While on a train, a teenage boy thinks about his life and the flamboyant aunt whose friendship acted as an emotional shield from his troubled family. This film evokes the haunting quality ...
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The Long Day Closes is the story of eleven-year-old "Bud." A sad and lonely boy, Bud struggles through his days. With cinema as his main source of solace, he haunts the local movie-house. ... See full summary »
Director:
Terence Davies
Stars:
Leigh McCormack,
Marjorie Yates,
Anthony Watson
Davies' film is divided into three segments entitled "Children", "Madonna and Child", and "Death and Transfiguartion". The segments tell the life of Robert Tucker. The first segment looks ... See full summary »
Director:
Terence Davies
Stars:
Phillip Mawdsley,
Nick Stringer,
Valerie Lilley
The lives of an English working-class family are told out of order in a free-associative manner. The first part, "Distant Voices", focuses on the father's role in the family. The second part, "Still Lives", focuses on his children.
Director:
Terence Davies
Stars:
Pete Postlethwaite,
Freda Dowie,
Angela Walsh
In sepia tones, the film moves back and forth among three periods in Robert Tucker's life: he's an old man, near death, in a nursing home at Christmas time; he's in middle age caring for ... See full summary »
Director:
Terence Davies
Stars:
Wilfrid Brambell,
Terry O'Sullivan,
Iain Munro
Robert Tucker, a young gay man who is almost without affect, sits in various waiting rooms. As he sits, he recalls events from the year of his childhood when his father dies. He's ten or ... See full summary »
Director:
Terence Davies
Stars:
Phillip Mawdsley,
Nick Stringer,
Valerie Lilley
Robert Tucker, a sorrowful, solitary man, given to bouts of weeping, tries to balance his life caring for his aging mother, his Catholicism, his homosexuality, and his dull job. One night, ... See full summary »
Director:
Terence Davies
Stars:
Terry O'Sullivan,
Sheila Raynor,
Paul Barber
While on a train, a teenage boy thinks about his life and the flamboyant aunt whose friendship acted as an emotional shield from his troubled family. This film evokes the haunting quality of memory while creating a heartfelt portrait of a boy's life in a rural 1940s Southern town.Written by
Ivana Redwine <credwine@ix.netcom.com>
In an interview with "Time Out Film", Terence Davies said about this film, "[It] doesn't work, and that's entirely my fault. The only thing I can say is that it's a transition work. And I couldn't have done The House of Mirth (2000) without it." See more »
Quotes
David, aged 15:
If you were different from anybody else in town, you had to get out. They used to say in school, "you have to think for yourself," but you couldn't do that in town. You have to think what your father thought and that was what everybody thought.
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Another question. Did anyone who had a hand in the production of this film bother to watch the daily rushes? I understand that the book this is based on is quite impressive. "Memoir films" are probably the trickiest to execute, especially when the languid rural South is the locale; Without the potent elements of a Tennessee Williams or a Truman Capote, it can all-too-easily result in a real misfire.
The handling of the story here is far too lyrical and poetic to have any ring of authenticity. It's as if the director's intent was to make the film so poignant you could die from it (was this secretly a Hallmark Hall Of Fame project?) But the period detail is good, whenever it's not laid on too thick.
But sadly, the characters are cardboard, almost "Stepford Wives"-mechanical in their behavior and speech. The pace is, needless to say, fatally slow. And even those physical elements which are easy to devise instead look jarringly artificial and overdone (the too-rhythmic tree movement seen through a window, the life-choking cloud of dust/smoke from a bus, a railroad coach that only rocks when viewed from the outside...and real passenger trains didn't carry a caboose!)
My two-star rating here is in acknowledgment of the film's one stand-out asset, Gena Rowlands, an actress who is so thoroughly watchable in anything she does. She breathes the only life into this production, not an easy task, and she makes the most of what was thankfully the most interesting character.
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Another question. Did anyone who had a hand in the production of this film bother to watch the daily rushes? I understand that the book this is based on is quite impressive. "Memoir films" are probably the trickiest to execute, especially when the languid rural South is the locale; Without the potent elements of a Tennessee Williams or a Truman Capote, it can all-too-easily result in a real misfire.
The handling of the story here is far too lyrical and poetic to have any ring of authenticity. It's as if the director's intent was to make the film so poignant you could die from it (was this secretly a Hallmark Hall Of Fame project?) But the period detail is good, whenever it's not laid on too thick.
But sadly, the characters are cardboard, almost "Stepford Wives"-mechanical in their behavior and speech. The pace is, needless to say, fatally slow. And even those physical elements which are easy to devise instead look jarringly artificial and overdone (the too-rhythmic tree movement seen through a window, the life-choking cloud of dust/smoke from a bus, a railroad coach that only rocks when viewed from the outside...and real passenger trains didn't carry a caboose!)
My two-star rating here is in acknowledgment of the film's one stand-out asset, Gena Rowlands, an actress who is so thoroughly watchable in anything she does. She breathes the only life into this production, not an easy task, and she makes the most of what was thankfully the most interesting character.