Monthly Archives: December 2025

  • The Long Day Closes

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terence Davies (1992)

    BFI’s CEO Ben Walters, self-described Terence Davies superfan, introduced this screening of The Long Day Closes.  The introduction was first rate:  accustomed as he surely is to public speaking, Walters impressed with a concise blend of professional cineaste and personal observations about the film and its auteur.  As a film-fanatic teenager, he first heard of Terence Davies on Barry Norman’s Film ‘93 on BBC TV.   Walters was watching the programme mainly for a featurette on the upcoming Jurassic Park …

    Like the Still Lives half of its 1988 predecessor, The Long Day Closes has a 1950s Liverpool setting.  This time, Davies’ representative on screen is twelve-year-old Bud (Leigh McCormack).  The youngest child in a working-class Catholic family, he lives with his mother (Marjorie Yates) and older siblings; viewers already familiar with Davies hardly need to be told that the children’s father was abusive and is now dead.  Bud’s present life is happy enough, though he’s troubled by aspects of his religion, and his native diffidence is increasing, especially in relation to boys his own age, in tandem with developing sexual awareness.  (Davies’ choice of name for his protagonist is presumably symbolic.)  Early on, Bud, at an upstairs window of his home, is transfixed by a bare-chested bricklayer (Kirk McLaughlin) working in the street outside.  When the young brickie catches sight of Bud watching, he smiles back.  Much later in the narrative, in Davies’ most striking (con)fusion of sexual and religious imagery and feeling, Bud has a fantasy about Christ on the cross, in the person of the bricklayer.  Actors in Davies films, however experienced, rarely deliver performances that seem convincingly independent of the director’s intentions.  Leigh McCormack, in his first (and only) screen appearance, certainly couldn’t be expected to.  He’s likeable, though, and rather different from some of Davies’ other boyhood alter egos – tall, with a pleasant, humorous face, not an obvious wimp.  I can’t imagine the film had a lengthy shooting schedule, yet Leigh McCormack’s face seems, remarkably, to age somewhat as the shadows lengthen for Bud.

    In the film’s extended finale, DP Michael Coulter’s fine images of a mackerel sky that slowly fades into near-darkness are accompanied by the Arthur Sullivan piece that supplies Davies’ title (sung a cappella by the choral group Pro Cantione Antiqua).  Before that, there’s been a good deal of very different music, as well as several snatches of dialogue from contemporary films.  The choice of both reflects Davies’ two-pronged approach to the cinema of personal memory.  He wants to recreate his past on screen.  He also gives a retrospective commentary that stresses that past’s irrecoverability.  The soundtrack includes popular recordings from the early post-war years ranging from Kathleen Ferrier’s ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ to Nat King Cole’s ‘Stardust’.  Songs such as these naturally evoke personal memories and associated feelings for audience members who remember the 1950s, putting us at least somewhat on Davies’ wavelength.  The highlight of The Long Day Closes for me, though, was a song that, despite a pretty melody, isn’t musically in the class of the two others mentioned.  ‘Tammy’ was composed by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans for the first ‘Tammy’ movie, Tammy and the Bachelor (1957).  Debbie Reynolds, who played Tammy in that film (before Sandra Dee took over the role), had a number one hit with the song in the US, and it’s her version that Davies uses.  The superb sound quality heightens the yearning, luscious strings accompanying Reynolds’ vocals.  This not only suggests how the song made the adolescent Terence Davies feel but also expresses a sense of how intensely and, because it’s part of something lost, how longingly he now remembers it.  While ‘Tammy’ is playing, Davies, in other words, integrates the two sides of his remembrance of things past.

    When his actors are doing the singing, the effect is very different.  The pub chorus in Distant Voices, Still Lives, although eventually overused, worked well enough; but when Bud’s mother sings, to herself, ‘If You Were the Only Girl (In the World)’, Davies asks the excellent Marjorie Yates to act her character’s emotions as she sings.  Bud’s mother is clearly remembering her late husband, so the memory is bittersweet, but the meaningful hesitations and pauses in her singing look contrived, even stagy.  The film excerpts layered over or forming a bridge between Davies’ images are effective when you can accept them as part of the cinema-going experience of twelve-year-old Bud, who’s already addicted to the pictures.  The voices of Martita Hunt, explaining Miss Havisham’s cobwebbed wedding breakfast in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers (1955) and Terry-Thomas (‘Absolute shower’) in Private’s Progress (1956), all pass this test.  Bits of Orson Welles’ voiceover narrative from The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) don’t.  This notoriously butchered film was hardly seen by anyone for many years, almost certainly not shown in British cinemas in the mid-1950s:  it wouldn’t have meant anything to Bud.  Davies is merely appropriating Welles’ elegiac words about a vanished way of life, and it feels phony.

