Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)

There is no whole thing. You have to make it work. Divorced thirtysomething recruitment agent Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson) begins a romantic relationship with glamorous sculptor Bob Elkin (Murray Head), aware that he’s also intimately involved with lonely middle-aged Jewish doctor Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch).  Bob takes off from the weekend babysitting for Alex’s friends the Hodsons (Vivian Pickles and Frank Windsor) in order to spend time with Daniel. The younger man represents a break with the pasts of both Bob’s older lovers, and neither is willing to let go of the love and vitality he brings to their mundane lives although he’s planning to leave for New York … I know you’re not getting enough of me but you’re getting all there is. Film critic Penelope Gilliatt’s screenplay, suggested by material she plumbed in her novel One by One, is a deep delve into the compromises and deceptions people make in order to have a little happiness. The North London setting with its population of slightly boho middle class types conceals the fact that the story is told rather cleverly, through the shared answering service, tales that Daniel is told by his patients, the insights of the precocious children Alex is minding and her mother’s truisms about marriage. The autumnal scenes carving out a season of political unrest hint at the melancholy truth that these are people who live in fear of rejection, hesitant about commitment, afraid to make a permanent display of emotion in a film which wears its protagonists’ pathology on its shirt sleeve, a patina of loss.  It’s amusing to see both Alex and Daniel cruise past Bob’s flat late at night, fearful there might be yet another person claiming his affection. Alongside the brilliant performances of the leads, with Finch a standout, there’s legendary silent actress Bessie Love as an answering service operator; Tony Britton in search of a job and winding up with a one night stand; and a very young Daniel Day-Lewis as a car vandal. How apposite for Jon Finch to be hustling his namesake, narrowly avoiding a late night arrest in Piccadilly Circus. Directed by John Schlesinger, whose best film this is, about a world he fully inhabits. He also contributed to the screenplay for this landmark in gay representation, along with David Sherwin and Ken Levison, who are thanked for their assistance in the credits. Some people believe something is better than nothing, but I’m beginning to believe that nothing can be better than something

The Romantic Englishwoman (1975)

Women are an occupied country. Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) is the bored wife of a successful English pulp writer Lewis Fielding (Michael Caine) who is currently suffering from writer’s block. She leaves him and their son David (Marcus Richardson) and runs away to the German spa town of Baden-Baden. There she meets Thomas (Helmut Berger), who claims to be a poet but who is actually a petty thief, conman, drug courier and gigolo. Though the two are briefly attracted to each other, she returns home. He, hunted by gangsters headed by Swan (Mich[a]el Lonsdale) for a drug consignment he has lost, follows her to England. Lewis, highly suspicious of his wife, invites the young man to stay with them and act as his secretary. Lewis embarks on writing a screenplay for German film producer Herman (Rene Kolldehoff) – a penetrating psychological story about The New Woman. Initially resenting the presence of the handsome stranger now installed in their home as her husband’s amanuensis and carrying on with the nanny Isabel (Béatrice Romand), Elizabeth starts an affair with him and the two run away with no money to Monaco and the South of France. Lewis follows them, while he in turn is followed by the gangsters looking for Thomas… It’s about this ungrateful woman who is married to this man of great charm, brilliance, and integrity. She thinks he won’t let her be herself, and she feels stuck in a straitjacket when she ought to be out and about and taking the waters and finding herself. With a cast like that, this had me at Hello. Director Joseph Losey’s customarily cool eye is lent a glint in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Thomas Wiseman’s novel (with the screenplay co-written by the author) in a work that teeters on the edges of satire. A house bristling with tension is meat and drink to both Stoppard and Losey, whose best films concern the malign effects of an interloper introducing instability into a home.  It’s engineered to produce some uncanny results – as it appears that Lewis the novelist is capable of real-life plotting and we are left wondering if Elizabeth’s affair has occurred at all or whether it might be him working out a story. Perhaps it’s his jealous fantasy or it might be his elaborate fictionalising of reality:  these interludes of adultery occur when he’s at the typewriter. Invariably there are resonances of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad but it’s far funnier. Like that film, it’s something of an intellectual game with a mystery at its centre. Aren’t you sick of these foreign films? Viewed as a pure exploration of writerly paranoia as well as the marital comedy intended by the novel, it’s a hall of mirrors exercise also reminiscent of another instance of the era’s art house modernism, The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  The flashback/fantasy elevator sequence that is Lewis’ might also belong to Elizabeth. You might enjoy the moment when Thomas mistakes Lewis for the other Fielding (Henry) but he still hangs in there without embarrassment and seduces all around him. Or when Lewis suggests to his producer that he make a thriller rather than the more subtle study he’s suggesting – and then you realise that’s what this British-French co-production becomes. It’s richly ironic – Lewis and Elizabeth have such a vigorously happy marriage a neighbour (Tom Chatto) interrupts a bout of al fresco lovemaking but none of them seems remotely surprised, as if this is a regular occurrence. And any film that has Lonsdale introduce himself as the Irish Minister for Sport has a sense of humour. And there’s the matter of the German producer who bears a passing resemblance to Losey and Berger’s accomplice who fleetingly reminds us of Luchino Visconti, Berger’s mentor and lover for much of the Seventies. If it seems inconsistent there is compensation in the beauty of the performances (particularly Jackson’s, which is charming, warm and funny – All she wanted was everything!) and the gorgeous settings, with a very fine score by Richard Hartley. The elegance, precision and self-referentiality make this a must for Losey fans. It was probably a tricky shoot – Jackson and Berger couldn’t stand each other, allegedly. And Caine placed a bet that he could make the director smile by the end of the shoot. He lost. Wiseman commemorated his experience with Losey in his novel Genius Jack. It’s not kind. This, however, is a sly treat you don’t want to miss. You are a novelist, an imaginer of fiction.

Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)

You are Queen of Scotland by birth, Queen of France by marriage and Queen of England by right. There was a swathe of period dramas in the wake of the 1968 riots – perhaps there was something comforting about a retreat into the past, no matter how bloody or violent. Director Charles Jarrott made something of a specialty of this in British cinema and this somewhat by-the-numbers evocation of one of the great rivalries for the crown boasts stellar performances by Vanessa Redgrave as the eponymous Catholic beauty and Glenda Jackson as Protestant Elizabeth I, the bastard daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. It doesn’t trouble with a lot of truth although Patrick McGoohan has a field day playing Mary’s half-brother James, the wannabe Scots ruler, and there’s some interesting bed action between Timothy Dalton as Lord Darnley, planted by Elizabeth to seduce and destroy Mary, and her Italian advisor, Ian Holm, in a tale rife with adultery and bisexuality. The last twenty minutes focuses on a fabricated meeting between the two women, all the better to sweeten the dramatic pill, to a swoony John Barry score and delicious photography by Christopher Challis. Off with her head! Written by John Hale.