The Terence Davies Trilogy **** (1983, Phillip Mawdsley, Nick Stringer, Valerie Lilley, Terry O’Sullivan, Sheila Raynor, Wilfrid Brambell) – Classic Movie Review 5156

Writer-director Terence Davies’s outstanding first film is an impressive achievement in bleak memoir, cohering satisfyingly, though made up from three autobiographical short films made over a period of six years or so.

The anthology film The Terence Davies Trilogy comprises the previously released shorts Children and Madonna and Child with the newly produced Death and Transfiguration. It tells the life of Davies’s alter ego Robert Tucker in the three segments, screened together at film festivals throughout Europe and the US as The Terence Davies Trilogy, and winning numerous awards.

The opener, Children (1976), written while Davies attended Coventry Drama School and filmed under the auspices of the BFI Production Board, looks at his birth and early life as a boy (Phillip Mawdsley) in a loveless, violent home and at an austere boy’s school. The cast also comes with Nick Stringer as Robert’s Father, Valerie Lilley as Robert’s Mother and Robin Hooper as Robert as a young man.

In part two, Madonna and Child (1980), made after Davies went to the National Film School, Davies’ alter ego hero Robert is a closeted gay man (Terry O’Sullivan) working in a grim office as a shipping office clerk in Liverpool, while living at home with his strong-willed mother (Sheila Raynor).

Lastly, in Death and Transfiguration (1983), he deals with his mother’s death and hypothesises the circumstances of his own death. The film moves back and forth among three periods in Robert Tucker’s life: he’s an old man (Wilfrid Brambell), near death, in a nursing home at Christmas time; in middle age (Terry O’Sullivan) caring for his cheerful but dying mother; an eight-year-old boy (Iain Munro) at Catholic school.

Terence Davies, who was gay, frequently explored gay themes in his films. But in 2022 he said he preferred to live alone and had been single for much of his life.

Davies’s next films were Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992), The Neon Bible (1995) and The House of Mirth (2000), The Deep Blue Sea (2011) and Sunset Song (2015). Because Davies found funding hard to raise and refused to compromise, his output was sporadic, with only eight feature films, up to A Quiet Passion in 2016 and Benediction in 2021.

Terence Davies died at his home on 7 October 2023, at 77, after a short illness.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5,156

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