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• Sunday Bloody Sunday

  • Goetan
  • 11/2/14

  An amazing follow-up from director Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy" look at complex relationships and lifestyles in '70's London. Finch and Jackson garnered Oscar nominations for their performances as two people in love with the same bisexual man, Daniel Day-Lewis' film debut. Schlesinger's treatment of homosexuality and it's members is shown in an ordinary, non-stereotypical way, but the setting is nonetheless bleak. A sad love story, but enduring. I give it a 4.5/5.

• sunday bloody sunday

  • kevin sellers
  • 10/11/14

  I saw it when it first came out in 1971 and the buzz about it then was that it was the first movie to equate homosexual with heterosexual love. Now, 40 years later, with that issue put to bed (no pun intended) you can see the deeper, more timeless theme of the frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful search for love, in this case by a gay man and a straight gal. Boy, Penelope Gilliat's screenplay is good! She probes her characters without being overly glib or pretentious . There's a wonderful scene between Glenda Jackson and her mom, played by Peggy Ashcroft, on the nature of love, and Peter Finch's closing monologue, which is thankfully not too longGilliat is not big on speechifying a la Chayevsky or Sorkin...is heartbreaking. John Schlesinger's direction is almost as good as the script, marred only by a need to point out how crappy James Callahan's England was in 1971, complete with gratuitous scenes of kids (one of whom is a 14 year old Daniel Day Lewis) vandalizing cars, down and outers waiting for pharmaceuticals, dogs getting run over, snide, envious cracks about Americayou get the drill. Oh, and the running device of the constantly ringing telephone as a metaphor for the horrors of modern life gets old pretty fast. Other than those relatively minor gripes, though, the movie is wonderful. P.S. Whatever happened to Murray Head? Good looking guy and a pretty decent actor, I thought he'd have a bigger career.

• Uncredited Daniel Day-Lewis cameo

  • Steve
  • 9/3/14

  "DDL" is one of the young vandals scratching cars, early on in the film.

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