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.

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.

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.

影片讲述的是6个多塞特劳工被驱逐到澳大利亚，并在1830年组建了史诗般的托尔普德尔蒙难者联盟工会…… "Comrades" has been described as one of the lost masterpieces of European cinema. It appeared in 1987 to critical acclaim then disappeared almost as quickly. For my opinion Bill Douglas's masterpiece stands alongside the best of Tarkovsky, Bresson and Bergman. Within minutes the viewer is pulled into a story of love and passion, solidarity and bravery. 'Comrades' is not just one-dimensional political polemic either. Far from it. Nor just a historical epic. This is character-driven story-telling of the highest order, definitely, although there are many layers to the film. It fuses and transcends both narrative drama and the avante garde and cries out for further viewings. In many ways 'Comrades' is an experimental visionary movie as well as a tribute to the cinema that came before cinema. (Watch out for the magic lanternist who appears in many guises.) Interestingly, the famous actors of the day - who Douglas didn't want in the film but was forced to use - were cast as the affluent classes while complete unknowns were cast as the Martyrs and their families. Director Bill Douglas was a man knew about poverty and struggle. He was raised in abject poverty in Newcraighall, which was then an impoverished mining village on the outskirts of Edinburgh. His autobiographical 'Trilogy' - filmed in a post-war Newcraighall that is now gone - is his only other cinematic output. But what a work! It is by far the finest cinematic achievement to ever come out of Scotland. Even the film scripts of 'Trilogy' are works of literature in their own right.