When Schlesinger's film about a love triangle involving an older man, a woman and the feckless, bisexual young man whom they adore appeared in 1971, it was universally praised by reviewers for its skill in portraying a love triangle “very much of today,” as Judith Crist put it in New York Magazine (Crist 1971, 74). Impressed by the film's open treatment of contemporary sexual practices and its innovative portrait of homosexuality, major reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic— Archer Winsten, Vincent Canby, Rex Reed, Pauline Kael, Kathleen Carroll, Newton North, Molly Haskell— seemed to write as if Sunday Bloody Sunday was the first work in history to explore an unconventional love triangle. As the somewhat complacent reviewer of the Wall Street Journal expressed it, “This is, of course, a triangle inscribed by an emphatically contemporary pen” (Boyum 1971, 14).

It's also a triangle inscribed by a somewhat older pen. The film's recollection of Shakespeare's love sonnets, in which the poet's young friend and his mistress betray him by having an affair together, is not simply a matter of subject (the insoluble truths of desire) and point of view (that of the older man) but of Schlesinger's artistic method of dividing the film into increments of time, marked by days of the week, temporal and emotional units that resemble the discreet lyrics within a sonnet sequence or the chapters of a novel. In the words of Schlesinger's biographer, Sunday Bloody Sunday can give one “the sense of reading rather than watching” (Mann 2005, 378). Pauline Kael described it as a “novel written on film” and, in being so, an entirely new achievement: “It has never been done before— not successfully, that is— and so this movie is instantly recognizable as a classic.”

Other earlier works of art reverberate in Sunday Bloody Sunday. The music of the film is taken from a Mozart opera and its vision of the city as a total environment derives from classic documentary films of urban life. These resonances distinguish the film from others of the period, providing it with a kind of aesthetic deep focus that distances the viewer from the contemporary story it has to tell and, perhaps for that reason, makes it possible for viewers today to derive something from the film beyond a time-bound portrait of the sexual and romantic quandaries of the well-to-do in seventies London.