Dir. Terence Davies, UK, 2008, 74 mins
Cast: Terence Davies (narration)
Review by Carol Allen
Davies’s film is a very personal visual poem to his native Liverpool with the now 62-year-old director looking back at the city which formed him from the post-war 40s and 50s of his childhood to the present day. The film combines Davies’s own specially shot and often beautiful footage with some truly fascinating archive, given a very particular emotional viewpoint by the film maker’s intense breathy voice, quoting poems by Housman, Shelley, Eliot and others and his own often very poetic narration. His description of families listening to “radios as small and brown as Hovis” and recollection of the days “when football was played in black and white” are two of the many phrases, which remain in the mind.
Much of the archive is particularly striking, reminding us of the poverty in which people lived. The narrow streets of back-to-back houses, the women carrying their laundry on their heads and washing it by hand in the copper vats of the local municipal laundries and a supremely ironic sequence of the demolition of the slums in the 60s and the ugly, soul and community destroying tower blocks, which replaced them, all to the soundtrack of Peggy Lee singing “The folks who live on the hill”. Though made as part of a scheme to celebrate Liverpool’s year as European City of Culture, far from being a paeon of praise to the city, this is often a very angry film. Davies recalls his Catholic childhood of “years wasted in prayer” in the shadow of a church, which condemns him for his homosexuality, until by the time the magnificent “crown of thorns” Cathedral is consecrated in the 60s by Cardinal Heenan “in his brand new frock, the Vatican’s answer to Schiaparelli”, Davies himself is a born again atheist. He is also bitterly critical of the extravagance of the royal wedding of “Betty and Phil” in 1947 at a time of strict rationing. For light relief though Davies recalls his early passion for cinema, when stars such as Gregory Peck brought Hollywood glamour premieres to nearby Birkenhead.
The film is not without a certain humour, as in the use on its brilliantly evocative soundtrack of extracts from the radio programme Round the Horne, which celebrated camp at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. But there is a certain preciousness and joylessness at times in the narration, which causes Davies to come over as rather miserable old man. Even memories of childhood day trips across the Mersey to the seaside fun of New Brighton and its now scorned Bathing Beauty competitions is tinged with a certain sour melancholy, while Liverpool’s pop culture glory days of the Mersey Beat in the 60s are dismissed with the comment that his love of pop music died then, as the well-crafted lyric became out of date. Hardly a fair critique of Lennon and McCartney. And when the film moves into the present day towards the end, with shots of children, old people and young adults enjoying themselves in the city centre, one is mainly conscious that these “golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.” “Where” he mourns “is the Liverpool I knew and loved”, while at the same time showing us totally gorgeous, sweeping aerial shots of the city. This is certainly a film of contradictions, fascinating, sometimes irritating but always compelling.
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