Bill Douglas Trilogy (2 disc set)

Bill Douglas's reputation as a film director rests largely on three films he made in the 1970s, the total running length of which is only just over three hours.

The Bill Douglas Trilogy: My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978) provide a painfully intense picture of a harsh upbringing marked by poverty, isolation and the complex family background of a boy who only gradually discovers that his father is the man who lives down the road and that his mother is in an asylum. All three films were closely modelled on the director's own experiences and memories. They were largely filmed in Newcraighall, the mining village on the outskirts of Edinburgh where Douglas was born on 17 April 1934, and where he spent his childhood. As his surrogate (called Jamie) and his older half-brother Tommy, Douglas cast two young Newcraighall boys, Stephen Archibald and Hughie Restorick, whom he had met at a bus stop.

My Childhood is set in 1945 during the last days of WW2, introduces us to young Jamie, a dirt-faced, raggedly dressed stand-in for Douglas who shares a house with his half-brother Tommy and ageing grandmother, who has taken on the task of raising the pair. That he and Tommy share the same mother but different fathers – both now absent and despised by the grandmother – is something both we and he discover during the course of the film. The cause of the illness that has the boy's mother in an asylum, unable to recognise or react to those around her, is left for us to speculate.

My Ain Folk sees Tommy and Jamie separated following the death of their grandmother – Jamie is sent to live with his paternal grandmother and uncle; a life full of silence and rejection.

My Way Home, where his boarding school discontentment is disrupted when he is taken home by his father, whose wife and son react with hostility to this young intruder and are scornful of his artistic aspirations. Unable to make peace with himself or those around him either at home or school, Jamie ends up on the streets and is cut off from his past when he discovers that his remaining family have all moved away. Called up for national service he joins the RAF and is stationed in Egypt, where he meets the educated Robert and starts a friendship that could be set to change his life

Bill Douglas died of cancer on 18 June 1991, aged 54. He left behind his collection of cinematic and pre-cinematic artefacts (now held at The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture at Exeter University) and a body of work that was hardly extensive, but contains moments as intense and lyrical as any in British film history.

Stephen Archibald (Jamie), whose face haunts the three films, sadly died in 1998, aged only thirty-eight, a victim of drugs, malnutrition and possibly violence.  Hughie Restorick committed suicide some years earlier.

DVD Extras
Bill Douglas: Intent on Getting the Image (2006, 63 mins), a new documentary about Bill Douglas’s life and work
Come Dancing (1970, 15 mins), Douglas’s remarkable, rarely-seen student short
Rare archive interview with Bill Douglas
Illustrated booklet containing newly commissioned essays, notes and credits.