Whistle Down the Wind
Bryan Forbes (1961)
Alan Barnes is remarkable in Whistle Down the Wind partly because this seven-year-old boy often seems like a little old man – both in his face and in the crotchety, sceptical attitudes of Charles Bostock, the character he plays. That alone made this BFI screening of Whistle Down the Wind an intriguing prospect. Under the ‘Projecting the Archive’ banner, the screening opened a season of films to commemorate Bryan Forbes’ centenary. It also marked the publication of a study of Whistle Down the Wind in the BFI Film Classics series. At the end of the film, curator Josephine Botting, author of the Film Classics book, was joined for a Q&A on the NFT1 stage by the three Bostock children of yesteryear: the film’s star Hayley Mills, Diane Poole (née Holgate) and Alan Barnes – all of them actual senior citizens now.
This was the first cinema film directed by Bryan Forbes. Fourteen more would follow, but this debut feature was one of his most successful films and it’s the best Forbes that I’ve seen. He and Richard Attenborough bought the screen rights to Whistle Down the Wind, Mary Hayley Bell’s recently published novel(la), soon after becoming partners in the production company Allied Film Makers, in 1959. If Wikipedia is right, Mary Hayley Bell and her husband, John Mills, were reluctant to have Forbes write or direct the film adaptation. Attenborough, who produced it, brought in Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall to write the screenplay and Guy Green to direct; when Green dropped out at short notice, Attenborough persuaded the Millses to think again about letting Forbes direct. Waterhouse and Hall turned Whistle Down the Wind into something far removed – socially and geographically – from Hayley Bell’s book. The three children in the story were based on the author’s own; the Mills family, who lived on Richmond Hill in Surrey, owned a farm in Sussex, where they spent summer holidays and which inspired the novel’s setting. The film takes place in the Lancashire countryside, with Burnley and Clitheroe the nearest towns. Kathy, Nan and Charles Bostock live – all year round – with their widowed farmer father (Bernard Lee) and his diligent, querulous sister Dorothy (Elsie Wagstaff), who has kept house for her brother and helped look after the children since their mother died. Forbes doesn’t overdo the hardscrabble atmosphere, but you get the strong impression that the family isn’t well off, and that local children generally have little scope for widening their horizons.
The core of Mary Hayley Bell’s story, though, remains the same. The eldest of the three children is startled to find a strange man hiding in a barn at the farm. He’s startled too and, when asked who he is, involuntarily mutters ‘Jesus Christ …’. The girl takes his words literally. Over the next few days, she, her sister and brother, and other children they know, come to the barn with food and an assortment of other things for the man, who in fact is on the run from the police. In the book, he’s an escaped convict; in the film, he’s Arthur Alan Blakey (Alan Bates), suspected of murder. Forbes’ narrative basically mirrors the life of Christ, from His birth in a Bethlehem stable, adored by shepherds and the Magi, to his arrest by the authorities: as Blakey gives himself up to the police and stands outside the barn to be frisked, his arms are held in a crucifix position. Despite the manhunt gathering pace in the area and even ‘Wanted’ posters, showing Blakey’s face, in a nearby village, the children are unaware of the man’s real identity. They keep Jesus a secret from the adults until Nan, inadvertently, and Charles, more ambivalently, give the game away to their father at Charles’ birthday party, which turns out to be a kind of Last Supper.
Discussing with her three guests the location shoot in rural Lancashire in the early months of 1961, Jo Botting referred to the film’s story as ‘the Christmas story’. You knew what she meant but that label is slightly misleading – never mind where Blakey is holed up and, when Kathy’s siblings first see him there, ‘asleep on the hay’; that the children bring gifts to the barn; that one of Forbes’ most memorable images is of Kathy, Nan and Charles capering on a hillside, around a leafless tree, to the accompaniment of Malcolm Arnold’s sprightly instrumental arrangement of ‘We Three Kings’. It may well be winter, but the story doesn’t take place at or approaching Christmastime – if it did, there’d surely be more excited anticipation in the air. Yet the children aren’t in school either (you’re more aware of that because they are seen in Sunday school, and because Charles and some other boys wear school caps). Why not? It could be the February half-term holiday; it’s perhaps more likely that the script doesn’t bother to mention something that Mary Hayley Bell does. In the book ‘the children’s school was closed’ because of ‘a scare involving the police’ (Wikipedia).
Waterhouse and Hall’s adaptation is all the more impressive for not placing the events too close to Christmas but instead creating a jumble of Christian lore and influences to fill the children’s heads. A Salvation Army woman (Patricia Heneghan) reassures Charles, trying to find a home for one of the farm cat’s kittens which the Bostock children have just saved from being drowned, that Jesus will look after the kitten in any case. The Sunday school teacher, Miss Lodge (Diane Clare), leads a discussion, prompted by Kathy’s question, about how Jesus Christ might be treated on return to the world today. When Kathy and Nan are gathering provisions for the man in the barn, they take bread from the breakfast table and ‘a bottle of wine’ (it turns out to be port) from a dining room cupboard; Nan asks if they don’t also need fish to go with the bread. The miracle of the loaves and fishes is mentioned again when the larger group of kids urge Jesus to tell them a story; the Good Samaritan (which they’ve learned about with Miss Lodge) and ‘the ‘oly Ghost’ are other suggestions.
