Whistle Down the Wind (1961) – Bryan Forbes (Friday’s Finest)

• Charles: Who’s that? Who’s that fellah?
• Nan: It’s not a ‘fellah’; it’s Jesus.
• Charles: That i’n’t Jesus!
• Nan: Well, is too, Mr. clever dick!
• Charles: Jesus wore a long dress!
• Kathy: Well, that was in them days.

Whistle Down the Wind is an apt movie to present here on Good Friday. It is also my first recalling of a movie which impacted me as a youngster. As someone as curiously engaged as the young actors, I found myself wanting to believe. This movie didn’t seem to have a trounce of adult sensibility impinging it which led Whistle Down the Wind to feeling like a real and enchanting childhood adventure where the stakes couldn’t be higher even for a naive viewer such as myself.

IMDB Storyline:
Little Kathy (Hayley Mills) discovers a man wanted for murder hiding in her family’s barn. When she asks him who he is, he says Jesus Christ just before he goes unconscious. Kathy and her siblings are convinced that he is Jesus, and try to hide him from grown-ups.

I remember seeing the magnificent childhood actress Hayley Mills play Pollyanna way back when and it was a terrific film. Whistle Down the Wind also seemed to me to be a great film as it dealt with the deepest questions of my little human existence up to that point, like belief, faith, and the meaning of love. I loved the photography of the bleak Lancashire countryside and the facial expressions of the actors interacting naturally, curious and questioning. In many ways the film is an elegy for a lost part of a former youth where we roamed the lands freely and the nearest telephone was back at your house which could be miles away. You lived in relative material poverty but with strong familial love, and the simple pleasures of life are enjoyed – playing in the open air.

The film has since been broadcast for the general public as seen below. I admit my rewatching of the film as an adult four decades later was a sobering and a detached experience since it didn’t correlate with my fascination of it in my youth. It was a sad realisation in all because I couldn’t recall that allure and mystique in my psyche of the children having found a criminal in their barn. I could only think Kathy, you silly girl.

Young Kathy like I once felt, needed to believe in him, even after the police come to cart him away. He even drops a picture of the Savior, which seems to symbolize not only the prisoner’s fall from grace but one more sign for Kathy that, yes, this mysterious man might be Him. Whistle Down the Wind is a hard-shelled movie that says we lose hope and faith as we mature.

References:
1. Whistle Down The Wind – IMDB

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand