The Long Day Closes. 1992

One of the most beautiful and poetic films in the history of cinema. is Terence Davies’s somber and majestic memory piece about his childhood and growing up in mid 1950’s Liverpool, where its seems to be always raining.
The movie opens up on a beat up deserted street dark and dismal and in the present and as Nat King Cole sings “Stardust” Davies’s moving camera glides up and in the deserted and boarded up house and we are suddenly back in 1955 where Bud the young boy of the piece is sitting on the interior staircase of his youth asking his mum if he could go to the pictures. This is where I start crying, which continues off and on for the films short but potent 85 minutes running time.
Davies who is an out gay director shows us his adolescent years in a series of tableaus and short scenes that take us into Bud’s (Davies’s) life with his kind and loving family. There’s his mother (beautifully played by Marjorie Yates) his two older brothers and a sister all of whom adore and cherish him. The four key centers of Bud’s life is his home, the movies, the Catholic church and school and Davies shows us each center both real and surreal through sound bites from films, and popular songs of the period.
So in a rain storm Bud does get his mum to give him money for the pictures, but he has to find someone to take him in, and as he waits outside the theatre in the rain asking passersby’s to take him in the theatre with them, we hear but don’t see Doris Day singing “At Sundown” from “Love Me Or Leave Me”, and we know without having to see a movie clip the picture that Bud is dying to see. Davies does this over and over throughout the film notating the episodes of this young boy’s life with the music and movie sound clips of the period.
There are many breathtaking scenes quick and lovely like when Davies’s pans across the balcony of a movie palace to show us Bud and his family sitting in utter ecstasy and transfixed as the Carousel Waltz plays over the scene, telling us once more what movie they are in rapt attention over without showing us the actual film. He then fades out of this scene to a glorious tracing shot of the family slowly walking through an amusement park, which is so breathtaking in its poetic accomplishment that once again I’m reduced to rubble of tears. How can a simple fade out and tracking shot do this to me I ask.
Bud is played by a superb young child actor Leigh McCormick who made this film and then disappeared, a shame. He brings a sensitivity and tenderness to the role and is heartbreaking in his loneliness, misery and sadness. One of the early scenes shows Bud looking out of a window where he spots a shirtless young bricklayer who catches him looking at him, and throws Bud a knowing wink, as Bud realizes at this young age who he is, and in fear and shame sinks to the floor out of view of his heartthrob’s wink.
Other famous scenes (if you can call them that) is a three minute pan over a patterned rug as fading sunlight plays across it, two sliding doors that open up on the family celebrating Christmas outdoors against a snowy Dickens like street, A beautiful clipper ship that Bud imagines as he sits in class (to take him away?) as he is covered with rain and water, a majestic crane shot of Bud as he swings on a bar over the basement stairs of his house the camera moves and glides overhead showing us a smoke filled movie theatre and audience, the interior of a church and a school classroom as Debbie Reynolds sings about Tammy one of the popular movies and songs of 1957.
There are also moments where the characters break out in song (these are generally in real time, at a birthday party, a pub and a neighborhood New Year’s Eve celebration, and there is also some comic relief with their neighbors a bickering but loving couple sort of like a British Fred and Ethel Mertz, with the zaftig and warm wife riding her husband Curly for his bad imitations of movie stars.
Most of the film was made on a set, complicated and detailed which allows for the film to be somewhat realistic but at the same time to hark back to the Hollywood back lot films of the 40’s and 50’s that Davies loves. The look of the film is vivid but not overdone in its period look and the Criterion transfer shows off the palette of the film in glowing tones. I know this is not a film for everyone, one of my closest friends hates it, but he also hates “Night Of The Hunter” and “The Little Fugitive.” The best film of 1992 and maybe of the entire decade.