Terence Davies (1976, 1980, 1983)
This month’s Sight & Sound features a Terence Davies interview, with Ben Walters, to mark the release in British cinemas of Benediction. This latest entry in the Davies oeuvre is, as usual, a melancholy affair but the personal anguish that Davies conveys in what he tells Walters is more poignant than anything in the films of his that I know, even the excellent A Quiet Passion (2016). His inveterate unhappiness made me feel guilty for some of the mean things I’ve written about Davies on this blog over the years, and that I should try harder to appreciate his work. It made sense to start with what’s become known as The Terence Davies Trilogy – the black-and-white shorts that began his film-making career, starting with Children (1976), followed by Madonna and Child (1980) and concluding with Death and Transfiguration (1983).
The trilogy’s protagonist is Robert Tucker, at different stages of his life. Anyone coming to the films with basic knowledge of Davies’s biography assumes Robert to be an alter ego. He’s the child of working-class parents. His mother, to whom he’s very close, is a devout Catholic. His father is violently abusive and dies young. From pre-adolescence onwards, Robert is deeply troubled by his homosexuality and the tension between it and his religion. He has all these things in common with the man behind the camera, and the second and third films were shot on location in Liverpool, Davies’s home city. (Perhaps Children was too though I didn’t spot the usual landmarks and the characters’ accents aren’t broad Scouse.) There’s common ground also between the salient qualities of these short films and of Davies’s subsequent features – the importance of music, the often jarring juxtaposition of settings that are realistic and acting that’s anything but.
Because the self-conscious performances in Children foreshadow a persisting issue in Davies’s cinema (right through to Benediction), it’s hard to ascribe them simply to the director’s inexperience. Even so, it’s only fair to note the circumstances in which his first film was made. According to Wikipedia, Davies wrote the screenplay while he was a student at Coventry Drama School in the early 1970s; Children was made under the auspices of the BFI Production Board (as it then was) and before Davies studied at the National Film School. At forty-seven minutes the longest of the trilogy pieces, Children mostly comprises scenes of Robert’s home and school life, at the age of perhaps eleven or twelve (where he’s played by Philip Mawdsley). These are punctuated by sequences showing the adult Robert (Robin Hooper) who evidently suffers from depression, wanders the streets distractedly, visits his GP and recalls his childhood.
Davies imposes misery in unnatural ways. In an early scene, Robert and other boys are attending a school medical. They sit in their underpants on a row of chairs, waiting their turn to be called by the doctor. Robert sits apart from the others, who snigger about ‘Mr Universe’. Why? Although he’s isolated and miserable, Robert doesn’t stand out as physically puny. Davies also has a tendency to make one point at a time even if that means ignoring points already made that would be relevant in a subsequent sequence. He shows Robert in a group of boys in the showers at a swimming baths. Here, Robert isn’t the butt of jokes and doesn’t seem embarrassed. Instead, he’s transfixed by a handsome young man (twenty-four-year-old Trevor Eve) who joins the group and showers ostentatiously. Watching the man sluice his upper body and rearrange his genitals inside his swimming trunks, Robert is uncomfortable but can’t look away.
There’s a lot of gazing in Children. In the opening sequence, where Robert is confronted by school bullies, even his aggressors gawp torpidly, which dilutes their menace. In a longer sequence, Robert and his wan, habitually silent mother (Valerie Lilley) sit side by side on the upper deck of a bus. Davies and his cinematographer William Diver show the back of Robert’s head as he looks out of the bus window at a succession of terraced streets flashing by. His mother, looking straight ahead, is shown in sideview. This shot is held for a long time before she starts to sob, attracting the attention of one or two other passengers and causing Robert to turn towards her. It’s the most visually striking and, for me, the most dramatically pointless bit of the film. I get that, even as a rookie film-maker, Davies wanted to create screen poetry rather than naturalism but the bus scene conveys nothing. We don’t know what Robert sees in the streets that he’s intent on staring at. He doesn’t seem to have chosen to look at them in order to look away from his mother. He’s surprised when she’s upset but doesn’t ask what’s wrong.
The film climaxes with the death of Robert’s father (Nick Stringer) and its immediate aftermath. The face of the priest administering the last rites is obscured from view but his beautiful voice surely belongs to Terence Davies. There’s a creaky exchange between Robert and two female neighbours who come to view the corpse; and a good moment as the undertaker goes discreetly about his business, screwing down the coffin lid – though it’s rather spoiled by the camera’s pulling back to reveal a tableau of mother and son observing the scene. The soundtrack includes, in the closing stages, ‘Swanee River (Old Folks at Home)’ and, more arrestingly, ‘The Ballad of Barbara Allen’ (which I don’t remember hearing before).
After leaving school at sixteen, Terence Davies worked for ten years as a shipping clerk in the Liverpool docks, and that’s the numbing job of thirty-something Robert (Terry O’Sullivan) in Madonna and Child (30 minutes). Davies shows his daily journey to the office and back on the Mersey ferry. In the first workplace sequence, the camera slowly pans across Robert and his colleagues from left to right; in the second, it pans in the opposite direction; each movement stresses soul-destroying office ritual and routine. The life of the film is in Robert’s world outside work, at home with his widowed mother (Sheila Raynor) and in a series of episodes dealing with his tormented carnal ventures – in a public toilet as he edges towards contact with the man at the next-door urinal, in a late-night visit to a club where he’s denied entrance, in an abortive telephone request to a tattooist (‘I want my bollocks done’). In the climactic sequence, Robert and his mother are side by side in a church pew until he enters the confessional. He scrupulously lists and enumerates his sins but his mind is on transgressions not mentioned to the priest: Davies cross-cuts between the confessional and Robert’s sexual fantasies.
