Whistle Down the Wind (1961)

Whistle Down the Wind is an odd and touching movie. In a very broad sense it’s a crime thriller with some film noir overtones but mostly it’s a movie about childhood and religious faith. It’s certainly about Christianity but it deals with the subject in a complex way. At the end is Kathy’s faith vindicated or is it shown to be empty and futile? The question is left open. This might be a movie about kids but it’s very much a movie for grownups.

This was the first movie directed by Bryan Forbes who went on to have an interesting career which included the very offbeat Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) and the very underrated The Stepford Wives (1975).

Whistle Down the Wind stars Hayley Mills. She was about fourteen when she made this film but was already an established international star. It was based on a novel by her mother, Mary Hayley Bell (who also wrote Hayley’s greatest movie Sky West and Crooked).

Whistle Down the Wind gave Alan Bates his first starring role. It launched him into stardom. It also gave Bernard Lee one of his meatier roles.

Kathy Bostock (Hayley Mills) lives on a Lancashire farm with her younger sister Nan, her little brother Charles and her father (played by Bernard Lee). The children are being raised by their aunt Dottie. The children are certainly aware of the harshness and cruelty of life. As the film opens Eddie (Norman Bird), their father’s farm labourer, is drowning kittens in a sack.

The children rescue the kittens but they’re very much aware that those kittens are under sentence of death if they’re discovered by the grownups. Grownups in this movie are more often than not either cruel, stupid or ineffectual. Their father does his best but he’s rather distant.

The events of the movie stem from a series of innocent irrelevant remarks to which the children (as children do) attach extraordinary significance. Kathy remarks that Jesus is dead. Her sister Nan assures her that Jesus will come to get her for that. In the barn where the kittens are hidden Kathy discovers a rather scruffy sleeping man (played by Alan Bates). When he awakes she asks him who he is. Half-asleep and suddenly seeing this girl staring at him he reacts in shock and mutters Jesus Christ. Kathy takes the words literally. This man must indeed be Jesus.

The children know that the last time Jesus was on Earth the grownups treated him pretty badly so they decide they have to protect him.

Jesus turns out not to be quite what they expected.

The man is in fact a murderer on the run.

They assume that Jesus can answer all the important questions, such as why does God let people and animals die. He has no answers. Kathy decides to ask the vicar but quickly decides that he has no answers at all. Kathy’s faith remains unshaken but little Charles has his doubts. Charles asked Jesus to look after his kitten and Jesus let the kitten die. Charles doesn’t think much of a Jesus who would do that.

Throughout the story the faith of the children is tested. There’s plenty of religious allegory here, all of it ambiguous.

At the end, like the Jesus in the barn, the movie offers no clearcut answers. This Jesus hasn’t saved anybody.

The movie deals not just with faith in God but in more general terms with belief - how we come to believe things, how we cling to our beliefs, how insignificant events can be the foundations of myth.

I don’t see this movie as taking either a definite stance either for or against religious belief. It’s more interested in the mechanism of belief than in the truth or falsity of such beliefs.

Most of the child actors were compete amateurs but they’re marvellous. Diane Holgate as Nan and Alan Barnes as Charles are particularly good.

Alan Bates gives a subtle complex and enigmatic performance. Bernard Lee is excellent. He must have been delighted when he discovered that this time he wasn’t going to be playing a policeman.

Hayley Mills gives one of the two greatest performances of her career (the other being in Sky West and Crooked). She’s totally convincing as a child approaching adulthood who still sees the world very much through the eyes of a child. She also succeeds in conveying Kathy’s conflicted feelings. She feels fairly sure that the man in the barn is Jesus but she isn’t stupid and she can see that some things just don’t add up.

Whistle Down the Wind is a unique and enigmatic film, the sort of film you might see several times and come to entirely different conclusions about it each time. Highly recommended.