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Director John Schlesinger followed up his darkly compelling drama Midnight Cowboy (1969) with Sunday Bloody Sunday, a rather bold examination of the loosened sexual mores in early 1970s London. It sees a gay doctor, Daniel (Peter Finch), and a divorcee, Alex (Glenda Jackson), in open relationships with a handsome young artist, Bob Elkin (Murray Head), whom both are afraid of losing. Developed with some difficulty due to the material, which both financiers and some actors found too risqué, Sunday Bloody Sunday was finally released to considerable acclaim, earning four nominations at the 1972 Academy Awards. —MM
Women in Love (1969)
Perhaps best remembered for a scene in which Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestle naked before a roaring fire, Ken Russell’s Women in Love—adapted by Larry Kramer (yes, that Larry Kramer) from the 1920 novel by D. H. Lawrence—is principally about the courtships of two sisters, Ursula (Jennie Linden) and Gudrun (Glenda Jackson, in an Oscar-winning role). Ursula loves the dashing Rupert (Bates), a school inspector, and Gudrun loves Gerald (Reed), a local industrialist and Rupert’s close friend. Yet as both relationships deepen and, in the case of Gudrun and Gerald, begin to warp, Rupert comes to understand that he wants more than a workaday friendship from Gerald. “We ought to swear to love each other, you and I—implicitly, perfectly, finally, without any possibility of ever going back on it,” he says after their wrestling match. “Shall we swear to each other one day?” Although Women in Love’s not-so-subtle homoeroticism caused it to be banned in Turkey, it’s now widely considered Russell’s most stirring work. —MM
The Group (1966)
