Comrades
The story of "The Tolpuddle Martyrs". A group of 19th century English farm labourers who formed one of the first trade unions and started a campaign to receive fair wages.
Bill Douglas
Bill Douglas
Casts & Crew
Robin Soans
William Gaminara
Stephen Bateman
Phil Davis
Jeremy Flynn
Keith Allen
Alex Norton
Robert Stephens
Freddie Jones
Michael Hordern
James Fox
Vanessa Redgrave
Joanna David
Imelda Staunton
Katy Behean
Amber Wilkinson
Patricia Healey
Shane Downe
Sandra Voe
Valerie Whittington
Harriet Doyle
Patrick Field
Heather Page
Barbara Windsor
Murray Melvin
Dave Atkins
Arthur Dignam
Mark Brown
Michael Clark
John Rafter Lee
Shane Briant
John Hargreaves
Lynette Curran
Malcolm Terris
Alex McCrindle
Symon Parsonage
Anna Volska
Charles Lathalu Yunipingu
Also Directed by Bill Douglas
The first part of Bill Douglas' influential trilogy harks back to his impoverished upbringing in early-'40s Scotland. Cinema was his only escape - he paid for it with the money he made from returning empty jam jars - and this escape is reflected most closely at this time of his life as an eight-year-old living on the breadline with his half-brother and sick grandmother in a poor mining village.
Two men meet on Southend Pier one foggy afternoon in what at first appears to be a gay pick up.
When Jamie's maternal grandmother dies, he and his brother Tommy are separated - Tommy is taken off to a welfare home and Jamie goes to live with his other grandmother and uncle. His life is far from happy, filled with silence, rejection and bouts of violence.
Jamie leaves the children's home to live with his paternal grandmother. After working in a mine and in a tailor's shop, he is conscripted into the RAF, and goes to Egypt, where he is befriended by Robert, whose undemanding companionship releases Jamie from self-pity.