In the church mother and son sit with their faces to the camera and their backs to a pietà sculpture. The formal religious setting justifies this dual tableau and Davies’s choice of predominantly religious music throughout, whether sung by a church choir or by a class of schoolchildren, supplies a framework that allows Madonna and Child to work mythically in a way that Children fails to do. It also helps that there’s less dialogue than in the first film and that Terry O’Sullivan’s face has a very serviceable ordinariness. During his ferry commute, Robert is in tears but this is a man inconspicuous enough for fellow passengers not to notice, even in distress. The film is less successful whenever there are lines to speak: the phone conversation with the tattooist is unassailably bizarre but the over-emphatic voices rob it of rhythm and detract from Robert’s desperation.
Where the second film gives comparable weight to each of its title elements, the trilogy’s last part (26 minutes) gives death a starring role and transfiguration barely a cameo. Robert Tucker appears at three ages here. Terry O’Sullivan returns as the middle-aged man, soon before and shortly after the death of his beloved mother (now played by Jeanne Doree). There are sequences featuring Robert as an eight-year-old boy (Iain Munro) and as an old man (Wilfrid Brambell), in hospital and eventually on his deathbed.
At the time, Wilfrid Brambell was by far the best-known name in any of Davies’s casts. This actor’s screen-hogging tendencies might have seemed a recipe for disaster but the result is impressive. Brambell was famously comfortable playing men much older than he actually was (only fifty, and only a dozen years Harry H Corbett’s senior, when Steptoe and Son began). Just turned seventy when he appeared in Death and Transfiguration, Brambell (who died in 1985) is an effortless incarnation of extreme old age. The role is wordless but not soundless: the geriatric Robert’s raspy breathing, on the verge of becoming a death rattle, is truly unnerving (it now seems to anticipate the last, laboured breaths of Emily Dickinson’s mother in A Quiet Passion). You almost wish Davies had dispensed entirely with dialogue. When the bereaved Robert caresses clothes hanging in his dead mother’s wardrobe, his words – ‘Mam, oh, mam …’ – are superfluous and, so deliberately are they spoken, counterproductive. As before, Terry O’Sullivan is facially expressive but his delivery often kills the effect. Not that O’Sullivan stands out as bad when the playing of smaller parts is conspicuously worse. The supposedly casual conversations between two nurses on old Robert’s hospital ward are particularly dire.
Before starting on this note, I reread the ones I’d written about Davies features. In the review of Sunset Song (2015), I quoted his professed approach to directing actors, as explained to Nick James for an earlier S&S interview:
‘I say to the actors in every film, “I don’t want you to act, but I’ll be there for you. If you do something that’s different than I think is best, stay with it.” That way you give them the freedom to do what they feel. And it’s much, much more powerful if they don’t “act”. But they’ve got to have the architecture of the piece, and technique has to come in there, but it just has to be felt.’
Perhaps the trilogy pieces predate this MO but they’re not the only Davies films where ‘acting’ is just what you see and hear. It’s quite a coincidence, if the actors are simply doing ‘what they feel’, that most of them are similarly awkward. Before Wilfrid Brambell, Davies wasn’t working with well-established actors but it’s worth noting the playing of the one member of the Children cast who did reach the big time, within a very few years. Trevor Eve’s readings aren’t a problem because he has no lines but he’s very clearly performing. This effect could be explained by the man in the showers deliberately preening but I doubt it. I can’t help suspecting that, because the point of the scene he’s in is to show Robert’s sexual fascination, Davies encouraged Eve to act provocative
As a single piece, Madonna and Child is the most satisfying of this trio of films. As the last of three parts, Death and Transfiguration naturally has an edge in consolidating the trilogy’s strengths as a whole. His memoir Of Time and the City (2008) set out to explore in quasi-documentary form the interrelationship of Davies’s past and present but the result tended to highlight (without admitting to) disjunctions between them. This earlier work is more persuasive. Despite being autobiographical, it’s set in the era in which it was made rather than the years when Davies was the age of Robert: most noticeably, the schooldays sequences in Children suggest the 1970s rather than the mid-1950s, when Davies was a pre-adolescent. This may well because the budget was too small to allow for detailed period recreation but, if so, film-making economics actually help to convey that Robert’s past is always present. Davies does this more intentionally too. In the recent S&S piece, he tells Ben Walters that he was a devout Catholic until the age of twenty-two. Robert’s churchgoing at a considerably older age in Madonna and Child conveys the persistence of a Catholic upbringing and, especially, Catholic guilt.
Past, present and future jostle together strongly in Death and Transfiguration, which also sustains the conflict between loves sacred and profane that Madonna and Child dramatises. Robert moves from his mother’s clothes in the wardrobe to leafing through a scrapbook of pictures of male bodybuilders (real Mr Universes). Sitting in the car that follows her hearse to church, he recalls visiting his dying mother in hospital. Perhaps he then imagines his own eventual demise though it’s just as likely that the elderly, ailing Robert does all the remembering in the film, of fragments from different stages of his life. The music in Death and Transfiguration is an aptly more various selection – children singing Christmas carols, popular standards that include ‘It All Depends on You’ (sung by Doris Day) and ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’. On the face of it, one big difference between Robert Tucker and Terence Davies is that, whereas the latter was the youngest of ten children, the former might as well be an only child. His solitariness makes emotional sense, though. It reflects what seems to be the enduring loneliness of Robert’s creator.
27 May, 1 June, 3 June 2022