Comrades (no 26)

(UK 1986 180m) DVD2

We raise the watchword ‘liberty’

p  Simon Relph  d/w  Bill Douglas  ph  Gale Tattersall  ed  Mick Audsley  m  Hans Werner Henze, David Graham  art  Michael Pickwoad

Robin Soans (George Loveless), William Gammara (James Loveless), Stephen Bateman (Old Tom Stanfield), Phil Davis (Young Stanfield), Jeremy Flynn (Brine), Keith Allen (James Hammett), Alex Norton (Lanternist/Sgt. Bell/Diorama showman/Laughing Cavalier, etc), Michael Clark (sailor), Arthur Dignam (Fop), James Fox (Norfolk), John Hargreaves (convict), Vanessa Redgrave (Mrs Carlyle), Robert Stephens (Frampton), Barbara Windsor (Mrs Wetham), Imelda Staunton (Betsy Loveless), Murray Melvin (clerk), Michael Hordern (Mr Pitt), Freddie Jones (vicar), Katy Behean (Sarah Loveless), Sandra Voe (Diana Stanfield), Joanna David (Mrs Frampton),

If ever there was a forgotten figure in British cinema, it’s Bill Douglas.  He’s virtually ignored even in the UK, let alone in the US, where even the most confident of cineastes will look at you with a blank expression upon hearing his name.  He only made four feature films, the first three of which – My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home – became known as his ‘trilogy’, and were based on his own childhood in a dilapidated Scottish mining village.  They were certainly amongst the bleakest films in existence, and also among the most truthful, and while they were undoubtedly a milestone in British cinema, their successor, Comrades, was arguably better still.  Yet it, unlike the trilogy, it was virtually impossible to see prior to the belated DVD release in July 2009, even ignored by its Film Four makers for many years.

            The film relates the famous tale of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the six farm labourers from a Dorset village in the 1830s who tried to start up a primitive union to look after their interests in response to the bosses’ refusals to pay them a decent wage.  In response, the bosses arranged to have them arrested and transported to Australia.  While their families and a few noble members of the ruling class fought against the injustice, they were packed off to a different life in Botany Bay.

            The film is referred to as a “Lanternist’s account” of the events, and a lanternist, as well as various other curators of optical devices to provide entertainment or primitive photographs, are seen through the film, all played by Alex Norton.  The opening shot is, one assumes, a Solar Eclipse, after which a massacre of workers takes place as if to emphasise the darkening times.  At the film’s end, however, the eclipse could be seen to be symbolic of the lens aperture of a camera, with the whole film told through the eye of a modern day lanternist.  Symbolic cuts are made regularly through the film, most memorably from a piece of stale bread on a table to the opulent finery of a church altar.  Entertainment for these neglected people is pretty much impromptu, reliant on travelling showmen or sailors dancing the Alla Hornpipe on a large outdoor table.  Yet, though their descendant, Douglas’ camera rather speaks through the mouth of one of the martyrs, who bemoans to one such showman that “what you offer is illusion.” Like him, Douglas is concerned with reality, in all its harsh, bleak, downtrodden glory, punctuated with real despair and pain.  A pain all the more apparent when set in contrast to the ruling classes shown in absolute hypocrisy, perfectly depicted in the form of a so-called gentleman cheating at cards while bemoaning how letting the working class read corrupts their morals.  For Douglas, this was no tale of the distant past, and was never more relevant than when it was released, a rallying cry for the early unions at a time when Thatcher was trying to systematically wipe them out.  It may be preachy in places, and it may go off on occasional tangents, but it remains a sterling, well-acted, shatteringly raw piece of work that remains shamefully neglected in the British cinematic pantheon.  As Geoff Andrew observed, it has a “deeply human concern for suffering, coupled with a righteous anger directed against hypocrisy and inequality.”  This and a whole lot more besides.  It’s Douglas’ vindication as a film-maker.