{"id":24984,"date":"2024-11-20T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-20T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=24984"},"modified":"2024-11-19T18:07:16","modified_gmt":"2024-11-20T02:07:16","slug":"the-boys-and-the-blitz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-boys-and-the-blitz\/","title":{"rendered":"The Boys and the Blitz"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cWe define ourselves in the stories we tell of ourselves. We hone them; repeat them until we no longer remember the memory, but only the story of the memory.\u201d \u2013John Boorman, <\/strong>Adventures of a Suburban Boy<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As he entered his third decade of making features, John Boorman got personal with a film based on his memories of growing up during World War II and how his family rode out the Blitz. With its nostalgic bent, Hope and Glory<\/em> isn\u2019t as traumatic as Steve McQueen\u2019s Blitz<\/em><\/a>, but that may be down to the difference between setting a story of this type in the suburbs versus the city. Not that London\u2019s suburbs didn\u2019t get bombed, as Boorman doesn\u2019t hesitate to show, revealing how more and more of the street where his family lived is reduced to rubble as time goes on. His youthful stand-in, Bill Rohan, simply finds the war to be a non-stop adventure and one he wouldn\u2019t dream of missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as Blitz<\/em> hinges on a boy separated from his mother when she sends him away for his own safety (a selfless gesture her son pointedly doesn\u2019t appreciate), Bill\u2019s mother, Grace, has an opportunity to send her children to live with relatives in Australia, but her resolve falters at the last minute and she keeps them with her for the duration. (\u201cOn your head be it,\u201d says the Women\u2019s Voluntary Service worker in charge of the evacuation.) This suits Bill just fine, since it means he can continue collecting shrapnel and playing at bomb sites where the rallying cry of his fellow miscreants is \u201cLet\u2019s smash things up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hope and Glory<\/em> is more than just Bill\u2019s story, no matter how much Boorman frames it through his alter ego\u2019s eyes. (He makes a point of showing Bill eavesdropping on adult conversations he understands little about.) The most important person in his life, for obvious reasons, is his mother, who\u2019s played with equal parts strength and fragility by Sarah Miles as a woman doing her best to hold things together for her family at the same time she\u2019s grappling with her own regrets. Chief among them is that she didn\u2019t marry for love, but Bill\u2019s father, Clive (David Hayman), seems affable enough, even if he\u2019s unable to hide his disappointment that he\u2019s too old to serve as an officer and winds up spending the war \u201ctyping for England.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Clive away for long stretches, Grace has to lean on neighbors and her extended family for support, as well as old family friend Mac (Derrick O\u2019Connor), who was more than just a friend to her once upon a time. When her teenage daughter Dawn (Sammi Davis) experiences romantic woes after taking up with a Canadian pilot, Grace\u2019s advice is direct: \u201cDon\u2019t kill love. You\u2019ll regret it for the rest of your life.\u201d She imparts this pearl of wisdom well before there\u2019s a hint there was ever anything between her and Mac, though, so it takes a second viewing for this line to truly resonate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The turning point for the family comes when they return from an outing at the beach with Mac (filmed through barbed wire by cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, who previously shot Boorman\u2019s The Emerald Forest<\/em>) to find their house ablaze and all their possessions destroyed. Their only recourse is to move in with Grace\u2019s parents, which means putting up with Bill\u2019s irascible and opinionated grandfather (Ian Bannen), who is of a decidedly different temperament from the grandfather played by Paul Weller in Blitz<\/em>. Still, their home on the river offers a lyrical respite from the war\u2019s ravages. It also happens to be situated near Shepperton Studios, giving Bill a fleeting glimpse of his real-life counterpart\u2019s future occupation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As good as the adult actors are in Hope and Glory<\/em>, a film like this lives or dies on the backs of its child performers, and Sebastian Rice-Edwards is superbly naturalistic as the wide-eyed Bill, who never loses his sense of wonder about the world. Boorman also made it something of a family affair by casting his daughter Katrine as one of his aunts and his son Charley as a Luftwaffe pilot shot down over their neighborhood who practically lands in Bill\u2019s backyard \u2013 a rare chance to meet the enemy in the flesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it was released in 1987, Hope and Glory<\/em> was one of three films centered on the experiences of a young boy during World War II. (The others: Steven Speilberg\u2019s Empire of the Sun<\/em>, from J.G. Ballard\u2019s autobiographical novel, and Louis Malle\u2019s Au revoir les enfants<\/em>, based on his childhood.) Boorman\u2019s film connected with critics and audiences, garnering plenty of attention at awards time, with five Academy Award nominations, thirteen at the BAFTAs, and dozens more besides. Boorman wasn\u2019t done with Bill Rohan, though, returning to tell the story of his service during the Korean War in 2014\u2019s Queen & Country<\/em>. That ends with a shot of a 16mm wind-up film camera coming to a stop, which Boorman, in his 2020 memoir Conclusions<\/em>, called \u201cmy signal that it was my final film.\u201d So it has remained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHope and Glory\u201d is streaming on <\/em>Tubi<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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