Comrades

Bill Douglas (1934-1991) was a director who created his art out of adversity – both in his subject matter and in the conditions he worked in. Leaving out some early 8mm shorts which Douglas dismissed as “rubbish”, the BFI have now released a pair of two-disc DVDs (or two-disc Blu-rays) containing the whole of Douglas’s output – the early short Come Dancing, the two shorts and one short feature that make up Douglas’s autobiographical Trilogy, and finally his three-hour feature Comrades. That’s a total running time of about six hours. Few major directors have a filmography as sparse.

Comrades is divided into two parts of unequal length. The first and longest section establishes the everyday life of the six Martyrs and their families in 1830s Dorset. This may seem slow to some viewers, but that’s because Douglas as far as he can is making his points visually, reducing dialogue to a minimum. Although there are moments of happiness in their lives, times are indeed hard, and become worse when their wages are cut. As their song goes, how can they live on eight shillings a week? Even less when that wage is cut to six. Dissatisfaction builds, until George Loveless (Robin Soans) forms a union to protect his fellow workers’ interests. However, the authorities do not take kindly to this, and Loveless, his brother James (William Gaminara), his brother-in-law Thomas Stanfield (Stephen Bateman), Thomas's son John (Philip Davis), James Brine (Jeremy Flynn) and James Hammett (Keith Allen) are arrested and transported.

An hour and three quarters in, we and the convicts are in Australia, a land of burning heat and blue skies, a visual contrast that acts as much of a jolt as the cut from Scotland to Egypt in My Way Home. Douglas’s narrative strategy changes too: while the first part emphasised collectivity, now he tells the stories of the individual Martyrs, one after the other. Douglas wanted to emphasise the visual contrast by shooting the two parts in different aspect ratios, expanding the screen to Scope for the Australian sequences, but the financiers did not allow this.

The film’s subtitle is “A Lanternist’s Account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and What Become of Them”. Almost the first person we see on screen is a Lanternist (Alex Norton), plying his trade in the impoverished village. Norton plays eleven credited roles during the film, plus a further uncredited one as a Witch, as a chorus-cum-storyteller. Douglas had a lifelong interest in pre-cinematic methods of visual storytelling, and this is used as a recurring theme throughout Comrades. The journey to Australia, for example, is conveyed by an antique Victorian panorama. (Norton had a thirteenth role, as the husband of the character played by Barbara Windsor, but this was cut.)

Douglas wanted to use non-professional actors as the Martyrs and their families, but due to Equity regulations settled for unknowns. Some of these have gone on to considerable careers of their own, including Philip Davis, Keith Allen and, in her cinema debut, Imelda Staunton. The better-known names in the cast played the aristocracy, the landowners and figures of authority, and familiar Australian actors such as Arthur Dignam and John Hargreaves make appearances too. The camerawork of Gale Tattersall (who had photographed My Ain Folk) is a major asset. Some of the scenes have a slightly abstract, minimalist feel to them: partly due to Douglas’s framing and no doubt also due to the low budget – some of the exterior scenes are noticeably lacking in extras.

Douglas first read about the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1979, shortly after the completion of his Trilogy. However, it was not easy to raise finance for a three-hour film involving a historical setting, a large cast and extensive location shooting in Australia. Ismail Merchant was initially on board as producer, and helped secure a British distribution deal. But Merchant and Douglas did not see eye to eye (more about this later). It’s hard to see Bill Douglas’s spare, primarily visual approach sitting well with the dialogue-driven literary focus of a typical Merchant Ivory production. However, Simon Relph, and his company Skreba Productions, stepped in and the film went into production. However, inclement weather in Australia caused it to go over schedule and over budget. Douglas’s original cut was thought too long, so an edited version of approximately 160 minutes premiered at the London Film Festival. However, Douglas felt that this version was unsatisfactory, so a final cut of 183 minutes (at 24 fps) was prepared and that is the basis of the version on this DVD – though see below for further details. This went on release in August 1987 and played for just six weeks. I saw the film a few months later at the National Film Theatre.

In a way the film’s lack of commercial success is not surprising. Although the film is certainly moving, it could be said to keep the viewer at arm’s length, due to Douglas’s use of distancing devices – Norton’s multiple roles, scenes where characters seem almost to be addressing the audience directly. At the time of release, costume drama was big box office, following the success of Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View, and we were beginning to see a spate of well-acted, prettily photographed but cinematically dull literary adaptations in that film’s wake. That isn’t to knock Merchant Ivory, who have made some very good films over the years on quite small budgets, but more the fault of their imitators. This was a time of Conservative government, and films such as these were seized upon as “heritage” cinema, and Merchant Ivory’s reputation has suffered ever since.

However, Comrades is a different type of historical drama. Merchant Ivory and their imitators made a kind of costume drama that was overtly literary – almost all adaptations of novels, and relying heavily on dialogue. As I say above, Comrades, like the Trilogy before it, comes from a different cinematic tradition. In its way, it belongs to a more visual, and more overtly political strain of British film,, one that has been recently been celebrated by the BFI with their releases of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s earlier Winstanley and Chris Newby’s later Anchoress.

