This film ranks 65th on the BFI's Top 100, with Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, John Schlesinger, and Penelope Gilliatt receiving Oscar nominations for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Writing, (Story and Screenplay), respectively.Dr. Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch) and Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson) share the same phone answering service and the same lover, Bob Elkin (Murray Head). They both know about their competitive positions in this love triangle and begrudgingly accept them. I read most of the rave IMDb User Comments about the 'bravery' of Finch to take on this homosexual role and Schlesinger to openly show it, as well the new twist on the 'love triangle' theme. However, I would hope that the movie has something more to offer than just being a cultural ground breaker. That, alone, would NOT make the movie a masterpiece. What DOES make it a minor masterpiece is the character study of the three principals and the underlying rationale that drives Daniel and Alex to put up with sharing a common lover at all, no matter what his or her sexual orientation is. Alex says something like 'sometimes I think it is better to have half of anything rather than all of nothing' and Daniel, through his actions, says much the same thing. But, Alex seems to be paralyzed to commit to love again after her former marriage. As her mother (played by Peggy Ashcroft) says, 'Darling you keep throwing your hand in because you're waiting for the whole thing. There IS no whole thing.'Daniel, an up-scale London physician, is a caring family man, shown by his appearance at his nephew's bar mitzvah. Daniel is forced to keep his private life private. (At the time this movie was made, it would have been hard to be a gay up-scale London physician.) Bob, the fulcrum of the triangle, seems to have everything going for him that his two partners don't: if each of them have half of him, he has both of them. That's not to say that he isn't loving and supportive to both. He is..to a point. Bob isn't bad. He is just young, attractive, and free from social restraints—an enviable position in this triangle.The vehicle for the main story line centers around a weekend where Alex and Bob are able to be 'ALONE' together by taking care of a progressive couple's five children as the couple goes out of town to a lecture. Some of the family's pseudo-progressiveness serves to give us both comic relief and anxious moments. The story is a well-told character study, with quick flashbacks to show some of Daniel's and Alex's thoughts and memories to illustrate where they are coming from in their present situations.

Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson play two lonely souls who are willing to share the same young man if it means staving off loneliness in this refreshingly adult relationship drama from John Schlesinger.For a film made in the early 1970s, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is surprisingly frank in its treatment of homosexuality, and it has a sort of hollowed out vibe that matches the social unrest that was clearly impacting Britain as much as America in 1971. Characters act primarily out of either desperation or boredom, as if seeking for actual happiness is a pointless exercise. The movie is a tad slow and a bit talky, but it is very good and gives two accomplished English actors a chance to shine.Both Jackson and Finch were nominated for Oscars for their performances in this film, both deservedly, Finch especially so. His role is the less showy and therefore probably the more difficult, and Finch plays it perfectly. Jackson is good, but there's just something about her manner that always annoys me no matter what character she's playing, so it's tough for me to be subjective about her, though there's no denying her talent. Schlesinger was also nominated for Best Director, as was Penelope Gilliatt, a former movie critic, for her original screenplay. Oddly, the film itself, though nominated for the formidable combination of Director, Actor, Actress and Original Screenplay did not manage to snag a Best Picture nom from the Academy, and it struck out in all its nominated categories.This is one to definitely check out.Grade: A

I am a big fan of John Schlesinger because he dares to go places no one has gone before, but, alas, it is quite obvious that he was a pervert at heart because his most memorable films have been studies in modern perversion. Midnight Cowboy, Darling and now Sunday, Bloody, Sunday - all with perverted story lines that would make poor Walt Disney turn in his grave. In the biography about Schlesinger, we are told that the director and the writer, Penelope Gilliatt, despised one another and in fact Schlesinger ended up calling the writer "a c---!" Heavens to Betsy! Surely Schlesinger knew what he was getting into when he was dealing with a movie critic who happened to write a script he wanted to make into a film. She despised the changes he made, could not abide by the fact additional writers were brought in - poor thing - you would think after all those movie reviews she wrote she would know what happens to a script in movie-land. Sorry to say, apparently she did not. Of course no one seemed concerned with the very obvious conflict of interest involved with an individual who just happened to be a major movie critic and now was the author of a movie script. It's almost axiomatic that the fur would fly on this one and apparently it did. It really does not show in the film which is from a script point of view well paced and well written, but the storyline is so depraved that slowly it dawns on the viewer just what he had been taken down the road for and eventually the viewer sits there thinking, "My God! What have I done?" But then that's Hollywood because the very nature of a script is to manipulate the viewer into a point of view he has never had before. And this is the magic of the movies.

John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday is social realism, as seemingly unusual as its scenario is and however much poetic license the script and direction take. Yes, it defies all perceived social convention. We follow a triangular sexual relationship comprised of a man and a woman, both middle-aged, and another man, much much younger. There is a scene where young children innocently smoke a joint after breakfast, because they know where their out-of-town parents keep it. But the lack of permanence implicitly shown in mercilessly intimate scenes of parties, workplace conflicts, doctors' appointments, bar mitzvahs, et al, are concerned with the politics of the personal rather than the traditional. It's an exploration of characters at crossroads in their lives, those roads intertwined.The screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt takes us through eight or nine days, while a young man, played very becomingly by British singer Murray Head, plans to leave for New York. Both of his lovers will miss him, and I guess he will miss them, in his own way, yet he has chosen to go, and between them, they don't entice him enough to make him want to stay. So the two love affairs begin their dissolution, while the lovers go about a moody everyday life in a London mostly comprised of frigid twilights. An aria from Mozart's comic opera Cosi fan Tutte is played on the soundtrack with ironic detachment. And then there is Mendelssohn's utterly romantic On Wings of Song, its minor key tonality embraced.Both the doctor and the woman are concerned with helping people, he by an altruistic and astute way with his patients, she through working in an employment agency. The boy however gives the impression of being solely absorbed in the marketing possibilities in America for his ultra-modern sculpture. He isn't even worried whether his stuff is any good, but whether it will sell to Americans. Indeed, he doesn't appear to feel very intensely about anything. He is nice enough and open enough, but there is no range to him, as there is to his lovers.Played with perfect pitch in deservedly Oscar-nominated performances by both the great Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson, it is with these two older characters that we get to the nerve center of the story. They survive in a lose-lose world by adjusting themselves to life as it must be lived, such as how Finch, the doctor, not at all internally bothered by his homosexuality, doesn't disclose it to his opaque Jewish family. Continuing fraternization as usual with them is another way for him to survive. Jackson says late in the film, "Some people believe something is better than nothing, but I'm beginning to believe that nothing can be better than something." Well, possibly so, but we get to know her well enough to reckon that she will shake on something, not nothing, once more the next time.That they're inclined to share him is maybe a tell: They share him not because they're inclined to accept half, but because they're apprehensive about going for all. The three-sided understanding is somewhat an assurance that no one will get in so far that being refined won't be barrier enough against heartbreak. It's the ultimate moral dichotomy in liberalized society: The philosophy of whatever works, but that can hurt people. Yet don't people suffer when bound by convention too? We are free to do what we want, but then people still choose to do what they don't want to do at all.Look at the scene where the young man and his female lover, who is watching her friends' children, and they have a fun time in a park by a church, which unexpectedly and senselessly leads to a tragic accident involving their dog: The kids are all having happy reckless fun, but there are casualties. The little girl disobeys, but she's a little girl in the throes of fun. Her dog's accident is nevertheless her fault. With pleasure, blameless or not, there is always pain, intended or not.