Working class filmmaker Bill Douglas followed his much lauded autobiographical trilogy with this British Film Council funded poor man's epic about the Tolpuddle Martyrs and their struggle to establish an early trade union that was a worthy winner of the BFI Sutherland Trophy and a fitting final film for the director.

Soans puts in a strong central performance with able support from Gaminara, Bateman, Davis, Flynn and a roguish Allen, whilst Hordern, Jones, Fox, Windsor, Redgrave and an astonishing debut performance Staunton rounds out the cast and the omnipresent Norton fills in everything else.

The director retells the tale on a grand scale breathing new life into the story with atmospheric locations that perfectly capture rural Dorset and colonial Australia whilst remembering his own place as the story teller, in the form of the lanternist and his bag of tricks, and never loosing the central message of the union movement.

Remember thine end.

There were such possibilities and opportunities to be grasped in the making of this film. There was a marvellous cast (I omit Keith Allen, whom I loathe and as for Barbara Windsor-she was totally out of place here) who made the best of what they could with a less than expansive script. There was some beautiful cinematography too in parts and a real feeling of the period in the costumes and sets but and I am reluctant to say this, a great deal of this movie was too slow and could have benefited from some judicious cutting. I am a lover of this kind of story and subject matter so I felt nonplussed at times as to what was going on in one or two scenes. The film was far too long and slow to really hold one's attention. I was not expecting a glossy Merchant/Ivory type production but something much more gritty and realistic which Comrades delivered to some extent but that was not enough for it to be truly absorbing. I could not get over the left wing bias that the film carried either- it was a natural result of the subject matter of course. One thing I did like was the refusal to use a lot of exposition and explanation in the script but I think it may have got in the way of filmgoers who did not know their history, understanding the whole thing. Overall rather a disappointing film, a story which could have been told so much better and more succinctly.

This opens with someone getting brained by a militia man but if you`re expecting a Steven Segal action fest ( And what Steven Segal movie hasn`t opened with someone getting killed by a militia man ? ) you`re going to be bitterly disappointed since COMRADES is a movie documenting in fine detail the story of the Tolpuddle martyrs , a group of labourers from 19th Century England who were deported to Australia because they committed the crime of starting a trade union

The Tolpuddle martyrs are folk heroes in the modern British labour movement. If you`re only vaguely aware of who they were or have a passing interest in how things were in 19th century Britain but want to know what things were like in a pre Marxist era then you could do a lot worse than watch this movie . However there is a problem and that`s just like ZULU DAWN it works far better as a history lesson than as a movie which means history students will rate this movie far more than prolific cinema goers which explains why 40% of the voters have given COMRADES ten out of ten while the IMDB regular voters have only given it an average of 4.6 out of 10

There is something very memorable about this movie and unfortunately I don`t think it`s a good thing with Scottish actor Alex Norton playing multiple roles throughout the narrative and it wasn`t until he appears in about his fourth role that I realised he was playing different characters . This was highly confusing to me since I thought he was playing the same role previously . Norton later plays a labour boss in Australia overseeing a work detail and in a highly disgusting scene goes into a hut and gets a dog to perform oral sex on him . It`s all done in a rather disciplined way with the camera locked onto Norton`s face as he gasps " good boy " but it still doesn`t make the scene any less shocking and I guess it brings a whole new context to the phrase " Give the dog a bone "