DVD review: This boy's life

Published on Friday 20 June 2008 19:59

The Bill Douglas Trilogy(BFI, £15.99) Dirty Harry: Ultimate Collector's Edition Boxset (Warners, £39.99)

IN SPARE, ELLIPTICAL AND OFTEN heartbreakingly poetic detail, The Bill Douglas Trilogy charts the late film-maker's poverty-stricken upbringing in Newcraighall, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. If you've never seen the films, that's hardly surprising, since they've long been unavailable and are only rarely screened in cinemas.

The lack of access to these hugely acclaimed films – My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978) – has meant that Douglas's visibility on the British cinematic landscape has diminished somewhat, despite being widely praised by contemporaries, such as Lindsay Anderson, and new filmmakers, such as Lynne Ramsay. The release of The Bill Douglas Trilogy for the first time on DVD on Monday should help fix that.

Made in the 1970s on a shoestring budget using real locations and locals for the cast and crew, the films are initially most striking for the way they capture, with remarkable tenderness, the bleakness of Scottish working-class life in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, while still locating moments of beauty and hope amidst the appalling deprivation. I'm aware that this may make the films sound too distressing to watch – something Scottish funding boards at the time certainly felt, refusing to finance them because they didn't conform to a positive image of the country – but they really are haunting works of art rather than harsh slabs of social realism.

Indeed, Douglas, who died in 1991, had a style that, while not fanciful, is so expertly controlled and considered it has something in common with the poetic realism of Franois Truffaut's The 400 Blows. What's more, by filling his carefully composed frames with unobtrusive imagery that evokes the experience of being a child, it doesn't matter if the context is alien to your own experiences: the overall effect is intensely moving.

In all three films (which together run for around three hours), we follow Douglas stand-in Jamie (played by local schoolboy Stephen Archibald, who died in 1998, aged 38), an introverted lad who, in the first two chapters of the trilogy, is bounced around between grandparents as he's gradually made aware of his sad, complicated family situation. What Douglas captures and reflects so strikingly here is the remarkable resilience and capacity children have to get on with life even when all factors seem to be against them. Made five years after My Ain Folk, the concluding chapter, My Way Home, picks up the story just as the young Jamie's artistic consciousness has started to awaken, which leads to bouts of depression until national service takes him to Egypt and opens his eyes to the very real possibility of escape. Watched together, they make for a remarkable cinematic journey, one that anyone interested in Scotland should take at least once.

Leaving the gentle humanity of Douglas, Dirty Harry: Ultimate Collector's Edition Boxset bundles all five of Clint Eastwood's violent, anti-liberal cop movies in sparkling remastered editions, replete with extensive Eastwood commentaries, new documentaries, collectors' items and pretty much everything dedicated fans could want.

Of course the films diminish in quality over the series, with fifth installment, The Dead Pool, the nadir (look out a young Jim Carrey as rock star Johnny Squares). But thanks to Don Seigel's ballsy, no-nonsense direction, the original – for all its morally specious subtexts – still thrills in a pulpy way. It also makes a killer double bill with David Fincher's disapproving Zodiac.