In the wrong hands, this religious allegory could be hard to take, but Forbes handles it admirably. His film is full of feeling, yet rarely sentimental, and the script is rich in deflating, humorous detail that keeps the story in the real, contemporary world, but is often touching too, and doesn’t diminish the tale’s emotional power. When the Sunday school teacher asks her group what Jesus would find different today, the answers are, ‘telly … Wagon Train …‘Beat the Clock’ … Cup final’. Nan brings to the barn a girls’ comic, ‘Shirley’; she explains that ‘It’s got a free gift inside – an Arabian charm bracelet’. Another child gives Blakey a New Testament, adding ‘your book’ when he looks puzzled. Succumbing hastily to the noisy pleas for a story, Blakey opts for the comic rather than the gospels, and awkwardly reads the tale of ‘Ruth Lawrence, Air Hostess’: because of who they think he is, his audience still listens with rapt reverence. Charles’ gift is the black kitten, Spider, but Jesus fails to do what the Salvationist promised, and Spider dies on his watch. (The Bostock children have defied their father’s wishes to rescue the kittens at the start – the litter is kept in secret in the barn before Blakey arrives there.) Trying to console her brother, Kathy seeks out the local vicar (Hamilton Dyce), and asks why Jesus has allowed the kitten, or indeed allows anything, to die. The vicar’s uneasy theodicy fails to convince Charles who, as he and Kathy exit, says bluntly, ‘He doesn’t know, does he?’ While this is very funny, the loss of the kitten is a serious turning point in the narrative. Once Spider dies, doubts creep into Charles’ mind that the unexpected barn guest isn’t Jesus at all. He confirms this at his party, after Nan has blurted out that a second piece of birthday cake she’s taken is for Jesus, and the children’s father asks what she means. ‘He’s not Jesus,’ says Charles, ‘he’s just a fella’.
Although I’ve not read the book and this may be unfair to Mary Hayley Bell, it’s hard to believe the film’s comic qualities derive from the presumably middle-class and certainly home counties world of her original. Wikipedia’s synopsis of the novel also suggests a conclusion far more pious (and melodramatic) than the film’s – ‘… the Man [sic] set the barn and the oast house on fire and escaped. The children’s father shows [his three children] … a cross left behind on a wall still standing after the blaze and they assure him that the whole affair has not changed how they felt about Jesus’. Forbes and his writers are comparatively subtle and sparing. Two children arrive on the scene after Jesus/Blakey has been arrested and driven away. ‘Has he gone?’, they ask Kathy, who replies, ‘Yes, you missed him this time, but he’ll be coming again’. The film does preserve what I’m guessing is the book’s enchanted-world-of-childhood theme, but without compromising its own harsher context and realistic dialogue. (It’s a coincidence that, in recent weeks, I’ve watched or re-watched a succession of films premised on the importance of seeing the world as a child – Mary Poppins (1964), Field of Dreams (1989), ET (1982), now this one.) At the same time, Forbes resists crude dismissal of the adult world as disenchanted and hypocritical. He also brings out well how the children’s view of Christ blurs any distinction between miracle working and magic tricks.
I knew that when Whistle Down the Wind was made, John Mills and Mary Hayley Bell’s younger daughter Hayley (five years Juliet’s junior) was a big name in Britain and Hollywood. I didn’t know, until it was mentioned in the introduction to this screening, that Hayley Mills’ box-office clout was what secured the funding Forbes and Attenborough needed to get the film made. Mills was fourteen at the time; although not tall for her age, she towers over nearly all the other children and seems a bit too mature for Kathy (whose equivalent is twelve in the novel). As an already experienced screen performer, though, Mills holds things together well and – this is quite an achievement – doesn’t seem incongruous among the children sharing the screen with her. These were all kids at local schools in and around Burnley and Clitheroe; none had prior experience of appearing on camera. Hayley Mills isn’t as instinctively expressive as the pair playing her sister and brother, but she’s professional enough to convey her character’s feelings reliably well. It’s because we see it through Kathy’s eyes that that crucifixion pose in the closing stages doesn’t stick out as too explicitly meaningful.
