THE WONDER OF THREE CHILDREN

By 'FREDA BRUCE LOCKHART
WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND Certificate "U" Director: Bryan Forbes
THIS is a simple and charming movie from Richard Attenborough's Beaver Films, the company which made "The Angry Silence".
The present story by Mary Hayley Belt (Mrs. John Mills) is a very different affair but not without some difficulties.
Three motherless children on a North-country farm (surely the lovely West of Yorkshire?) tenderly hide a family of kittens in a barn. The small brother is told by the Salvation Army lady that Jesus will look after his kitten. With this in her mind, the teenage elder sister (Hayley Mills) goes to the barn and stumbles upon a bearded man lying in the straw.
Staring at each other in mutual shock, she asks, "Who are you?"
To which comes the easy blasphemy of his expletive: "Jesus Christ".
What more natural than that the sensitive child, full of vivid if vague notions of the Christian story and comparing the exhausted, bearded figure with some illustration torn from a book, should decide it is Our Lord come back on earth.
This belief, shared in the end by the whole pack of local children, is the basis for the film, Only the little brother (a masterpiece of child performance by Alan Barnes) introduces partial levity in his address of "Gentle Jesus' and the first blow to his faith when he can protest: "He's let my kitten die." Hayley Mills herself uses the Holy Name with suoh reverence there can be no question of offence, at least until it becomes clear beyond doubt that the stranger in the barn is a murderer on the run. Then I confess to some unease at the bandying about of the Holy Name simply as an element in a thriller, Nor did the childish confusion of the murderer with Our Lord seem properly cleared at the end.
There is one bitter little comment when the distraught children call on the vicar for counsel, only to be told about the theft of roof lead. "He doesn't know, does he?" says young Charles exposing the stony answer with piercing childish truth.
This is an enchanting picture and the childish confusion characteristic enough to be plausible. The harassed father is played by Bernard Lee who is so line an actor he never suggests how much too small for him the part is.
WEDDINGS AND BABIES No Certificate Director: Morris Engel
NOT since the surprise triumph of "Marty" can 1 recall a movie which gave me more simple pleasure than this delightful piece by the director of "Little Fugitive",
It is difficult to see what classifies it as an "offbeat" picture, one of America's rare non-commercial ventures, unless it be the humility of the production. Like "Marty", "Weddings and Babies" is set in New York's Little Italy, much of it being shot on location there in the midst of a gay street fair.
There are only three principals —the man, his mother, and his Swedish fiancee, Bea.
The surprising title is the sign he hangs over his photographer's establishment. But Bea has been waiting years for her own wedding and babies and the film simply tells a chapter of that waiting with its strain on frustrated nerves.
Carl Mohner is delightful as the volatile, anxious photographer, though of course his appearance and gestures are more Teutonic than Italian.
As his fiancee, Viveca Lindfors gives the performance 1 have expected from her ever since she arrived in Hollywood, warm, vivid and whole.
Probably the most moving character is the photographer's old Italian mother (Chiarina Barite), who moves through the picture in solitude, from old people's home to church, to the cemetery to sit at the grave of her husband, a figure of purest. pathos.
The action is. I felt, lived out before us with a limpid clarity and most rare naturalness which can only indicate by saying that at Bea's birthday party the guests looked exactly like people at a party. A small film but worth pursuing to film societies, classic theatres or wherever it may appear after its limited showing at the National Film Theatre.
BY LOVE POSSESSED Certificate "A" Director: John Sturges
ONCE upon a time there used to be a steady flow of such all-star high-gloss pictures of upper-income American life. At their best they were often based on the work of John O'Hara.
"By Love Possessed" seems a compromise between "Peyton Place" and one of the earlier upholstered Americana.
Thomas Mitchell plays the head of the firm of lawyers where &rent Zimbalist, jnr. and Jason Robards jnr., are the junior partners. But the film's main preoccupation is with their womenfolk and with the next generation, represented by George Hamilton, one of Hollywood's brightest new hopes, and Susan Kohner, whom he was expected to marry.
Worst of all I found the picture's tedious succession of static and dreary tete-a-tetes which only began to move in the last of four half-hours.