That was an excellent one.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

I was one of the schoolchildren who ran on in the closing minutes of the film, to the farm at the foot of Worsaw Hill in Lancashire. There were several takes of this scene, and we alternately ran into the farmyard from along the stream in front, and down a rather steep part of the hill and into the farmyard. Many of the children chosen for disciple parts and principal parts were from Chatburn Primary School. The entire front row in the final gate scene were also Chatburn schoolkids. We were paid ten shillings as extras for each day's shooting. I remember earlier in the year - probably 1960 - Bryan Forbes and Dickie Attenborough came round to the school, and we were all lined up against a wall while they were doing cast selections. I recognized both of them from older films that were appearing on television at the time.Of course the film was a big hit locally when it premiered (at the Odeon in Burnley). It still is, as most people in the surrounding villages are related to someone who was in it.It was a long time before I was able to develop a proper adult opinion of 'Whistle'. What strikes me now is how opinion in various reviews I have seen, and discussed, splits along the lines of the division of opinion among the protagonists. Having once 'identified' The Man as Jesus, even in spite of ("adult") evidence to the contrary, Kathy and Nan, and apparently also the disciples, persist in believing that he was Jesus and is being persecuted all over again. Charlie is the lone dissenter, who interprets the evidence of his senses and concludes "It's not Jesus. It's just a fella". So the overall flavour of the film from an analytical perspective is that in the matter of religious faith, presentation of contrary facts is completely irrelevant to the persistence of the belief. A more cynical twist on this: in so far as only children were party to the belief, while adults only saw a dangerous criminal, it suggests that irrational belief systems require a childlike worldview. This is doubly damning for Faith versus Facts.And yet, People Still Believe.

The original novel WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND, written in 1959 by Mary Hayley Bell, who is Hayley Mills' mother, so there is little wonder that Hayley is cast as the lead after Disney's POLLYANNA (1960) has catapulted her to stardom and she has become the last person ever to receive a Juvenile Oscar. Also it marks a director debut of Bryan Forbes (SÉANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON 1964).Hayley plays Kathy Bostock, a young schoolgirl living in the farm of Lancashire, with her widowed father (Lee), her younger sister Nan (Holgate) and younger brother Charles (Barnes), as well as their auntie (Wagstaff). Due to a sheer coincidence, Kathy firmly believes a man (Bates) who hides in their barn, is Jesus Christ himself, this is where the story works, thanks to Hayley's superbly credible performance and her mother's well-conceived creation, Kathy is disconcerted by speaking of the truth of Jesus and for fear of being punished for blasphemy, so it is pretty logic for her to be startled by the man's exact presence in the barn and his muttering word "Jesus Christ" before passing out, and believes he is Jesus, arrives for the Second Coming. It potently justifies a rather cockamamie situation, which serves as the cornerstone for the ensuing happenings. Once Kathy is on board, it is not difficult to convince her two younger and more impressionable siblings to believe her words, then a whole bunch of school-kids, deferentially joins them to worship Jesus-in-the- barn.The story fluidly blends children's naiveté with the religious influence, and stimulates sheer zest and excitement in children's endeavour to save Jesus from the intervention of adults, and the man's true identity, a criminal on the lam, consigns a trenchant contradiction into a dichotomy between children's innocence and grown-ups' worldliness, where credulity and blind faith are put to good use by the man, for his own interest, who even menaces the children-friendly trappings with a gun in hand in the final siege, and from A to Z, the film has been deliberately avoiding to address the elephant-in-the-room, so in the end, in Kathy's eyes, it is Jesus who has been captured, not a wanted offender.The three children are the backbone of this rustically beguiling film, Hayley Mills' dogged devotion towards her belief, Diane Holgate's spur-of-the-moment slip and Alan Barnes' fractious mischief, plus his adorable acting-cum-being-himself antics (and he is the one who is telling the truth, although no one takes him seriously), all enliven the relatively small scale of the narrative with immense delight. Alan Bates, only in his second film role, underplays his handsomeness (although the requisite is that he should look at least remotely like J.C.) to foreground the moral ambiguity of his character, a cynical chap, very cagey about his criminal background (supposedly to be a wife murderer according to IMDb), he is a blank paper just plays along with the kids to secure a getaway plan, at one point, viewers are tempted to be ready for something rather ugly will happen, which is foiled regarding to the family-friendly grain, but a sense of remorse is accurately added in his last words? There is no cheesy redemption to facilitate a feel-good ending, and under the coat of a children story, the film in effect, pinpoints how easily religion can corrupt a child's psyche, being a double-edged sword, sometimes it is much sharper than we think, we must wield it cautiously.

What creates the terribly poignant mood of this movie is the continuing contrasts between Christian teaching and acts, right from the beginning, when the little boy asks the Salvation Army lady if she will take care of the unwanted kitten. She fobs him off with "Jesus will look after it," which of course is worse than useless because it gives the child false hope and makes him feel that loving Jesus is useless too. Couldn't she have made SOME effort to find someone to care for the kitten instead of dispensing vapid promises of universal love? When Hayley Mills asks the Sunday-school teacher what would happen if Jesus came again, the teacher keeps avoiding the question and, when Mills asks, Would they do to him what they did before? is told, they might, because there are still bad people.As the film shows, the adult world is composed of some people who are bad and many others who are thoughtless and insensitive and have no trouble with saying one thing and doing another. They tell the children to be good but are themselves mean-spirited, harsh, and cruel, and would see no conflict between the two. The Hayley Mills character is so touching because she is just reaching the age at which children stop taking things literally and start turning into adults. We want her to believe that the murderer is Jesus, even though it is a lie, because the "real" world she lives in is so soulless.Perhaps the most troubling scene is the one in which the local bully, a boy not much older or bigger than the other children, knocks one little boy down and twists his arm while all the others stand and watch. Why do none of the others interfere? Just a few of them could overcome the bully. Hayley Mills arrives, and the bully hits her. She does not fight back, or even react--one must assume because she knows none of the others would help her. These children go to Sunday school, but they just watch, as if they had no sense of right and wrong, only the law of the jungle. They have, in a sense, become adults already--the ones we read about all the time who stand and watch someone being attacked and do nothing.

The screenplay for Bryan Forbes' (1961) film - based on Mary Hayley Bell's novel - was one of the earliest successes for northern writers Keith Waterhouse (Billy Liar) and Willis Hall (The Long and the Short and the Tall).Set in the north of England in the fifties, it's a charming tale of innocence told from a child's point of view.As we enter the Bostock family's rural home, the scene is set for a gentle comedy of harmless intrigue.Kathy Bostock (a very young Hayley Mills) turns in a great performance in the film based on her mother's novel. The barn at the Bostock's place becomes refuge to one of the nicest escaped convicts you could ever hope to meet (Alan Bates) who is discovered by the children in an exhausted and collapsed state, laying in the straw.As he comes too, he find himself surrounded by a semi-circle of gawping children, one of whom asks him who he is. More by way of exclamation than information he says two words before lapsing back into unconsciousness. 'Jesus Christ !' For the children, fresh from rehearsals for the school nativity play, it all begins to make sense. A barn.. a manger.. the oxen looking on. They mistakenly conclude that it's the second coming and that they have been specially chosen to host the son of God on this impromptu visit.Doomed to ultimate failure, their endearing efforts to conceal and sustain the scruffy, bearded man they believe they already know so well from Sunday School make the story a poignant testament to a state of grace that is somehow only accessible to the very old and the very young.