The bomb-torn streets of postwar London are the stage for a ripping boys'-own adventure in this buoyant classic, the first of the great 'Ealing comedies'. When schoolboy dreamer Joe discovers that robbers are planning their crimes using secret codes in a children's comic, the police are unconvinced. So Joe and his friends take matters into their own hands… With the great Alistair Sim as a twitchy comic writer and against-type villain Jack Warner, it's an ageless joy, and the East London and dockland locations are a revelation.
In his first starring role, an 11-year-old James Fox (then known as William) plays Johnny, an over-imaginative child who tricks a younger boy out of his prized magnet. Troubled by his conscience, he gives the magnet away - but the guilt isn't so easy to lose.
The anguished finale of the Terence Davies Trilogy opens with the death of Robert Tucker’s beloved mother, jumping forward in time to show an elderly Robert bedridden in hospital (an astonishing appearance by Steptoe and Son’s Wilfrid Brambell). Fragments of his past - a school nativity play, mal...
The second instalment of Bill Douglas’ revered Trilogy. Though life becomes ever harder for Jamie, so that he eventually ends up in a none-too-comforting children’s home, the bold, uncompromising assurance of Douglas’ very personal brand of realism ensures that the film effortlessly avoids the pi...
