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