Apart from a couple of TV showings and a VHS release, Comrades has been hard to see since its cinema run. Part of this may be due to a rights issue: Skreba Productions made several features in the Eighties and early Nineties, and until now none of them have had a DVD release. So for two decades, Douglas’s epic has more or less vanished from sight. Douglas died of cancer at the young age of fifty-seven.

The struggle that Douglas had even to be able to make films is hardly unique. Terence Davies, twelve years younger, who also began his career with a BFI-produced autobiographical trilogy, recently went eight years between features. British cinema history in the Eighties is littered with the names of men and women who made one or maybe two features and were not able to follow them up. Many of those have continued to work in television, but it’s hard to visualise a director as distinctive (and as uncompromising) as Douglas shooting episodes of The Bill or Casualty. For those not working squarely in the commercial mainstream, if anything the situation for British filmmakers is worse than it was.

But now Comrades is available again, and it looks more and more like one of the great British films of the 1980s.

The DVD

Comrades is released by the BFI as a two-disc DVD set, encoded for all regions. There is also a Blu-ray edition, which Noel Megahey has reviewed here.

The version released here is Douglas’s final cut. As the booklet accompanying this release states, the only alteration (which was approved by Simon Relph) was to replace an intermission card with a dissolve. However, the booklet does not mention one other difference from the version I saw in the cinema. That version had three seconds removed for a PG certificate. This material is from the Australian section of the film and shows chain gang boss McCallum (Alex Norton again) apparently causing his dog to perform oral sex on him. Although this was cut for cinema and VHS this footage was apparently present on TV showings. I didn’t watch the film then, but I do remember Right to Reply featuring a letter complaining about Channel 4 showing “a scene of bestiality”. This footage has been reinstated for this DVD release. You can see the reasoning why this was cut. At the time, this scene would quite likely have landed Comrades with an 18 certificate, but if you lose three seconds (and make a plot point a little obscure) you get a PG and make the film accessible to school history lessons. It would be interesting to know if Douglas agreed to this cut, or if it was forced upon him. The uncut version now carries a 15, though due to a scene of solvent abuse in the short film Home and Away (see below), the package overall is rated 18.

The DVD transfer is anamorphically enhanced and slightly pillarboxed, giving a ratio of 1.75:1. That is the ratio I saw the film in at the cinema, and it would be a feasible ratio for a low-budget British film of its time. However, during the Lanterna Magicka documentary, a card is shown which states that the intended ratio of Comrades is 1.85:1. The transfer itself, done in high definition from a 35mm interpositive, is quite outstanding, coping as well with the softer light of Dorset to the harsh orange earth and blue skies of Australia. Shadow detail is excellent.

Comrades was released in cinemas with a Dolby Stereo soundtrack, from before the era of digital cinema sound. It's rendered on this DVD as an uncompressed Linear PCM track. Like many such soundtracks, it's pretty much mono with the surrounds being used for Hans Werner Henze and David Graham's music score. Hard-of-hearing subtitles are available in English for the feature and the extras. Subtitles in French, Spanish and German are available for the feature only.

The extras are on a second disc, with a “Play All” option. The DVD and Blu-ray had a documentary on Douglas called Intent on Getting the Image. Here there's another one: Lanterna Magicka: Bill Douglas and the Secret History of Cinema (60:47). This covers Douglas's earliest cinematic influences, such as Bresson (unsurprisingly) but also Buñuel (more so). We take a look at Douglas's collection of pre-cinematic equipment, some 50,000 items now housed in the Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter. This moves on to how this interest in pre-cinema influenced the making of Comrades, which is covered in some depth.

Visions of: Comrades (14:46) is a making-of piece interviewing many of the cast of the film, including Philip Davis, Robin Soans and Imelda Staunton, and also producer Simon Relph. The device of introducing each speaker with a still shot (not a freeze-frame) while they talk on the soundtrack is a little tiresome.

Bill Douglas: Interview (18:31) and Bill Douglas: Reflections on His Trilogy (11:17) are two interviews with Douglas shot at his London flat in 1978, just after the completion of My Way Home. The interviewer is Charles Rees, joined on the second film by Mamoun Hassan. Douglas discusses the making of the trilogy, and how the different crews in each part gave the films a different look and feel to each other. We also see his pre-cinema collection, and watch Douglas assemble and demonstrate a zoetrope.

Home and Away (29:56) is a 16mm colour short from 1974 directed by Michael Alexander and co-scripted by Douglas. The story of a Scottish boy coming to terms with boarding school and the break-up of his parents' marriage, it shows similarity in themes to the Trilogy though is obviously very different in style. It's an engaging, character-led half-hour, transferred from DVD from a slightly faded print with a very low-mixed soundtrack.

The extras continue with the Comrades theatrical trailer, the length of which (3:45) is an indication that this film was a hard sell. Finally, there is a local TV news report on the shooting in Tyneham, Dorset (2:22). Interviewed are Simon Relph and Douglas, neither identified on screen.

The BFI's booklet begins with an essay by Grahame Smith “Still Dancing: The Return of Comrades”. Smith begins by saying he thinks himself lucky to have been able to see the film in a cinema: he's not alone. Also in the booklet are a transcription of a Q&A session after a screening in Bridport in 1987, scans from the shooting script, plus a biography of Douglas and notes on the transfer and extras.


As I say above, Comrades looks more and more like one of the great British films of the 1980s, and this is one of the DVD packages of the year.

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