‘Bill Douglas: My Best Friend’ Review: Affecting Portrait Of A Maverick Director Who Died Too Young

The recent passing of Terence Davies and the tributes that followed — tales of a steel will, impassioned budgetary battles and a host of dream projects that never materialized — give this highly personal tribute to Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas an extra and very poignant relevance as a similar story, now depressingly familiar to the British film industry, of an uncompromising talent who left us with a tantalizing promise of what might have been. Now largely unknown to the wider world but very dear to the heart of Scotland (despite the fact that he left his homeland at the earliest opportunity), Douglas is the closest thing to a Rosetta Stone in recent British independent and social-realist cinema. From his early home movies through to his last three-hour masterwork Comrades (1986), the director left an indelible imprint that still seems shockingly modern today, leaving traces in everything from Derek Jarman’s early Super-8 works to Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and beyond.

Jack Archer’s Bill Douglas: My Best Friend begins a little scrappily, introducing Peter Jewell as Douglas’ longtime best friend since childhood. This friendship will prove both intense and enigmatic (Jewell insists it was platonic), since the film doesn’t really dive into Douglas’ ensuing reputation as a pioneer of gay cinema. It does, however, paint a beguiling portrait of a difficult man born into difficult circumstances: Douglas’s rough childhood was the bedrock of his landmark trilogy — My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978) — but Archer refers us to its depiction in those films rather than rake over the coals of that traumatic time (perhaps because eyewitnesses are now rather thin on the ground, and the slums of the Edinburgh environs that he came from have long since been bulldozed).

After the pair met in the early ’50s as 18-year-olds during National Service in Egypt, Douglas moved to London’s bohemian Soho district with Jewell in the early ’60s, and it’s notable how much the pair self-documented, like the Beat Generation before them. Like the Beats, they also roped friends and neighbors into their rough-and-ready movies, and one wonders what Douglas might have thought of his Super-8 precursor Kenneth Anger, with whom he shared a fascination with early movie culture and showbusiness. Unlike Anger, Douglas wanted to raise his game, although this deft move into features in the ’70s is rather lightly sketched here.

Nevertheless there’s a surprising amount of archive, largely of the artist at work, and footage of Douglas fretting over a typewriter next to an overflowing bowl of cigarette butts is both a portrayal of his determination as an artist and a foretelling of his untimely death from lung cancer in 1991, aged 57. Douglas is revealed as a charismatic and rather photogenic character, and his resemblance to the youngish Alan Bates — or, perhaps more pertinently, John Cassavetes — makes it surprising that he didn’t pursue an acting career himself. But as the film points out, Douglas preferred the Pasolini option, casting a young non-professional named Stephen Archibald as his avatar in his autobiographical trilogy. Douglas’ instincts about the young tearaway proved uncannily correct; in an example of Sliding Doors reality, his young alter ego wound up in jail, despite the director’s attempt at an intervention, and died six or seven years after Douglas without even making it to 40.

The film’s limitations show, especially when using Douglas’ meticulous compositions as reference, but Archer’s belief in his subject is affecting, to the extent that his film doesn’t really need film-pro testimonies from the likes of fellow Scot Ramsay and Dublin’s Lenny Abrahamson. The slender running time also leaves a lot of loose ends, but this could be a plus for its shelf life — after premiering at this year’s Venice Film Festival, where My Childhood won the Silver Lion in 1972, Bill Douglas: My Best Friend would serves as an illuminating companion piece alongside, or in anticipation of, a season bearing this genuine auteur’s modest signature.

Title: Bill Douglas: My Best Friend
Festival: Venice Film Festival
Director: Jack Archer
Running time: 1 hr 17 mins