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Derek Malcolm's rating
Forgotten masterpiece from a neglected film maker
By
Derek Malcolm
19 Apr 2007
The retrospective accorded to Terence Davies at the BFI Southbank is long overdue.
He is one of our most talented and neglected film-makers, and this is quite possibly his masterpiece.
This autobiographical story, a bittersweet tracing of his working-class upbringing in postwar Liverpool, is told in flashback and studded with songs of the period.
It is highly emotional but seldom sentimental as it traces his fraught relationship with his psychotic father (Pete Postlethwaite) and weak but affectionate mother (Freda Dowie).
Its subtle stylisation is a triumph of real cinematic artifice. All Davies's other films are on display and each is worth seeing as defiant and often poetic expositions of a fractured life.
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