Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 1984


Four Days in July

Buy Four Days in July now from Amazon

First, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.

Wikipedia article




'Four Days in July' is a 1984 television film by Mike Leigh. Set and filmed in Belfast, the film explores the Troubles by following the daily lives of two couples on either side of Northern Ireland's religious divide, both expecting their first children.Clements 167 The film's action unfolds over 1013 July 1984; the two couples' children are both born on 12 July, the date of a Protestant celebration in Northern Ireland known as the Twelfth.Clements 16768 Despite the politically charged setting, the film is uniquely uneventful, at least on the surface; Paul Clements writes that "It is hard to identify any full length work by Leigh in which less of consequence seems to happen."168 Broadcast only once, it was Leigh's last film for the BBC.Clements 176

Cast and crew



The film stars Paula Hamilton and Charles Lawson as the Protestant couple, Lorraine and Billy, and Brid Brennan and Des McAleer as the Catholic couple, Collette and Eugene. Stephen Rea, Eileen Pollock, B.J. Hogg, and Shane Connaughton appear in secondary roles. The film's music was composed by Rachel Portman.

Reception



In 2009 'The Times' Kevin Maher praised the film as a "must-see movie for anyone with a compassionate interest in an 800-year-old political sore." Shane Connaughton, screenwriter of 'My Left Foot' called it "easily the most interesting picture I've seen about Northern Ireland since the troubles started. Apart from John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy's 'The Ballygomben Bequest' (1972), I can't think of any play or film that has gone into it so successfully in any deep way at all."Connaughton, quoted in Michael Coveney's 1996 'The World according to Mike Leigh', p. 178

Notes



References



Clements, Paul. [https://books.google.com/books?id=MOQbnlogBK8C&pg=PA162 "Four Days in July (Mike Leigh)."] 'British Television Drama in the 1980s'. Comp. George W. Brandt. Cambridge University Press, 1993. 162176.


Buy Four Days in July now from Amazon

<-- Return to movies from 1984



This work is released under CC-BY-SA. Some or all of this content attributed to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1101763176.