revelation. But in certain scenes--when, for example, she orders Bob about in a voice filled with self-abnegation, or when she stands depleted before her "rival"--she surpasses any previous part. As for Peter Finch, this versatile and deeply intelligent performer has never had so fine an hour and a half. In his portrayal, Hirsh betrays no gesture of queerness or bathos. He is merely a man whose affliction is not homosexuality but the tradition that abhors it.

Although the trio constitute most of the film, Schlesinger has not slighted even the smallest subordinate role. A 53-year-old hence unemployable businessman (Tony Britton) is a character worthy of a tragedy all to himself. In a single scene, Peggy Ashcroft as Alex's mother furnishes her daughter with an almost schizophrenic past.

It is a pity that Alex is not the only divided personality of Sunday Bloody Sunday. There have always been two John Schlesingers. The high Schlesinger is the consummate actor's director. Julie Christie has never fulfilled the promise of Schlesinger's Darling. Jon Voight has not come near his performance in Midnight Cowboy. Finch and Jackson will find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to equal their Sunday roles. The low Schlesinger is a pirouetting dandy who can take a lean, melancholy story and muck it about. Thus he filled Midnight Cowboy with baroque ornaments and fussy camerawork. Thus he films Sunday Bloody Sunday with the same extraneous decorations. Faces are continually shot in reflection, or through objects; juxtapositions are sophomoric --the camera pans down from a poverty poster to a refrigerator brimming with food; posh automobiles wheel around London streets, whilst the radio barks of economic crises.

Yet, after all the errata, the core of the fiction remains incorruptible. Gilliatt is always a mature artist; Schlesinger is often one. When they work in unison they emphasize the callowness of such tentative sexual probes as Carnal Knowledge or Husbarids. And they provide a binary challenge--to the viewer and the film maker. For at its frequent best, Sunday Bloody Sunday proves that no theme, no individual need be beyond the reach of cinema. The faults and excesses of this difficult, contradictory film cannot be glossed over or indulged. Nevertheless, Sunday Bloody Sunday must even now be considered one of the central films of the decade. It is that rare work whose influence is bound to prove greater than its statement. -- Stefan Kanfer

During the London blitz, Barrister Cyril Conner retained a serene confidence in his country's future. It was his daughter's future that concerned him. "Promise me something," he asked the smashing little redhead. "Promise me you'll never marry a saxophonist from Budapest."

Recalls Penelope Gilliatt (hard g as in grin): "He sensed something perilous in the air even then." The hair and skin are the same hue that used to transport Titian, and she has never married a Hungarian of any kind. But as for the "something perilous"--well, Conner's trepidations were founded.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Mum and Dad separated when she was ten; the child was given her choice of parent to live with. At that age, girls are bonkers about their fathers; she and Conner enjoyed what she recalls as "a parody of marriage." Together they went to concerts, studied languages, played cello and piano duets. At 15, Penelope passed Oxford's matriculation exams, but was too young to be admitted. She tried a year at Bennington. There the peculiar Americans informed her that she possessed an Einsteinian IQ of 170.

By the time she got back to London, work offered more appeal than Oxford. To fill her mind, she practiced French, Middle English, Latin and Russian. To fill her fridge, she turned out witty, informed theater and cinema essays for such respected journals as the New Statesman and The Observer.

Irresistible Signal. In her 20s Penelope Conner became known for something more than her critical acuity. There was that flaming hair, for one thing, and that look of perpetual astonishment. And there were the men. She was married for seven years to a brilliant neurologist, Roger Gilliatt--the best man at the wedding of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones. The Gilliatts split when she ran off with Playwright John Osborne (Look Back in Anger). After five years of volatile marriage, she and Osborne called it finis. She got custody of their only child, Nolan Kate. For a brief time she had a rather deep friendship with Critic-Impresario Kenneth Tynan (Oh! Calcutta!). The New Yorker, enchanted with her work, brought her Stateside to write their film critiques from April to

September--Pauline Kael writes for the other half-year. Her long liaison with Director Mike Nichols has been extinguished. (When his pictures open, she still steps aside for a more objective critic.)

Those credentials have hemidemisemi-quavers of Alma Mahler, who also combined personal beauty and an intellectual signal that achievers found irresistible. But Gilliatt's life has no such grand Viennese design. The first major film critic since James Agee to enjoy distinction as a scenarist, she has become something of a recluse, both in her life and work. The prominent are never the subjects of her fiction, so far almost twoscore polished short stories and two novels, largely about the odd, unfashionable characters whom Anthony Burgess reviewed as "defiantly interesting."

Gilliatt's abiding empathy illumines Sunday Bloody Sunday and roots her in America. Though her passport is British, she works nine months a year on Manhattan's West Side, where she and Nolan, six, share a large flat. One of her favorite recreations is solitary word games--she has concocted one of the world's longest palindromes: "Doc, note. I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod." Now that Sunday Bloody Sunday has opened to ecstatic notices in London, she is in the act of turning down offers from producers who once thought of her as The Enemy.

Gilliatt remains one of the few foreigners who openly celebrates her adopted home. "England is a very brilliant, very wry old country and I love it very much," she says. "But America is huge and different and I don't think any event, any act--like Attica--will ever express the whole of this inexhaustible country. I hope some day to be good enough to write a film about it."

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