Like many pictures, Whistle Down the Wind is a frustrating mixture of the good and the bad.
The good includes:
A screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall that keeps the embarrassment down to an endurable minimum.
The uniformly good, natural performances that Bryan Forbes coaxed out of all those untrained kids (probably the best ensemble acting by children I have seen).
The bad includes:
A lazy, inappropriate 'Mickey Mouse' score by Malcolm Arnold that continually undermines the realistic aesthetic of the picture.
An ill-conceived premise in which Kathy, a girl who appears to be about 12 or 13, finds a man in her barn and concludes he is Jesus, largely on the basis of an expletive that she must have heard a hundred times. This excruciating piece of whimsy requires Kathy to act like a credulous retard (who nonetheless manages to draw all the other local children into her improbable delusion). When young Charles glumly observes "he's just a fella' the whole fragile premise of the picture collapses.
The numerous parallels with the New Testament story (the stable, the bearing of gifts, the disciples, the 'teaching', the three denials, Judas/Doubting Thomas, the crucifixion pose, etc.) are never too obtrusive and the story flows just as naturally if you don't notice them. Nonetheless, they are still an essentially pointless artifice that subtracts meaning from the movie, rather than adding it.
This film seems to encourage people to sound off about the simple faith of children and the cynical worldliness of adults, but this sort of analysis doesn't bear scrutiny and, in truth, this picture is always saying less than it thinks it is.
The best I can say of Whistle Down the Wind is that it is a bad idea well executed.
PS: I have never read the book, but I suspect Kathy is somewhat younger than she appears here. It might have been better to use a child of the right age, rather than the 15-year-old Hayley Mills. She did make a fairly convincing 12-year-old, but that was still too old and compromised whatever credibility the story might have had. Then again, the movie probably wouldn't have been made without her.
The good includes:
A screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall that keeps the embarrassment down to an endurable minimum.
The uniformly good, natural performances that Bryan Forbes coaxed out of all those untrained kids (probably the best ensemble acting by children I have seen).
The bad includes:
A lazy, inappropriate 'Mickey Mouse' score by Malcolm Arnold that continually undermines the realistic aesthetic of the picture.
An ill-conceived premise in which Kathy, a girl who appears to be about 12 or 13, finds a man in her barn and concludes he is Jesus, largely on the basis of an expletive that she must have heard a hundred times. This excruciating piece of whimsy requires Kathy to act like a credulous retard (who nonetheless manages to draw all the other local children into her improbable delusion). When young Charles glumly observes "he's just a fella' the whole fragile premise of the picture collapses.
The numerous parallels with the New Testament story (the stable, the bearing of gifts, the disciples, the 'teaching', the three denials, Judas/Doubting Thomas, the crucifixion pose, etc.) are never too obtrusive and the story flows just as naturally if you don't notice them. Nonetheless, they are still an essentially pointless artifice that subtracts meaning from the movie, rather than adding it.
This film seems to encourage people to sound off about the simple faith of children and the cynical worldliness of adults, but this sort of analysis doesn't bear scrutiny and, in truth, this picture is always saying less than it thinks it is.
The best I can say of Whistle Down the Wind is that it is a bad idea well executed.
PS: I have never read the book, but I suspect Kathy is somewhat younger than she appears here. It might have been better to use a child of the right age, rather than the 15-year-old Hayley Mills. She did make a fairly convincing 12-year-old, but that was still too old and compromised whatever credibility the story might have had. Then again, the movie probably wouldn't have been made without her.