Inspired by Hitchcock and admired by Truffaut, the great Scottish director has been largely forgotten – but 20 dazzling unseen miniatures could reignite interest in his masterly work
In his lifetime, film-maker Bill Douglas was acclaimed by cinema legends including François Truffaut and Luchino Visconti. After his death in 1991, the novelist Andrew O’Hagan called him “the best Scottish director ever”. Yet these days Douglas’s films are rarely, if ever, seen in cinemas or on television. Douglas produced a small body of work – just four films in nearly 20 years, plus a film-school short called Come Dancing – but what films they are. Through the 1970s, Douglas wrote and directed three black-and-white masterpieces – My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home, collectively known as the Trilogy – followed by Comrades, released in 1986, which tells the story of early trade unionists the Tolpuddle Martyrs.