Stalwart British character actors of the era, like Bernard Lee and Norman Bird, as a shifty farm hand, are on good form – Lee’s Bostock is gruff and easily irritated, but you keep seeing, and feeling, the farmer’s love for his children, and anxiety to protect them. But Whistle Down the Wind is memorable chiefly for the youngsters. Alan Barnes is the outstanding OAP-in-waiting, but ten-year-old Diane Holgate’s face also seems to anticipate the older woman that Nan will be – so do some of the other kids’ faces. The impression you get that these futures are predetermined by childhood circumstances is reinforced by the kids’ clothes (which I guess were mostly their own clothes). There is one adult, though, nearly as terrific as any of the children – another Alan B.
Alan Bates had made his cinema debut the previous year in Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer, with a quietly effective portrait of Archie Rice’s son Frank. In Whistle Down the Wind, only his second film – in a role that, while obviously vital to the story, doesn’t involve a huge amount of screen time or many lines to speak – Bates gives what would be one of the most completely satisfying performances of his screen career. In the barn he is, with the help of Arthur Ibbetson’s lighting, an exceptional camera subject. Bates’ dark, bright eyes and swarthy good looks combine to give him a quality of danger and of nobility: he’s credible as both the man he really is and as the transcendent figure the children see. His eyes express Blakey’s initial bafflement followed by growing realisation of what’s going on with the children. The reticence of Arthur Alan Blakey, wanted for questioning about a murder in Derby, makes perfect sense, of course, but Alan Arthur Bates, born and raised in Derby, is no less eloquent when he does speak. There’s real comic skill in Blakey’s uncomfortable reading of the ‘Shirley’ story.
Bryan Forbes’ widow, Nanette Newman, still looking and sounding good at the age of ninety-two, made an unbilled appearance to say a few words about Whistle Down the Wind from the front row of NFT1. Hayley Mills, eighty now, made her way onto the stage with the help of a walking stick; as their characters did in the film, Diane Poole and Alan Barnes followed. Jo Botting opened the Q&A by saying that she understood this was the first time the trio had ever shared a stage together, and Hayley Mills confirmed as much. You soon got the feeling this was maybe the first time she’d spoken to either of the other two since the film wrapped, sixty-five years ago this spring. Mills was very eager to ask the questions (to be fair, she did keep apologising to polite Jo Botting for doing so). Why hadn’t her co-stars continued to act? In fact, Alan Barnes did do one more film – he had a small part in The Victors (1963), a Carl Foreman World War II drama – but he and Diane Poole clearly never entertained the idea of an acting career; they were sure their parents would have taken a dim view of that. (Roy Holder, who has the fourth largest kid’s role, was unusual among the children in the film in that he went on to act for a living, and successfully.) The duo had very happy memories of making Whistle Down the Wind but soon seem to have accepted the experience as a thrilling one-off. Both still live in the same part of Lancashire where they grew up. It’s nice to report that Alan Barnes in his early seventies seems to be far from the grumpy old man that Charles Bostock appeared to foreshadow.
The Q&A yielded plenty of brilliant insights and anecdotes, with a strong how-times-change flavour, about the making of the film. Diane Poole recalled how the headmaster of the primary school where she and Alan Barnes were pupils, told school assembly one morning, ‘Now two men are going to be watching you in the playground today, but don’t take any notice of them’! The two men were Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes at the start of the casting process. Later, when Diane and Alan were on the final short list to play Nan and Charles, Attenborough gave each of Alan and Diane a lift home (in his Bentley or Daimler – there was some dispute as to which). Attenborough asked Alan, ‘Now, would you like to be in a film?’ It’s thought that the answer – ‘I’m not bothered’ – may well have clinched him the role. Diane recalls that when Richard Attenborough brought her back home, her mother was mortified that he visited on a day when she hadn’t donkey-stoned the doorstep. Hayley Mills was alone among the children in learning the script. It increases your admiration for Bryan Forbes’ direction to know that, with the other children, Forbes usually told each of them what to say and how to say it just before shooting a sequence. Most were done in a single take. A painful exception, for Alan Barnes, came in the scene where Elsie Wagstaff’s Auntie Dorothy slaps Charles’ head. That required ten takes.
Whistle Down the Wind isn’t perfect. Some of the adult cast tend to be a bit wooden. Although it makes for a powerful image, the swarm of children that gather to witness Jesus’ arrest is too big – a biblical multitude that rather violates the prevailing naturalism. All in all, though, the film is very good. As well as the story and the people in it, there’s Arthur Ibbetson’s black-and-white cinematography, which captures the bleak landscape most successfully, and Malcolm Arnold’s inventive original score. Allied Film Makers, the brainchild of Sydney Box, was short-lived. One of its last films was Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), written and directed by Bryan Forbes and co-starring Richard Attenborough. The company isn’t as well remembered as Woodfall Films, which started around the same time and lasted considerably longer. Under Tony Richardson’s leadership, Woodfall produced most of the leading films of the ‘British New Wave’, including several directed by Richardson himself – Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Tom Jones (1963). Yet Whistle Down the Wind is the equal of any of them.
4 September 2026