    The Long Day Closes, said Ben Walters, is widely regarded as the apex of the first, autobiographical phase of the Terence Davies oeuvre.  While I’m sure Walters is right, I found nothing in what Davies puts on the screen here as powerful as the old man’s deathbed episode in Death and Transfiguration (1983).  As usual, Davies’ studiedness kept getting in the way.  A Christmas family tableau shows Bud’s mother, in the centre of the group, in her best frock; she and her children sit at a table full of good things to eat and bathed in light.  I realise Davies means to elevate the occasion – to create, you might say, a visual equivalent of the ‘Tammy’ moments on the soundtrack – but it can’t work in the same way:  the whole thing looks improbably opulent, given the family’s means.  A visit to Bud’s school by the nit nurse (Brenda Peters) should be strongly redolent of most 1950s English childhoods but the nurse’s pronouncements (‘lice’ or, in a small minority of cases, ‘clean’) are too deliberate for the scene to seem real.  The male teachers doling out corporal punishment at the school are so gruesomely overplayed that the actors seem to be sadists, too.

    19 November 2025

  • The Neon Bible

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terence Davies (1995)

    All Terence Davies’ film work before this – three shorts and two features – was set in Liverpool.  The Neon Bible was the first of what would eventually be three films that he made with American subjects and locations (The House of Mirth (2000) and A Quiet Passion (2016) followed).  The Neon Bible is also a Davies first in that his screenplay is an adaptation.  The source material is a novel of the same name, by John Kennedy Toole (written when the author was sixteen, not published until 1989, twenty years after Toole’s suicide at the age of thirty-one).  Even so, Georgia in The Neon Bible seems home from home for Davies, shows him redefining himself in transatlantic terms.  The story is set in the 1940s, the decade of his birth.  The protagonist is, like Davies, a sensitive boy with an abusive father and an adored mother.  Harsh Christian dogma, stirring church music, secular music-making within the community, the nearly constant presence of voices and songs on the radio – these are integral to the culture of the small town where The Neon Bible takes place, as they were to Davies’ accounts of working-class life in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool.

    In all these respects, then, the new land is well-trodden Davies territory. The director’s signature is unmistakable, too (at least for someone coming – like me – to The Neon Bible for the first time with most of Davies’ future films under their belt).  The meticulous composition of mostly inert images.  A prevailing dramatic languor, except when either characters are singing or things turn suddenly melodramatic.  The film opens with images of a train, and one of its few passengers – fifteen-year-old David (Jacob Tierney).  His face tells us that David is deep in melancholy thought.  His thoughts trigger flashbacks to the childhood that he’s now leaving behind.  He recalls how his father, Frank (Denis Leary), lost his factory job, became a wife-beater, went to fight in Italy during World War II, and was killed in action there.  David remembers how his mother, Sarah (Diana Scarwid), though brutally treated by her husband, went crazy with grief after Frank’s death; and recalls, with more pleasure, his Aunt Mae (Gena Rowlands), a former nightclub singer, who came to live with the family when David was some years younger (Drake Bell plays him as a ten-year-old).  Once Aunt Mae departs to start a new life in Nashville, where she hopes to revive her singing career, David is left to care for his mentally and physically deteriorating mother.  The powers-that-be deem him too young to do so; a preacher (Peter McRobbie) arrives at the family home, intending to commit Sarah to an asylum, unaware that she has just died.  Rather than enlightening him, David uses his father’s old rifle to shoot the preacher dead.  He then buries his mother before taking the train out of town, into the future.

    There are some good things in The Neon Bible, chiefly Gena Rowlands.  Getting her was a real casting coup for a British filmmaker working in the US for the first time.  Rowlands’ vivid, blatant, free-spirited Aunt Mae gives the film nearly all its energy – not only when she’s singing but also when, for example, Mae reads through a few old press cuttings.  She basks in the warmth of one review before being ruefully reminded that it gave the dress that she wore more praise than it gave her singing.  Even Gena Rowlands, though, can’t always avoid giving the impression that she’s only obeying director’s orders – a quality that also detracts from Diana Scarwid’s skilful description of Sarah’s breakdown, and which paralyses Jacob Tierney’s conscientious performance in the lead.  The cinematographer, Michael Coulter, creates some fine pictures, but it’s no coincidence that these were praised by some critics in art-history terms.  A typical instance of Davies image-making:  a white sheet on a washing line expands to fill the screen, then dissolves into the Stars and Stripes (also seen draping the coffins of soldiers like Frank).  This takes so long that the sequence becomes, for the viewer, nothing more or less than watching the process of the dissolve being achieved.  As for the shots of David on the train, these are beguiling at first, but repeated ad nauseam.   To be fair to Davies, he is on record as admitting to Time Out that the film ‘doesn’t work and that’s entirely my fault’.  At the time of its release, though, he was also quoted in Sight and Sound as saying, ‘I didn’t want to dramatise the book …’  In that aim, Terence Davies succeeded.

    16 November 2025

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