the cough
by
Douglas Messerli
Penelope
Gilliatt (screenplay), John Schlesinger (director) Sunday Bloody Sunday /
1971
It
is strange that the John Schlesinger film I saw in 1971, at the time of its
release, was completely different from the disk of Sunday Bloody Sunday
I saw on Netflix yesterday. One scene, in particular, symbolizes how mistaken I
was during my first visit to this work.
Having overslept, and late for her promise to care for the Hodson children
and dog so that their parents might escape their noisy British suburban household
for a weekend, friend Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson), quickly makes herself a
breakfast.
I recall the original as a quiet and calm affair
wherein she, almost with great regulation, makes coffee and toast. This time
round I realized just how crazed and hectic was that same breakfast of leftover
coffee, with cigarette butts strewn around the floor, and a sink full of
leftover dishes. In short, Alex seems the last person in the world you might wish
to invite over to care for a baby and two precociously aware young girls—particularly
since she plans to also spend much of that “bloody” weekend in bed with her
boyfriend during a governmental crisis and its quite prescient suggestions of
the Northern Ireland Bogside massacre a few months later, when 14 people were
shot and killed by police during a march against internment without trial.
It’s so very strange that I should have
seen Alex’s manic rush as a careful and civilized event, accomplished even with
great grace when Howard and I, in our second year of our relationship first saw
it. Roger Ebert’s opening comments to his 1971 review of the film state
something I missed:
The official East Coast line on
John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody
Sunday was that it is civilized. That judgment
was enlisted to carry
the critical defense of the
movie; and, indeed, how can the
decent critic be against a
civilized movie about civilized people?
My notion, all the same, is that Sunday
Bloody Sunday is about
people who suffer from psychic
amputation, not civility, and that
this film is not an affirmation
but a tragedy.
In fact, the movie begins that way with
the almost Dickensian household which Alex is about to care for representing a
kind of exuberance of married life. The Hobson’s know of Alex’s affair with the
handsome Bob Elkin (Murray Head) and might even secretly approve of their
divorced friend’s new-found love; although they say nothing, their children are
rather curious and overtly interested in the relationship. Even their over-large
pet seems perfectly happy to intrude. Moreover, despite her disordered life,
Alex is a good baby-sitter, mostly caring and attentive to the children. If
things are not quite right in this world, Schlesinger hints they might almost
be “civilized,” or controlled if nothing else.
Yet, this talented director certainly
provides numerous clues that something else is going on. It’s hard for today’s
young, perhaps, to recognize just how intrusive was the rotary phone long
before the constant pings and musical intrusions of cell-phones. Again and again,
the director interrupts moments of love and caring with old-fashioned phone
calls and with images of rotary dialing, to say nothing a busy-body phone
operator (Bessie Love) who almost makes Lily Tomlin’s satirically obnoxious Bell telephone operator seem like a saint.
She and Bob seem to be in love, and
together they perform briefly as a nice pair of parental substitutes. But the
circles of those endless rotary phones say almost everything.
The social circles they inhabit are much
larger than larger than the Hobson’s suburban retreat, as we soon see Bob rush
away to London to his other lover, the much-besieged and over-worked doctor, Daniel
Hirsch (played with panache by Peter Finch), a role offered first to Alan Bates
and Ian Bannen. Bates had other filming assignments, and Bannen was wary of the
deep kiss with which he meets his bisexual partner, Bob.
This is one of the first true films of absolute bisexuality, as Bob, openly admitting to liking sex with both women and men, and with both Alex and Daniel willing to accept the limitations of their loving sexual encounters with him. Both are pained by the temporariness he devotes to them, but both have also been clearly hurt in the past by others. Alex is an unhappy divorcée, and Daniel is a Jewish gay man with a history he cannot reveal to the community with which he is still very much intertwined, shown by a brief encounter with a former lover who is a heroin addict and a bar-mitzvah at which he is constantly questioned as to why he has never yet married, with members of his family hinting that sometimes less is better than nothing.
Both have chosen basically empty
relationships to salve their lonely and empty lives, which their “civilized”
circles will not ever truly allow, and the rather self-centered Bob, a rather
mediocre “light” sculptor, will never truly permit. He’s on his way to New York
where he hopes to extend his flimsy career.
The film ends with Daniel’s personal
confession and the beginning of a doctor’s joke, trying to deny his own
loneliness—“I am happy, except for missing him”—and ending with the old Jewish
joke “Doctor, I came about my cough.” The cough, of course, is everything, the
beginning of the end.
Los
Angeles, February 29, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (February 2020).
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