John Boorman's autobiographical film about a London family in the Blitz — with himself running wild as a small boy in a fabulous rubbled playground — has gotten hearty congratulations for what it is not. It is not Mrs. Miniver and The Battle of Britain and stiff-upper-lip and There'll Always Be An England and Our Finest Hour and all that. You cannot, however, build too high a pyramid of praise out of negatives. And what the movie actually, positively is, meanwhile, has a great deal to do with such lower-case but not at all foreign concepts as British understatement and carrying on and coping and keeping a sense of humor and jolly good sportsmanship and afternoon tea on schedule. Altogether, in any case, this has been welcomed as a softer, gentler, sweeter, mellower, lighter side to Boorman. It is all of that and more — or, according to taste, all of that and less. And the strenuousness of the welcome thus needs to be gauged in proportion to one's sick-and-tiredness of his other side (Zardoz, Exorcist II, etc.). Perhaps in that light we could do without the brass band and the four-foot-high banners. Sebastian Rice Edwards, Sammi Davis, Sarah Miles, Ian Bannen. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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